The World Socialist Website on Woody Allen, Amazon

The Trotskyist World Socialist Website has a long article on Woody Allen and Amazon's response to Allen's lawsuit. They're less taken by the #MeToo movement than I was. But maybe they have a point. Ronan Farrow has taken to arguing that he didn't have any evidence against Weinstein---why should he need evidence against Woody Allen or anyone else?

The article also points out Amazon's hypocrisy.

Again, the Amazon lawyers modestly fail to identify one of the chief culprits in the creation of this poisonous atmosphere, Bezos’s own Washington Post. On January 4, 2018, for instance, the Post published an especially foul, stupid piece authored by Richard Morgan, “I read decades of Woody Allen’s private notes. He’s obsessed with teenage girls.” The article’s sub-heading read “His [Allen’s] 56-box archive is filled with misogynist and lecherous musings.” ThePost advertised the article as “Making Art out of Lechery.”

From the World Socialist Website article:

In Wednesday’s motion, Amazon’s legal team were obliged to concretize the company’s arguments, although they could not manage to make them any more convincing in the process. 

The motion notes that little over a month after Amazon entered into its agreement with Allen’s production company, Gravier Productions, in August 2017, “Allen’s son Ronan Farrow published an investigative article in the New Yorker detailing multiple reports of serious sexual misconduct by film producer Harvey Weinstein.” This sensationalized, scandal-mongering piece, according to Amazon’s lawyers, “became the catalyst for a broad public reckoning over the persistence of sexual harassment in entertainment and other industries.” 

Remarkably, the motion goes on to assert that, despite “immediate consensus on the importance of acknowledging and addressing this issue, Allen made a series of public comments suggesting that he failed to grasp the gravity of the issues or the implications for his own career.” He dared to express sympathy for Weinstein as well as his alleged victims, “describing the situation as ‘very sad for everybody involved.’ Then Allen added: ‘You don’t want it to lead to a witch-hunt atmosphere, a Salem atmosphere, where every guy in an office who winks at a woman is suddenly having to call a lawyer to defend himself.’” 

Of course, this “immediate consensus” was largely manufactured by the establishment media, led by the New York Times, the New Yorker and theWashington Post, the property of billionaire Jeff Bezos, who also happens to own Amazon. There is no indication that broad layers of the population, women or men, ever adopted this cause as their own. #MeToo has remained for the most part an affair of the outraged, affluent petty bourgeois, incited and manipulated by the Times, Post and company. 

The lynch-mob atmosphere created in Hollywood and the entertainment industry, on university campuses and elsewhere has been driven by several related concerns: to distract attention from deteriorating and desperate socio-economic conditions, to help channel popular opposition to Donald Trump along right-wing lines, to further undermine legal due process and to advance the careers of an already affluent layer of women. 

Amazon’s motion continues: “Several months later, in January 2018, Allen’s daughter Dylan Farrow recounted her memories of Allen’s sexual abuse. Allen publicly dismissed those statements as ‘cynically using’ #MeToo for attention.” These “memories” have been looked into and dismissed by numerous bodies, including the New York Department of Social Services and a team from the Yale-New Haven Hospital Child Sexual Abuse Clinic.

...

For 18 months, the American and global public has been subjected to an endless stream of platitudes and outright lies about the uplifting character of the #MeToo movement, about its supposed defense of the weak against the “powerful,” about its liberating effects. And a good many “left” figures, including some who should know better, have chosen to believe and have repeated this drivel. Only willful ignoramuses can make such claims now. 

...This “ennobling” campaign has been reduced to the squalid effort to destroy the reputation and career of an 83-year-old man because he refuses to be a part of the conformist “consensus” and toe the #MeToo line. Disgusting and shameful. 

The Amazon motion spells it out: artists are to be driven out and blacklisted on the basis of their public comments. If this is not a new McCarthyism, what is? In some ways, the current blacklisting is even more fatal. The blackballed Communist Party members or supporters in the 1950s were generally seen as martyrs, even if their politics were considered to be misguided or “extreme.” There were also limits to their banishment. A time came, after the height of the anti-communist hysteria passed, when most were allowed back in the fold. Today, however, individuals who find themselves on the Hollywood “sexual offenders” list are presumably pariahs forever. They are “monsters,” “predators,” there is no hope for them. 

Moreover, the film industry blacklist in the 1940s and 1950s was almost never overt or verifiable. Historian Ellen Schrecker notes, “There was, of course, no official list and the [film] studios routinely denied that blacklisting occurred.” The Amazon legal argument could hardly be more explicit.

Read the whole thing here.