As someone who suffered his abuse, I am so sick of the talking heads.
When Harvey Weinstein’s New York conviction was overturned on Thursday, it didn’t take long for commentators to begin dramatically and variously expanding on what this specific and relatively technical ruling means. In short order, we were offered opinions on the effect of the decision on the #MeToo movement overall, the future of sexual assault cases, women’s rights, and even the parallels with Donald Trump’s ongoing legal battles.
For those of us who actually knew Harvey—those of us who had experienced his hands upon us and the very real fear of harm, those of us who for the past six years have been congratulated for our “courage” while simultaneously lambasted for being “attention-seekers,” “gold diggers,” or downright liars—the news of the overturned conviction landed more viscerally.
That pundits were quick to seize on the news to promote their own particular cause or career is not surprising. We’ve seen this before, when the press insists on marking each anniversary by asking “What has changed since #MeToo?” The answer, we are given to understand, is “Very little.”
On the morning the news broke about the overturning of the pivotal conviction in the #MeToo movement, I clicked on the news stories and learned from the lawyers and activists what I should be thinking and feeling before I even had a chance to process my own reaction. My body knew—my hands shook all day—but my brain had yet to catch up. Then came the newsroom requests for “reactions” from “Weinstein survivors” (we are mostly interchangeable in their eyes, it seems). During the TV interviews, I tried to talk about trauma, something I know a lot about, as I have been running Echo Training, a nonprofit that provides trauma education, since 2013. I read up about the legal intricacies surrounding the case and, if called upon, I could expound on women’s rights and a legal system that is stacked against victims and the likelihood of getting a conviction of sexual assault. But none of that was asked of me, and even when it was, my responses ended up on the cutting-room floor.
Instead, they mined for raw emotion—all of our raw emotion, which again is somehow presumed to be the same. “What is your reaction?” “How do you feel?” “What are the other survivors feeling?” In the absence of being in-studio, shots of wringing hands were replaced by my slightly blurred-by-Zoom face and kitchen shelves.
Meanwhile, I absorbed the comments from those who feel entitled to have an opinion on the appeals court decision no matter how tenuous their relationship to the case. Lawyers and advocates prepared statements and gave quotes. Reporters interviewed other reporters. I felt churned under by the sheer weight of all this opinion until, abruptly, I was left lying in the dust after the 24-hour news cycle moved on.
By banding together to “out” a serial sexual predator, the Weinstein survivors provided a tipping point, a moment when women around the world gave voice to sexual harassment and abuse long suffered in silence and declared war on the deeply entrenched male sense of entitlement to women’s bodies. Thus Weinstein survivors became part of “MeToo” and each “me” a universal “we.”
The #MeToo moment does not belong to the pundits, the lawyers, the survivor advocacy groups, or feminist columnists. It belongs to every woman, man, and child who has suffered the loss of their bodily autonomy and dignity because someone else selfishly satisfied their own sexual impulses at the expense of another. It belongs to everyone who has a place in their memory that cannot be revisited without shame and revulsion. It belongs to anyone who to this day struggles to trust that their needs will be respected by another human being and either shuns intimacy or submits to new violations of their body and soul because the neural networks for how to say “no” were never programmed into their brain.
On the day I took a business meeting with Harvey in his hotel suite and he proceeded to strip naked and try to pull me into his bed, I ran from the room feeling small and ridiculously naïve. “That’s what happens when you are stupid enough to try to play in the big boys’ league,” I berated myself. Each time I saw Harvey’s televised face at an awards show, I burned with a mixture of shame and the knowledge of who he really was. It is a lonely feeling, to see the world celebrate money, fame, glitz and glamour, while smarting with the private wounds to pride and ambition.
Which is not unlike my experience during the past few days. We endured the degradation of detailing body parts groped and violated to put Harvey in prison. We paid in smears to our integrity and the invasion of privacy—us and the countless other women who came forward to talk about sexual abuse by famous and non-famous men alike—to facilitate the changes that were supposed to prevent predators getting away with their crimes.
And yet, as Harvey Weinstein came back into the news, his victims were once again relegated to screengrabs of “emotional reaction.” We watched the industry that has now formed around survivors sun itself in media attention and turn our personal pain into grand themes about the state of women’s rights and legal reform and “here’s my business card.” Of course we need to talk about legal reform—goodness knows, many of our cases could not traverse the arbitrary statute of limitations, which, by its nature, suggests that there is a time limit to our pain. But, since I have been asked, let me tell you my “emotional reaction” to the overturning of Weinstein’s New York conviction and the ensuing brouhaha: It is to once more feel small and irrelevant in my own story.