Contact The Editor
Articles By This Author
Once again he had his famous walker, the walker with the tennis balls on the back legs, the walker that in his mind makes him look frail and nonpredatory, almost as if it were a prop.
For weeks through jury selection, Weinstein used that walker theatrically, as befits a savvy movie producer playing a kindly man in great pain deserving of much sympathy.
He clings to it as if he were drowning and his walker with the tennis balls is his life vest.
What's weird is that my 90-year-old mother has the same exact walker with the tennis balls.
She doesn't love her walker. She doesn't cling to it. She hates it. Sometimes she pitches it aside when she sneaks outside in the morning when we're not watching, to get her Chicago Tribune in the driveway.
Out there, when it's warm, I've even seen her with a filched smoke.
Mom, what are you doing?
"I'm 90 years old," she says. "Are you going to tell me I'm going to die? I'm 90. What the hell does it matter anymore?"
She hates her walker and she hates the tennis balls, too, but a granddaughter added them to protect the floors, and Mom loves her grandkids.
Harvey treated his walker as a friend. My mom treats hers as an enemy, a reminder of her stroke.
"Weinstein uses my style walker? Nah!" she said as I was writing this, giving him a double moutza as she saw him on TV with his walker. "Mr. Producer, Mr. Hollywood with the casting couch. What a weasel. Nah! and Nah!"
She went on, but I won't repeat the rest. For Harvey Weinstein, she has no pity.
In the Manhattan courtroom, during opening statements, Weinstein was ripped on by Meghan Hast, an assistant district attorney.
"That man was a sexual predator and a rapist," Hast told the 12 jurors. She promised that Weinstein's alleged victims will testify.
"They will each describe to you their fear, their shame and their humiliation that they each wrestled with following the violent encounters with the defendant … each feeling small and insignificant, no match for the power broker of Hollywood," Hast said.
Weinstein's Chicago defense attorneys — Donna Rotunno and Damon Cheronis — build a defense that the sex was consensual.
In court, Cheronis talked of the accusers writing emails "bragging" about their relationships with Weinstein. He portrayed some of the emails as "loving."
I don't know the prosecutor. But I do know Rotunno and Cheronis. They're good and gutsy. And they will do what defense lawyers do in rape cases: create doubt. All they need is one juror.
This is a serious matter. Sexual predators are serious business. And each of us has an idea about him.
We often say trials are about truth and justice, but they're not. Trials are about what comes out and what can be proven in a jury's mind.
So, what is the truth of Harvey Weinstein?
He had money and power and the right Democratic Party connections, as a fundraiser and bundler for the Clintons and others. He was protected for years by celebrity media, though Hollywood knew what he was about long before the story was made public.
Comics would make jokes about him at those Hollywood awards ceremonies, where liberal film people spend hours virtue-signaling and lecturing the rest of America for our moral failings.
Weinstein's proclivities were an open secret. But can a people question their "God"?
You look at him now, with or without the walker, and you see a god made of suet, a frightened god, but a god nevertheless, one you didn't want to cross if you were in the movie business just a few years ago.
You'd especially not want to cross him if you were a woman seeking fame in show business and he liked your looks and wanted you in bed.
Or, say, if you were a hunky male actor and he was attracted to your girlfriend and you needed to stay on Harvey's good side for great heroic parts, increasing your chances of being included in those "sexiest man alive" lists.
But for all that, Weinstein was a god of Hollywood, with immense power to reach out his hand and help or ruin careers.
In 2012, Streep accepted a Golden Globe for her portrayal of the late Margaret Thatcher in "Iron Lady," a Harvey Weinstein-produced film.
She thanked her champions, including Weinstein, and played the grand dame.
Streep wasn't exactly channeling Dame Edith Evans, the great actress who played Lady Bracknell in "The Importance of Being Earnest," but there was a definite Lady Bracknell vibe from Streep, as she pitched her voice and fluttered her eyes and stretched out her vowels.
"And God, Harvey Weinstein," said Streep, stretching out the "O" between the "G" and the "D."
Gaaawwwd.
Streep's speech was greeted by thunderous applause from people who knew what Weinstein was about.
That's Hollywood.
Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
(COMMENT, BELOW)
John Kass is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune who also hosts a radio show on WLS-AM.