Courtesy of Pam Martens
Harvey Weinstein Accepting an Oscar for “Shakespeare in Love” at 1999 Academy Awards
Following a detailed investigative report that appeared on the front page of the New York Times last Friday, along with additional disturbing reports over the weekend, the powerful Hollywood producer, Harvey Weinstein, was fired yesterday by The Weinstein Company, the film studio he founded with his brother, Bob, in 2005. The two were previously the co-founders of Miramax Film Corp. It was sold to Disney in 1993.
According to the Times and other reports that followed, Weinstein is a sexual predator who has harassed his own employees in the workplace as well as actresses seeking jobs during hotel interviews.
Weinstein, like Fox News founder Roger Ailes, was said to have perpetrated his sexual misdeeds over many years without public disclosure by effectively creating his own private justice system – using private monetary settlements with gag orders for their accusers instead of public courtrooms where the claims would have been reported by the press, decided by the public jury system based on witness testimony and detailed evidence obtained in discovery. Had the nation’s court system been utilized, dozens of future female victims would have been spared the trauma and lifetime scars of these sexual predators.
What Weinstein and Ailes did was a less formalized version of Wall Street’s private justice system – where all industry workers must sign away their rights to access the public courts and agree to try all claims against the firm, and the prolific sexual assaulters and harassers that work on Wall Street, in an industry-run private justice system known officially as mandatory arbitration but more accurately as kangaroo courts. (See related article below.)
It is these private justice systems and their enablers – the lawyers who have allowed them to proliferate — that have emboldened the sexual ogres in the workplaces of America.
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