CommentsCORRUPTION WATCH-Rose McGowan alleges that after Harvey Weinstein raped her, she was blacklisted. In an industry which made the phrase, “You’ll never work in this town again,” world renown, one should not be surprised. That phrase sums up both the predator’s modus operandi and the fact that entire industries and professions protect predators and further victimize the innocent. Unless moviedom sided with Weinstein, his blacklisting would not have worked.
“They threatened [me] with being blacklisted. I was blacklisted after I was raped, because I got raped, because I said something … but only like internally, you know,” McGowan said. “They blame the victim, they do all that shit. People are bred to be scared. They are bred to put fear into people and that’s what they do, they’re bred to put fear into the publishers and lawyers and they overreach it, and I’m going to do what I can and come out as hard as I can,” McGowan added. (Independent News, Oct 15, 2017)
Blacklisting is related to “complicity through silence,” a social situation where people shun the victims in order to protect the predator. We are seeing this now in the U.S. Senate after Senators Flake (R-AZ) and Corker (R-TN) spoke against Trump’s predatory behavior as being the antithesis of American values; everyone else in the GOP has decided that complicity through silence is the wisest course of action.
During an October 23, 2017 GMA interview, speaking of Harvey Weinstein, Matt Damon said, “You had to spend about five minutes with him to know that he was a bully…He was intimidating. That was his legend that was his whole kind of MO. . . .. And it was like, ‘Could you survive Harvey?'” Damon continued, “When people say like, ‘Everybody knew,’ Like, yeah, I knew he was an a—hole…he was proud of that. That’s how he carried himself.”
Now that the public is learning that Weinstein is a serial sexual predator with a growing number of credible claims that he raped some of his victims, the denials of complicity in his blacklisting behavior are abounding. Really, they didn’t know? No one wants to admit that when Harvey let it be known he didn’t want others to hire Rose McGowan, most went along with it.
The Use of the Blacklist – one Form of Complicity
Many predators act within a social context in which their predatory behavior is evident to others. Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump, many businessmen and judges are this type predator. All Hollywood knew Harvey Weinstein was a predator from either direct contact or via the grapevine. Likewise, the nation knows from Donald Trump’s own mouth that he was and is a sexual predator who has gotten away with his behavior because he is famous. Did Billy Bush or others who heard the live mic-feed come forward and take some action? No! Trump was right – powerful predators get away with criminal behavior because anyone who opposes them will be blacklisted. Does anyone imagine that a sound technician who went to the authorities with the Trump tape would have continued to work in the industry?
Predators R Us!
Predatory behavior thrives in the movie industry, in Sacramento, in Congress, in the White House, in the California judiciary, in America. It has become ubiquitous to the point that President Obama adopted the policy of Too Important to Prosecute for the Wall Street predators who crashed the entire economy in 2008 using their multi-trillion-dollar mortgage frauds. Yet, no Democrat will admit that Obama was actively complicit in enforcing silence about criminal predatory behavior of Wall Street. Any federal prosecutor who brought charges would have been “blacklisted.”
As William Cohan pointed out in The Atlantic, “…[Attorney General Loretta] Lynch and her predecessor, Eric Holder, appear to have turned the page on…the profligate and dishonest behavior of Wall Street bankers, traders, and executives in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. How we arrived at a place where Wall Street misdeeds go virtually unpunished while soccer executives in Switzerland get arrested is murky at best.”
And as previously reported in CityWatch, the California Commission on Judicial Performance [CJP] is fighting vigorously on behalf of predator judges to conceal the vast number of people who have been victimized by our judiciary. Predators are not limited to sexual assaults and the predatory modus operandi of attack; blacklisting of victims and complicity by others are rampant in our culture. The powerful use their power to harm others who are then expected to remain quiet about the abuse.
Attorneys who report judges end up blacklisted or worse. Richard I. Fine was framed and thrown in jail for exposing the millions of dollars in unlawful payments to Los Angeles County Superior Court judges. Worse off was Attorney Dexter Jacobson who turned up dead on the eve of his meeting with federal authorities about judicial misconduct in the Bankruptcy Courts. After his murder, authorities lost interest in both the judicial misconduct and in who had murdered attorney Jacobson.
The Revenge of Pogo - We are the Enemy
Predatory behavior continues not only because the predators exist but because others go along to the point of blacklisting anyone the predator wants to shut up. What becomes of a society in which its judiciary is filled with vicious predators whose own personal care and feeding is more important than anything else? They rally around the predator and plunge their own daggers into the corpses of the victims. After all, a new associate justice certainly does not want to get on the bad side of a psychopathic predator who is the presiding justice.
Matt Damon explained why people help predators by honoring the blacklisting: “Miramax was the place, really the place, that was making great stuff in the ’90s.” Blacklisting operates because those who honor it know that if they do not, they too will become targets. The same dynamic is happening to Senators Flake and Corker who are facing a virtual blacklist by other GOP Senators, even as they privately admit that Trump is mentally unstable.
Most people fail to grasp that we are witnessing the “Nazification” of the GOP from the bottom up. This base element of the electorate cheered every vicious impulse of Donald Trump and he became addicted to their cheers. This adulation from the crowd is ten times more addictive than a barrelful of oxycontin would be for a histrionic personality like Trump.
(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney and a CityWatch contributor. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Abrams views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
-cw
