8. I have flashbacks
When I finally sat down to the Weinstein exposés in the New York Times and The New Yorker, it was some of the most difficult reading I’ve ever done.
I missed the beginning of the MeToo movement—for reasons I’ll go into in a bit. I missed it by about a week and a half: missed the Times article about Weinstein that appeared on October 5, 2017, and the one by Ronan Farrow that came out in The New Yorker a few days later; missed the drama over the Shitty Media Men List—missed it getting posted and missed it being taken down and missed the whole controversy about it. I missed the day that 55,000 people responded when the actress Alyssa Milano told Twitter to use the hashtag “MeToo” if you’d ever experienced sexual harassment or assault, and white America’s discovery, a few days later, that yet again we’d co-opted some instance of black ingenuity, since years before the phrase “me too” had actually been coined for use in connection with sexual assault and abuse by a New York activist named Tarana Burke.
All this had already happened by the time Meredith, with whom I’d been out of touch for fifteen years, tracked me down to ask what I thought about what was going on down in New York.
When I finally sat down to the articles about Weinstein, it was some of the most difficult reading I’ve ever done.
I don’t mean that it was hard to take or that I found the material distressing. It was just that I couldn’t focus. I was like Gene Kelly at the end of Brigadoon: I kept having flashbacks. Some word or phrase or statement would set off a flood of memories about things I hadn’t thought about for years. And I’d just sit, remembering. And then I’d get up and walk around the room for a bit. And then I’d sit back down and try again, and again I’d fail to get through more than a few lines before going back into orbit.
It took me a whole day to get through the Times article. I must have been having a lot of Isabella moments. I find that I printed it out twice, and the highlighting—there’s a lot of it—is all over the place and completely bonkers. I slashed yellow across specific years mentioned in the article—“1990” and “1991”—and under the phrase “nearly three decades” and I circled the word “hotel” a few times. I highlighted sentence fragments, like “sexual harassment and unwanted physical contact” and “they feared retaliation” and “women reported to a hotel for what they thought were work reasons…”.
There was one quotation from Ashley Judd I’d zigzagged across in yellow: “I said no a lot of ways, a lot of times, and he always came back at me with some new ask.”
You’d think that I would have been setting my own experience against the stories I was reading about; and I guess there was a bit of that. (Was there a parallel between Judd being invited to the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel “for what the young actress expected to be a business meeting” and my being forced to attend a sales conference in Florida where I was sandbagged by the advances of a colleague whom the top brass had allowed to insinuate himself into the situation?) Mostly, though, I found myself wondering how many other women at that particular moment were reading what I was reading and listening to the ways in which it rhymed with fragments of their lives.
She said he was very persistent and focused though she kept saying no for over an hour.
That’s kind of the way things were.
The young woman chose not to report the episode to human resources personnel, but the allegations came to management’s attention…
Had there even been a human resources department at The New Yorker in 1990? I didn’t think so. At any rate, I didn’t remember one, though I thought I remembered a human resources department at Conde Nast, the magazine’s parent company, heading up a stop-smoking program one year. The idea that an idiosyncratic institution like The New Yorker might possess anything as prosaic as a human resources department seemed laughable.
I seem to have calmed down considerably by the time I turned to the New Yorker article. The highlighting is much neater. And there’s less of it. There’s some next to a reference to an event that the actress Asia Argento said she “felt professionally obliged to attend” and, further down in that same paragraph, next to another quotation:
“I was, like, ‘Look, man, I’m no fucking fool,’” Argento said. “But looking back, I am a fucking fool. And I am still trying to come to grips with what happened.”
Actually, the thing I found most triggering in the New Yorker article was an audioclip that accompanied the online version: an extraordinary recording of Weinstein alternately importuning and threatening a young model named Ambra Gutierrez who had worn a wire at a prearranged encounter with Weinstein after going to the police about having been assaulted by him the day before in a business meeting. “Don’t ruin your friendship with me for five minutes,” Weinstein says on the tape.
It’s an astonishing aural artifact for the way it encapsulates the logic of sexual extortion. Weinstein was saying that what he wanted would only take about five minutes, and five minutes of submission set against having her life ruined didn’t seem to him like a bad bargain.
The other thing I found myself remembering—probably just because I hadn’t thought about it in years—was a conversation with Veronica that must have taken place in 1991, more than a year later. We were in my old apartment on West End Avenue. (She used to stay there sometimes when I went out of town because it was bigger than her place, and also I had cats.) I was telling her about a recent incident with Mr. New Yorker writer that had upset me. I wanted Veronica’s advice on what to do, or whether I should do anything at all.
But I also wanted her take on whether at the very beginning there might have been a better way of handling the whole situation. I didn’t want to seem uncool, though. So, instead of asking her that, I started making jokes about what my “action” should have been, as though we were analyzing the scene in the Florida hotel room according to the David Mamet approach to acting.
We went through the questions you were supposed to ask:
What was the character literally doing in the scene?
(“She’s telling him she wants him to leave her the fuck alone.”)
What did the character want?
(“She wants to get him out of her hotel room without pissing him off.”)
So what’s the essence of that?...
Veronica kept rejecting everything I suggested because none of it was “actable.” At one point she started laughing because, she said, I was coming up with things that would end the scene.
“But that’s what I wanted,” I said. “I wanted the scene to be over.”
Some time later—I think during the winter or spring of 1992—Veronica called to tell me she was thinking of having a fling with Mr. New Yorker Writer. Actually, she called to ask if I would mind if she did.
I said of course not, why would I mind? I’d never had any sort of relationship with him.
Then she said she thought she was really asking whether I’d think less of her if she had a fling with him.
I said of course I wouldn’t, but I thought she should be careful. He seemed like an angry guy.
She said that was what she liked about him. She was attracted to that darkness.
We never talked about it again, not directly. But I don’t think it lasted long. I gathered from things she let drop later that the darkness had worn out its welcome.
Much later, after we’d both been fired, she used to come over to my house to hang, and I’d show her what I was doing on the acting book and she’d do some editing on it and rant and show me her favorite noirs like Detour and Pick-Up on South Street and her favorite Samuel Fuller movies and rant some more, and sometimes she would bring a copy of the latest issue of The New Yorker, so she could show me how few women were appearing in the magazine. And sometimes she’d do Tarot readings.
I used to love that because reading the cards she always sounded the way she did when she was editing. She’d make these little noises of discovery, like when you’ve just picked up on what a writer is doing, and I liked the idea that she could read the future the way she would read a piece of prose.
She used to do spreads about what was going to happen to us and to people she particularly hated, like Tina Brown and Mr. New Yorker Writer.
She thought that he’d campaigned to get us fired because we were a threat to him. She was obsessed with the idea. She said she knew too much about his finances, specifically money he’d told her he was trying to hide from his wife’s lawyer. And she said I was evidence of his infidelities, which mattered now that his wife was divorcing him and he wanted to look like the injured party.
I thought she was probably right that in some way he’d been instrumental in getting her fired. It takes so little. Men just have to raise an eyebrow or grimace or smirk when they want to suggest that some woman is not an asset to the abbey. I remembered the way he’d talked about her to me, not knowing she and I were friends.
But I said I didn’t think what she was saying about me made much sense, because wasn’t New York a no-fault divorce state? (I’d just finished a paralegal course at NYU.) Veronica said I just didn’t understand how divorce worked.
A few years later she would die of a brain tumor, which hadn’t been in the cards, or not the way she’d read them.
And I inherited all her obsessions.