What goes around has come around for a pillar of the Hollywood Democrat donor establishment.  Who would ever have thought Harvey Weinstein might getting the Bill O'Reilly treatment from the New York Times, of all places?  In case you don't know, Harvey is a mega-successful movie producer with four Best Picture Oscars®, a big donor to all the proper favorite Hollywood politicians and causes, including the feminists.  Like the Silicon Valley moguls, he could have concluded he had purchased immunity, a progressive indulgence such as Ted Kennedy got.

And now he comes across as a latter-day movie mogul with slightly better manners than Harry Cohn and an active casting couch.  The title of the New York Times article says it all:  "Decades of Sexual Harassment Accusations Against Harvey Weinstein."  It is a little long, but the story is very well told.  It begins with a story told by Ashley Judd, the very angry and proudly self-described "nasty woman."

Two decades ago, the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein invited Ashley Judd to the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel for what the young actress expected to be a business breakfast meeting. Instead, he had her sent up to his room, where he appeared in a bathrobe and asked if he could give her a massage or she could watch him shower, she recalled in an interview.

"How do I get out of the room as fast as possible without alienating Harvey Weinstein?" Ms. Judd said she remembers thinking.

In 2014, Mr. Weinstein invited Emily Nestor, who had worked just one day as a temporary employee, to the same hotel and made another offer: If she accepted his sexual advances, he would boost her career, according to accounts she provided to colleagues who sent them to Weinstein Company executives. The following year, once again at the Peninsula, a female assistant said Mr. Weinstein badgered her into giving him a massage while he was naked, leaving her "crying and very distraught," wrote a colleague, Lauren O'Connor, in a searing memo asserting sexual harassment and other misconduct by their boss.

We hear more from Judd and others in an account that should be read whole if you have any appreciation at all for hypocrisy and schadenfreude.

My first reaction to the story was to wonder why the paper would publish an attack on a pillar of the media wing of the establishment elite, since the Times itself occupies a sizable role there as well.  Based on my reading of the article, I infer that the O'Connor memo was leaked to the Times.  The article makes clear that non-disclosure agreements have silenced the women who took formal action over the years.  Someone got access at some point to that O'Connor memo, which likewise was kept confidential, and decided that the public (especially potential future victims of the man) deserved to be warned about him.  It is just a guess, but that would account for the willingness of the paper to pursue the story.  Someone was going to get the story if the Times didn't grab it.

The salacious nature of the subject ensures that this is a scoop worth having.  And it helps burnish the Times' reputation as more than a propaganda outlet, if it directs fire at people on its own side once every decade or two.  Still, I wonder if a genie has been let out of the bottle.  Once thing about sexual harassment is that its victims are angry and feel empowered.  What they saw what happened to Bill O'Reilly, it was like blood in the water.  I am reasonably certain that there are plenty more harassers out there among the Hollywood elite.  Now that even Harvey was unable to buy immunity with his generous support of the progressive causes, maybe other women (and men) will get ideas and we'll see a bunch of icons on the left foisting off lawyers.

Harvey's response to the article is here.  It is hilarious, asking for forgiveness and promising to take a leave of absence from work to "deal with this issue head on."  He doesn't actually say he is going to check into rehab (for sex addiction?), which is a customary Hollywood dodge for smaller fry.

But then, in the last paragraph, he promises to devote his attention to fighting the NRA.  Yeah, promise to fight the current number-one bogeyman, and that'll close the deal.  There won't be much time for deep reflection on his own demons when he's fighting the devil as Hollywood sees it.  Fighting a common enemy is a great way to bond with people in general, but this takes brazen cynicism to an epic level.

I love it when the left consumes itself.

Bumped, 10/7/17