Would the war against preying on women be blazing so fiercely had Hillary Clinton been elected?
When
I interviewed women in Hollywood about the ugly Harvey Weinstein
revelations in The Times and The New Yorker, they told me that feelings
of frustration and disgust at having an accused predator in the White
House instead of the first woman president had helped give the story
velocity.
When I talked to Susan Fowler, after her blog post
about sexual harassment at Uber that toppled its C.E.O., Travis
Kalanick, she said that before Donald Trump’s election, women in Silicon
Valley were speaking up but no one was listening.
“I
think it was different this year because Trump won and people felt
powerless,” she said. “I know I did. I felt super powerless. Because I
felt, with Obama in the White House, I could just take for granted that
good people were in charge.”
It
is also interesting to speculate: If Hillary were in the Oval, would
some women have failed to summon the courage to tell their Weinstein
horror stories because the producer was also a power behind the Clinton
throne? As Janice Min, the former editor of The Hollywood Reporter, told
me, when Barack Obama stepped off a stage and into Weinstein’s arms for
a big hug after giving a $400,000 speech as an ex-president in the
spring, it sent a signal that the ogre was in a protected magic circle.
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