Beware, Hollywood, Harvey is coming for you!

While he is heading for a rape lawsuit, Weinstein is plotting to call the biggest brokers in the industry as defense witnesses.

A strange feeling of emotion ran through me as I read the last twist in Harvey Weinstein's story: New charges were brought against him by the Manhattan District Attorney. On July 2, as most readers of this section know, the AD says that there was a third woman Weinstein assaulted, in addition to the two previously cited in her previous criminal charges. This time, the charge was a predatory sexual assault, and if the 66-year-old mogul is convicted, it could mean life in jail.

So what was this strange emotion that I felt when I heard the news? Was it nostalgia for the man who once dominated Hollywood, the greatest showman of his era? Was it the regret that a filmmaker of his gifts should have fallen so far? Or was it something else, a sense of relief, perhaps, that his reign of terror was over, a reign of which the poisonous mixture of brutality and rage was being imposed on a whole bunch of people – obviously the women who were the only ones in the world? he would have assaulted, but also the executives, the assistants, the writers, the directors, the producers, the agents and even, yes, the journalists whom he harassed endlessly?

That was none of it. It was a thrill of fear.

Because even though I recognized that Weinstein's time was really good, I also realized that it would not come down without a fight. Just as this chapter of the #MeToo chronicle is coming to an end, another is about to begin. Call him Harvey's Revenge.

His lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, has already said that Weinstein would plead not guilty to the new charges, noting: "Weinstein maintains that all these allegations are false and he expects to be fully justified. Weinstein's predator when the interactions were consensual is simply not justified. "

So, if you think Weinstein will take the slings and arrows of a hostile DA. lying down, think again. And if you imagine that he will sit humbly in the courtroom, uttering a series of "mea culpas" or quietly allowing his attorney to negotiate a plea bargain that lasted a long time. years, you still have something to do.

If he does not take the witness stand, he will make sure that many other people do it. And I'm not just talking about dozens of women who have accused her of everything from harassment to rape; I mean the hundreds of passers-by, the men (and sometimes the women) who were standing next to each other and who were doing terrible things, because they did not have the courage to fight against him or to to be convinced that it was like that. There were those who did not know, but also those who chose not to do so.

Weinstein's loudest argument is probably not only that it's not culpable, but that everyone who approached knew the rules. From the game. And these rules were that sexism and chauvinism, cowardice and lust, violence and predation were correct. More than that, they were on the agenda.

He is likely to say: How could there be real victims while everyone knew what he was doing? And how could they not know, when Casting Couch was a tale as old as time, a song as old as rhyme?

It's the tacitly accepted creed that all the old-time tycoons – the men whose bullyzer-like personalities were strong enough to shave the citrus groves of Los Angeles and build their own empires – taken for granted just as they expected their wives, girlfriends, colleagues and employees to do the same. They were selfish and believed in nth degree individualism: there is one set of rules for you and another for me. Like so many kings and monarchs, they held to their right of lord and created feudal domains that could respond to all their fantasies. The idea that another human being could have value and value, let alone be his equal, had nothing to do with the distorted universe of his imagination.

They had grown up in countries where equality did not exist. And they had fled the Old World, not because they believed in freedom for all, but because they believed it entirely for themselves. It was the survival of the fittest, a Darwinian ethos that left no room for weakness and no place for those who were less able to carve a path for themselves. They clung to their own fields of distortion of reality, just as Steve Jobs clung to his own, and if their reality did not match yours, you just had to buckle up and give in.

They were the kind of people who would like the current mantra "follow your truth" – as if "your truth" and "my truth" could coexist in one way or another without being a single and same thing. But there are no different truths; there is only one objective truth, which we should all cherish.

And yet, many men (and some women) in Hollywood chose not to do it in the Weinstein era, just as in the decades that preceded it. They chose to focus on snippets of truth: that Weinstein was a big producer; that he could butter their pockets if they were buttering his own; that it was just the way things were done. Who were they to challenge the most established conventions of Hollywood?

Now, as everyone knows, we are all challenged. We are obliged to recognize that we have analyzed the truth. We are putting in place barriers between one aspect of it and another – between the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. We thought it was okay to have one and ignore the rest. But it is not and never will be. Not just in court, but in life

What all these potential witnesses should say now. Before they are called, before they have to squirm on the stand, let them talk now and admit where they went wrong. It is only by recognizing the total horror of the past that we can never go beyond.