1. Where the matter stands. Let's hear what People Magazine, experts on trivia, have to say. So let's begin with FACT. 
Mogul Harvey Weinstein Surrenders to Authorities on Rape Charges

KC BAKER / PEOPLE.COM

May 25, 2018 08:04 AM

Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein surrendered to authorities early Friday morning at a police precinct in New York where he was arrested and chargedwith allegedly raping a woman and forcing another to perform oral sex, police sources confirm to PEOPLE.

The 66-year-old former head of Miramax and The Weinstein Company faces charges of first-degree rape and third-degree rape in one case, and with first-degree criminal sex act in another, the sources confirm.

He is charged with criminal sex act in the first-degree in connection with an alleged 2004 sexual assault on aspiring actress Lucia Evans, the sources confirm. (Evans has agreed to be publicly named.)

The arrest of the fallen movie executive comes after a 7-month investigation into allegations of sexual harassment and assault against him – and just weeks after a special grand jury was convened to hear the evidence against him, the New York Daily News reports.

It’s unclear if Weinstein will face additional charges in connection with other allegations of sexual misconduct.

Weinstein forced to do the humiliating perp walk. (TGP Screengrab)

After turning himself in at the First Precinct in Tribeca, he was fingerprinted and booked, police sources say.

Handcuffed, he was taken to Manhattan Criminal Court, where lead prosecutor Joan Illuzzi read the charges against him, the Times reports.

Months of investigation, she said, have “shown that this defendant used his money, power, and position to lure young women into situations where he was able to violate them sexually,” The New York Times reports.

Weinstein was not required to enter a plea at Friday’s hearing. He paid $1 million in a cashier’s check to post bail on a $10 million bond, CNN reports. He handed over his passport and his travel is now limited. He will also wear a monitoring bracelet.

Weinstein will plead not guilty if he is indicted, his lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, said after the hearing, the Times reports.

Calling the charges against Weinstein “factually unsubstantiated,” Brafman also said he predicted that a jury would not believe the women who have made these allegations against his client, according to the Times.

“My job is not to defend behavior — my job is to defend criminal behavior,” Brafman told the dozens of reporters waiting outside the courthouse after the hearing. “Mr. Weinstein did not create the casting couch in Hollywood.”

Brafman, did not immediately return calls for comment.

But he has said in the past that “Mr. Weinstein has always maintained that he has never engaged in nonconsensual sexual acts.”

The Birth of the #MeToo Movement

Weinstein’s arrest ends months of speculation as to whether the producer would be criminally charged after more than 80 women have accused him of sexual assault or harassment.

Erik Pendzich/REX/Shutterstock

Many of the women came forward in — and following — the publication of bombshell, Pulitzer Prize-winning articles in The New Yorker and The New York Times in October documenting Weinstein’s decades of alleged sexual misconduct and sexual assaults.

Actresses including Ashley Judd told the New York Times how Weinstein allegedly sexually harassed her during a 1997 hotel meeting.

Other actresses including Asia Argento, Rose McGowan — and Evans opened up to Ronan Farrow of The New Yorker with their stories of Weinstein’s alleged sexual assaults and harassment against them.

Spurred on by Alyssa Milano’s galvanizing Tweet about writing “Me too” as a status if they had ever been sexually harassed or assaulted to show how widespread the issue is, a torrent of women came forward from all over the world with stories of sexual assaults of their own – helping launch the #MeToo and Times Up movements.

Charges Against Evans Stem From 2004 Encounter

Evans was an aspiring actress and a college senior when she met Weinstein at a nightclub in 2004, she told the The New Yorker. When he invited her to his office at Miramax for a meeting, he allegedly forced her to perform oral sex on him, she told the magazine.

“I tried to get away, but maybe I didn’t try hard enough. I didn’t want to kick him or fight him,” she told The New Yorker. “He’s a big guy. He overpowered me.”

"...scant little will change by the purging of wealthy, privileged liberal men by wealthy, privileged liberal women."

For years afterward, she said she blamed herself for not allegedly stopping him, even developing an eating disorder, she told The New Yorker.

Word of Weinstein’s alleged sexual misconduct caught the attention of the Manhattan District Attorney’s office in 2015 when it investigated Weinstein about alleged sexual abuse, the New York Times reported. But district attorney Cyrus Vance declined to press charges, saying that he did not believe prosecutors could have won the case.

But in October 2017, the NYPD launched a criminal investigation into Weinstein stemming from Evans’ assault allegation 13 years before, interviewing her about the details of the alleged attack.

While the woman in the rape case has not been identified, Evans agreed to be named in the criminal proceedings.

A spokesperson for Weinstein previously told PEOPLE in a statement that “any allegations of non-consensual sex are unequivocally denied by Mr. Weinstein. Mr. Weinstein has further confirmed that there were never any acts of retaliation against any women for refusing his advances.”

Weinstein’s legal woes are far from over. The U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York has launched a criminal probe investigating in part whether he enticed or persuaded any women to cross state lines with the intent of committing a sex crime — a potentially federal offense, according to The Wall Street Journal, which was first to report the news.

Brafman has previously confirmed to PEOPLE that he has met with federal prosecutors in the SDNY “in an attempt to dissuade them from proceeding” and will continue to meet with them moving forward.

2. Now let's try to sort this our. Let's move to COMMENT.

So far so good. A horrid excuse for a human being has finally been toppled, but not exactly for the reasons he richly deserved to be eliminated from the equation. In fact, Weinstein, throughly despised throughout the industry as a cruel tyrant, a cheap bastard, to boot, made for an easy target. His transgressions, given his bullying temperament and hubris were so numerous, that he was simply low-hanging fruit to use as the avatar for a problem that needs recognition and remedial action, for Weinstein does represent a disease in our midst, but it is not what the bourgeois feminist/identitarian mob on his tail would have us believe, but something far more serious and entrenched in our way of life, and one that individualised witch-hunts are not liable to cure: the generation of constant economic and power inequalities and insecurity under a regime of savage capitalism.

#metoo will never revolutionise society because it was never designed to do so. 

Freeman with one of his accusers. What does he think he is, God?

In this regard, let me yield the floor to my colleague Phil Rockstroh, whose analysis of the Weinsteinian problem I regard as characteristically astute:

“Revealing the dismal state of the Weltanschauung of the Liberal Class: Morgan Freeman is being discredited due to boneheaded transgressions but not his crackbrained Dr. Strangelovean ravings -- to wit, the Ruskies have penetrated the precious bodily fluids of the US's body politic.

Creepy, crass, and clueless behaviour is cause for umbrage and attendant purging; yet, de facto imperialist war mongering and apologia for Cold War militarist brinksmanship, directed at a nuclear power, with possible catastrophic consequences, is acceptable.

If, in the first place, the militarist and classist proclivities of the Hollywood elite were not tolerated then Harvey Weinstein et. al would have never gotten away with their creepopathic actions for as long as they did. It was the power, acquired within dynamics of capitalist despotism, that shielded them from consequences.

Moreover, scant little will change by the purging of wealthy, privileged liberal men by wealthy, privileged liberal women. Although the purges will never cross the ossified class lines of the capitalist socio-economic order, we are encouraged to be heartened by the unfolding events, in the same manner the we of the underclasses are induced to identify with the participants in a royal wedding.”

 

So there. Abandon all hope. When all the auto-da-fes are done—if ever—and the mobs have gone home after the last burning at the stake, unless the issue is dealt with at the root, the problem will persist, the disease will rear its ugly head again. For social inequality and widespread insecurity foster a regime of opportunist exploitation and abuse, and that applies to everyone, male or female, even if females, by nature and cultural lag, may still be far more exposed to such dangers than their male counterparts. As in feudal times, when social inequality permitted and even literally sanctified such crimes by the powerful, capitalism which is nothing if not feudalism with an modern industrial veneer and a truckload of pretensions, will go on producing such tragedies wherever two unequal parties collide.

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