The Me Too Movement took the country by storm in late 2017 that claimed the careers of many Hollywood juggernauts like super producer Harvey Weinstein, comedian Louis C.K., director Brett Ratner and Academy Award winning actor Kevin Spacey.
It doesn’t look like it’ll stop anytime soon either.
And one Hollywood power player just became an enormous hypocrite after she ignored this key Me Too Movement thing on one of her sets.
There are some things you just can’t come back from.
Hollywood celebrities who were not accused banded together to make sure some of those sexual assailants would never work in the industry again. Or did they?
This is actually deeply rooted in things far before Farrow’s piece.
One good example is disgraced director Roman Polanski – known for “Chinatown,” “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Ghost Writer” – was convicted of drugging and sexually assaulting a thirteen year old girl in the 1970’s. Consequently, Polanski fled the country upon hearing the judge planned to overturn the plea deal and sentence him to fifty years in prison.
But that didn’t stop him from directing while he was a wanted fugitive by the United States government.
When the scandal broke in late October, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, along with many others were accused of staying silent on Harvey Weinstein’s alleged sexual misconduct. And yet, somehow, these celebrities have false morality in these situations.
That’s exactly what happened with Lena Waithe recently.
That name may not be familiar to you but she’s quickly becoming one of the industry’s most powerful people; that compounded with her LGBT background (she’s gay) and she’s also an African American. Waithe played Aech in Steven Spielberg’s “Radio Player One,” but she’s also the mind behind “The Chi,” “Dear White People,” and a lot more coming down the pipeline.
But a new report uncovered by Carron J. Phillips of “The Shadow League” claims that she was silent about actor Jason Mitchell’s conduct on “The Chi” which ultimately led to him being booted from the hit show.
Phillips wrote, “Tiffany Boone, the actress who Mitchell’s character’s girlfriend, Jerrika, on the ‘The Chi’ and the show’s second-season showrunner Ayanna Floyd are the women at the heart of the allegations against Mitchell. It’s been reported that Boone would even have her fiancée come to set, and asked to be released from the series. Mitchell is trash, and it appears that everybody knew about it, including Waithe.”
The article doesn’t go into any detail about what the specific allegations against Mitchell were but it appears there was a consensus he allegedly did what everyone claimed.
And what Waithe has said in the past certainly contradicts her decision to stay silent on this issue.
Last March, in an interview with “Vanity Fair” Waithe said of the allegations against her former colleague and comedian Aziz Ansari after he was accused of sexual misconduct noted, “At the end of the day, what I would hope comes out of this is that we as a society… educate ourselves about what consent is—what it looks like, what it feels like, what it sounds like. I think there are both men and women who are still trying to figure it out. We need to be more attuned to each other, pay more attention to each other, in every scenario, and really make sure that, whatever it is we’re doing with someone else, they’re comfortable doing whatever that thing is, and that we’re doing it together. That’s just human kindness and decency.”
Just three short months later, Waithe said, “I’ve been very involved in Time’s Up and that movement, and for season two, we’re making sure that women feel safe on the set and we’re hyper aware of what that means because there are sex scenes. We want to make sure we’re talking to these actresses and also talking to our male actors and making sure they’re aware. ‘Cause I don’t play. I’m like, “It’s the city of Chicago, people die every day, so if you want to play that game and be disrespectful or misbehave on set with an actress or anyone, I’ll happily call Showtime and say this person has to go, and you will get shot up and it’ll be a wonderful finale.”
And yet Waithe had the audacity to claim from high up on her Hollywood pedestal that everyone needs to be better when she wasn’t. Waithe should take a long look in the mirror about how much of a hypocrite she truly is.