LOS ANGELES (CA)
Los Angeles Times
October 27, 2017
By Steve Lopez
Eight years ago, producer Harvey Weinstein and a horde of Hollywood moguls and celebrities banded together in defense of child molester Roman Polanski.
The Polish director, who fled the U.S. in 1977 before being sentenced for forcing himself on a 13-year-old girl, had just been arrested while attending a film festival in Switzerland. The Weinstein gang was outraged at the disruption of the festival, among other things, and demanded Polanski’s release.
My, how times have changed.
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And how does an entire industry go from denial to denunciation in just eight years?
“Maybe that’s the new norm,” said former Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, who called me last week to talk about the Polanski case and about Weinstein’s role in defending him.
Cooley said the long-running abuse of women by powerful men in Hollywood echoes the Catholic Church’s pedophilia scandal, which his office investigated for years, fighting against church leaders who refused to turn over documents.
He’s onto something. In each institution, sex, money, career opportunity and public image are powerful forces that breed corruption, arrogance and abuse. The church and the entertainment industry were populated by people who knew what was up, but had reason to enforce a code of silence, if not to actively engage in cover-ups.
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