For Whom the Bell Tolls, Celebrity Edition

The cavalcade of the accused is starting to look like a funeral procession. Except the wealthy and powerful men, who’ve long evaded any consequences for decades of misbehavior and criminal activity, are shuffling along, following the death knell of their own careers with passive apologies and deflective statements.

A couple of years ago, and from a substantial distance, I saw a funeral procession from a beach in Mexico. It was a serenely somber outline of people silhouetted single-file against the hillside homes overlooking the ocean.

The slow-moving small figures, many of them on horseback, looked like chess pieces from where we sat on the beach. What seemed like hundreds of them continued along the concave curve of the mountain and around the convex swell of it. An enormous S elongating into one straight line until it disappeared behind the mountain. Finally I couldn’t see them any more.

I learned the word for cemetery that night – panteón.

What seemed like great respect for a dignitary turned out to be the apparently reluctant but obligatory community response to a local man, well known to be a drunk, who had gotten drunk and fallen off his horse – again. The waiter who told us this actually rolled his eyes before he told us the story. He was unclear about how this particular fall had actually killed the man. All he knew was that the man had drunkenly fallen off his horse before but this time the cement was unforgiving.

That image of so many people, varying heights and sizes like the jagged teeth of a saw blade, pilgrimaging because they had to, stays with me. And now I see a long, reluctant line of men shuffling toward a different cemetery, a mausoleum where they will be enshrined alive, paying their dues for things they have yet to regret. Like so many who apologize, they seem unapologetic for what they’ve done. They’re just sorry they got caught.

The same social pressure that used to keep victims silent is now obliging the accused to publicly repent.

We can barely finish reading about the Old Vic theatre being complicit in complaints against Kevin Spacey before we get sideswiped by another accusation against Dustin Hoffman or Corey Feldman naming another man who preyed on him as a teenager.

It seems the tipping point is actually a tsunami. While people eagerly maligned Hollywood for Harvey Weinstein’s decades-long crime spree, the upsurge of #metoo voices was like a tornado that picked up that tsunami and flung it out and across all industries and multiple countries. I unexpectedly find an opportunity to make a Sharknado metaphor. The new social climate is the tornado and these men, their predilections and their predatory behavior are all being swept up out of the depths of their secrecy and spit out across society.

It is, of course, not just Hollywood. Not just the deities of celebrity. And not just angry-faced ogres like Weinstein. Women and men, especially young people, are victimized by the mild-mannered soft-smiling Kevin Spaceys of every profession. And sexual harassment is of course not limited to the workplace.

For the first time in my life I think the use of the term ‘sea change’ is warranted. Somehow, the spontaneous tide has turned and the perceived and public power now seems to flow from the accuser. This whimper-to-bang transition is nothing short of astonishing to me. Famous men who’ve toiled for decades in their respective fields can be taken down literally overnight by a single tweet. The knee-jerk reaction is no longer just the scripted and doubting “well why didn’t she come forward sooner?” or “she’s making it up to blackmail him for money”. Those refrains will echo for always. Victims will likely endure the court of public opinion forever to prove their accusations. But for the first time the accused are under perhaps equal pressure to prove that it didn’t. And the burden of proof is no longer on the victims because these men are serial predators. The proof is often in the plural. And the sheer number of victims with hauntingly similar stories demonstrates that these predators also have MOs.

 

Perhaps as this house of cards continues to crumble (Kevin Spacey pun can’t be avoided here) perhaps the sincerity of the apologies will start to match the gravity, and the quantity, of the transgressions.