I'm not equating, you know, the Central Park Five with Harvey Weinstein. I'm just talking about the figure of the defendant. Anyone who is accused, who's in the hot seat, whether it's someone with no power or someone with a great deal of social power. Once they are defendants, they are at the mercy, really, of the state. And they should have their -- you know, their thin reed should be the presumption of innocence and the benefit of the doubt. But again and again and again, we deny them the benefit of the doubt. Scandal always denies them the benefit of the doubt. Those five boys in Central Park, who were wrongly accused of rape, they never had the benefit of the doubt. And Harvey Weinstein, he never had the benefit of the doubt.
So if we as a society are going to say -- oh, well, you know, some people don't get the benefit of the doubt. And we decide, oh -- so the crowd decides, the media decides, whoever decides -- this is very dangerous. And it's fraudulent to say just because somebody once had tremendous amounts of power, once he's been convicted in the press he still will probably be able to buy himself justice. You know, he might, but it's unlikely.
RS: Well, you refer to it -- you're quoting, I forget who, but as "poisoned solidarity."
JW: That's a terrific phrase. It's a terrific phrase by a great anthropologist called Roger Lancaster. And he uses it in a wonderful book called Sex Panic and the Punitive State. And what poisoned solidarity is, is kind of the reverse of what we typically think about as solidarity, where we're, you know, unified by positive feelings of common good. In poisoned solidarity, there is a mutual identification based on negative energies, negative feelings, the desire to get the bad guy, a desire for vengeance, and feelings of fear. And it merges two things: a kind of thrill of being scared together, and a thrill of trying to stick it to the devil. And poisoned solidarity is really a feature of our time, you know, where we decide that somebody is a public enemy. And the public enemy is most obvious in these sex scandals, because the person who's accused in a sex scandal is typically spoken of as a demon, as a monster, as depraved, as deviant. This person is beyond rights or humanity, you know. It's a language that we have all heard repeatedly, and sometimes they're actually called satanic, these monsters, and sometimes they're just called monsters or demons.
It's -- and I'm not just using this, you know, colorfully here. Because it's important to know that in the Harvey Weinstein trial, the prosecution actually began its case in the opening by talking about Harvey Weinstein and the women who accused him in these words: "He was the old lady in the gingerbread house, luring the kids in, missing the oven behind." So suddenly we're in the world of Grimms' Fairy Tales and Hansel and Gretel, and the women are children -- they're "kids" -- and he is the old lady in the gingerbread house. So you know, he was called a monster in the course of the trial by the prosecution. He was called disgusting. He was called, you know, just horrible and degraded. He was also called deformed, abnormal, you know, disgusting, scarred, grunting, fat, hairy, stinking. He had to be unmanned, you know, he had to be made subhuman. But afterward, when he was convicted -- not on the most serious charges, but still, as the carceral feminists said, a win is a win, and he was sentenced to 23 years in jail, which is effectively a death sentence -- the New York Times, you know, here it is, the great august paper-it ran an editorial titled "The Lessons of #MeToo's Monster." And this took up a quarter of the editorial page with a graphic image of a silhouette of Harvey Weinstein. And so it's just this, you know, sort of black image of a face, and where the mouth would have been was a couch, and the couch had legs, and the legs stuck down like vampire fangs.
So this is the language and the evocative imagery that's used in a criminal trial. This is -- you know, this ought to -- when people said afterward that, you know, the prosecutors and #MeToo and everyone dragged the law into the 21st century -- no. It was dragging the law back into some pre-modern state, where all we have to do is name the witch and really make him horrible. Now, Harvey Weinstein may have done terrible, terrible things. But from what they presented in court, given how much power they have, it was remarkably thin. And really, it was uncorroborated testimony by two people. There were many other people who came in to say how awful he was, but there were two accusers. And they were -- you know, I'm not going to go into it too long on this, but --
RS: No, because it's a view we don't -- let me just say, it's a view we don't hear. And people should be reminded listening to this, you covered this -- I believe you covered this for Harper's.
JW: No, The Nation.
RS: For The Nation. But you were there; you examined the evidence, you went through everything --
JW: Yeah, I was there as a member of the public, which was a really interesting experience. Because there was a media line -- and I didn't get credentials for this -- and then there was a public line. And so I stood on the public line every day and talked to people who were just curious about the case. And the difference -- and the piece I wrote for The Nation was, you know, a report from the public line, because I talked to a lot of the people who were, you know, just New Yorkers or visitors, international visitors, visitors from around the country who were curious. And you know, we reviewed what we'd just heard. And I had wonderful conversations, and I was struck by the fact that we were never asked by the ranks of media people there -- I mean, there were tons and tons and tons of journalists. They took up all of the courtroom except for two rows in the back, and then the public got in. But they never asked -- like, if I were -- they never asked the public, what did you think? They never asked any of us on the line-so, what do you think? Which is astounding to me. You talk about Murray Kempton -- Murray Kempton would sit in those courtrooms, but Murray Kempton would also talk to New Yorkers. You know, he'd also talk to people who were watching. He would look at the evidence, he would listen to what was going on in the court, but he was interested in what was the mood, also, around the courtroom and, you know, in the hallways and in the city.
And you got a very different view from the public line. Because the public line, people were really acting like jurors. They were saying, I don't know, that's-we sat all day listening to the most banal emails from, you know, one of the accusers, Jessica Mann, to Harvey Weinstein. And they're asking for tickets, they're asking how he is, they're asking when he'll be in town, they're asking -- they're complimenting him, saying she loves him, he has such a cute face, he's so supportive, he's so helpful, he always makes her feel wonderful. But really, it went on for hours, and they were all things about what's going on in her day, what commercial she just got, et cetera, et cetera. And she had said that every one of those emails was carefully, carefully crafted to defend her life, because he was going to kill her. She felt he would kill her or destroy her or kill her father or do something, and so she carefully thought out each word so as to mollify this man who was usually 3,000 miles away from her.
And so, you know, the journalists had one take on this, which was of course how much she was brutalized, even though the emails spoke contemporaneously of a different reality. But on the public line, people were going, oh, wait a minute. How would you -- would you really write that to somebody who you say just raped you the day before? Would you stay on in New York to go to his birthday party the next day if he raped you the day before? I mean, there were a lot of, lot of things that average people, thinking like jurors, said wait a minute. You know, he's got the benefit of the doubt, and this is evidence to the contrary. This creates doubt. But I think the jury was under a tremendous amount of pressure. I think they made -- I don't really know, but I think there was some kind of compromise that was made among them, where they wouldn't find him guilty of the most serious charges, but they would find him guilty of some things. And the judge, who has typically sentenced first-time offenders, which on the face of it he was, to not very much time for what he was charged with -- like average seven to eight years -- gave him 23 years.
RS: Let me just jump in here. Because at this moment, people listening to this will wonder, why did you even care? You know, the Central Park accused rapists, attackers -- you could say, well, they were poor, they were marginalized Hispanic and Black people in New York who were subject to racism. And you could be sympathetic to, you know, as you point out in your book, 70 million people have a criminal record in the United States, one-third of U.S. adults. You point out that 50% of Black men in the U.S. have this kind of record. And you know, charges of this kind were used against marginalized and vulnerable people beginning -- well, not beginning with our history, but certainly one case you mentioned, Emmett Till, accused of leering at a woman. And so you know, but then when you get to the famous people, the Woody Allens and the Dershowitzes and all these other folks, there isn't a reservoir of sympathy.
But you know, people -- it's really interesting. If the media were so clear that Harvey Weinstein was a monster, and it evidently was revealed to, according to the prosecutors, some large number of people, how could the media have not known that? I mean, there were receptions, there were gatherings. Harvey Weinstein was one of the most important figures in the entertainment world. The same thing could be said about Epstein and the whole scandal with him. You know, Bill Clinton was on his airplane 38 times or something. You know, how -- how, if the people on the line -- and this is really a Murray Kempton journalism moment. You're with the people on the line, as Murray Kempton would be quite often. And you're talking to people who are taking this in, without the bias of having a profession called journalism or law or what have you. And on the other hand, the media -- which, you know, many of these people knew Harvey Weinstein. They dined with him, they went to his functions, they spent a lot of time. How come this was -- that he was such a monster was such a mystery to them? And you know, we're going to run out of time, but I want to say something about your journalism, in case anybody is questioning this now. I want to quote, again, from the Times Literary Supplement, which is a marvelous review, by the way, and really gives you your credit, JoAnn -- now I'm going to blow it again -- Wypijewski. Starts out with a W, the W is a V in Polish, et cetera. So when you're looking up the book to maybe buy it or certainly read it, remember it's with a W.
But anyway, in the Times Literary Supplement, they write, quote, "An accomplished journalist and a former editor at The Nation, Wypijewski courts scandal herself. Romps on Harvey Weinstein and Brett Kavanaugh -- and a more dubious apologia for a priest accused of molestation -- reveal her stake in provocation. But she is too smart to succumb to facile contrarianism-and too compassionate" -- this is important -- "and too compassionate to ignore the human costs of the tragedies she treats. What We Don't Talk About" -- the book's title -- "is buttressed by moral clarity, and what emerges is a leftism animated by unshakable respect for the dignity of all, even sinners and sex pests." That strikes an example from Jesus Christ himself. And then he quotes you, I guess: "The mess of life demands principled humanity' because 'the suspect is one of us, whether ultimately found guilty or not.'"
And what you really argue in your book -- and I want to end with one very big case that you witnessed, Abu Ghraib, which is related to this. What your journalism has -- and again, if people listening to this have never read Murray Kempton, please -- there are a number of books that are still in print, really the great model, I think, for journalism. And what he did is actually, OK, the drama, the -- we didn't have cable then, but whatever the daily news was saying and everything -- he said wait a minute, what's really going on? And that's what JoAnn Wypijewski does. She says wait, wait, stop for a second -- what's really going on here?
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