#MeToo is now officially out of control

Let me preface this piece by stating the obvious. Inappropriate touching by a man or a woman is certainly wrong. Rape is a crime and should be treated as such. Now with what’s bugging me. This #MeToo thing has gotten completely out of control.

Morgan Freeman is the latest victim of this movement. And, yes, I said victim. Let me explain how this whole Morgan Freeman thing started. Chloe Melas is a reporter for CNN. She interviewed Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, and Alan Arkin for their movie, “Going in Style.” Melas was pregnant at the time. Apparently she explained to the men that she was pregnant and Caine told a story of how he had been cured of saying anything about a woman’s pregnancy. He said he asked a woman many years ago how far along she was and she said she wasn’t pregnant. He was so embarrassed and that cured him of ever asking again. At that point Freeman said, “Boy, I wish I was there.” It was an obvious response to Caine’s story. Melas somehow took it as a sexual comment directed at her!

After she got back from maternity leave she was on a mission. She tried to find others who had been sexually harassed by Freeman. Here’s what she dug up. A production assistant on “Going in Style” said Freeman made comments about her figure and her clothing and touched her…wait for it…back.

She did have the only legitimate complaint of inappropriate behavior against Freeman. She told CNN he “kept trying to lift up my skirt and asking if I was wearing underwear.” That, I will admit, is over the line. But should you lose your Visa gig because of it? Those are the only details we got from CNN. The allegations from six or seven other women were only reported as “public comments about women’s clothing or bodies.” Hardly the type of behavior that gets you banished from the advertising world.

The problem is Morgan Freeman apologized. That’s a mistake too many men these days are making. Now, Freeman didn’t admit guilt. He said he was sorry if anyone misinterpreted his comments. Still, an apology to the #MeToo movement is a scalp. They come back later for the whole head.

Remember when Carrie Fisher died? Remember Steve Martin’s tweet? He wrote, “When I was a young man, Carrie Fisher was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. She turned out to be witty and bright as well.” The Twitter world came unglued. The outrage was so fierce that he deleted the tweet. So much for saying something kind. 

Granted, the Morgan Freeman flap is a little more than a tweet, but it basically amounts to a guy hitting on women. The irony is this turns the notion that these women are as tough as men on its head. Now, don’t get touchy. I’m not talking about all women. I’m talking about these women who now accuse Freeman of sexual harassment. They are so hypersensitive that they can’t properly function in the real world much less be as “tough as the men.” In other words, they purport to be strong women but they’re proving to be anything but. 

I suspect this all has something to do with Morgan Freeman’s strong stand on race. He’s on record as thinking Black History Month is stupid and saying the best way to stop racism is to stop talking about it. To the liberals out there that position cannot be taken without consequence. The #MeToo movement has been weaponized, and Morgan Freeman is the movement’s latest kill.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Sexual harassment—To believe or not believe

Well, since my column on the shelf life of outrage we’ve seen two congressmen and a senator go down in flames. The most bizarre involved now-former Congressman Trent Franks of Arizona who had discussions with female staffers about surrogacy. At least one of the staffers took it as a proposition for sex. Franks denied that charge but resigned anyway.

We’ve had several in public broadcasting either suspended while allegations are investigated or outright fired. Hollywood is embroiled in an almost daily scandal of sexual harassment or sexual assault. The harassment plague has spilled over into TV news. Our senior research analyst joked that there was going to be no one left in Congress to pass laws but no one left on television to cover it.

But what of those who vehemently deny the accusations? Roy Moore of Alabama is forever tainted by scurrilous allegations by two women who have been discredited. Most people never heard about the checkered pasts of the accusers or the tremendous holes in their stories. I’ve often told you that media bias is not what they tell you, it’s more what they don’t.

Now that the Alabama special election is behind us, we need to have a collective discussion as a nation. The basic cornerstone of American jurisprudence is “innocent until proven guilty.” Unfortunately, there is no due process in a public lynching. 

Members of the House and Senate now want ethics investigations for members based on accusations that sometimes date back 40 years. I wonder how many lawmakers will survive that scrutiny if it’s meted out even-handedly. I can’t imagine that any of them have nothing to hide. You know what they say about people who live in glass houses.

Two people who have built a glass high-rise are Mika and Joe from MSNBC’s Morning Joe. They sit each morning in judgement of every sex scandal that comes down the pike while, according to various news reports, they carried on a years-long adulterous affair until they were outed by the National Enquirer.

Recently I had the misfortune of sitting in front of Megyn Kelly’s sinking talk show on NBC while waiting for my car to be washed. She had three Trump sexual assault accusers on. One was the infamous woman from first class who claims Trump groped her on a flight from Houston to New York. She said he never said a word to her. He just started rubbing his hands all over her and putting his hand up her skirt. She claims she jumped up in disgust and stormed to the back of the plane for the remainder of the flight. Several witnesses who remember sitting near Trump on the plane have come forward to say they saw nothing unusual.

As if to double down on the story, the woman claims an encounter with Trump years later. She says she was working a fundraiser for the Humane Society when Trump approached the table for his tickets with his first wife, Ivana. She claims Trump recognized her and said, “Hey, you’re that c@*# from the plane!” Even if we were to believe Trump groped a woman on a plane it’s highly unlikely that he would instantly recognize her after just a couple of minutes of groping. It’s also impossible to believe that he would call her out in front of his wife.

But it doesn’t matter how incredible the accusation. We’re told we must believe the woman. That is, as Mika said one morning, unless the accuser voted for Trump. In that case, they must be totally discounted. So goes justice.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

What is the shelf life of outrage?

It’s now an almost daily occurrence. Someone comes forward saying they were groped, grabbed, or otherwise wronged by somebody famous. How long should we credibly be asked to believe that someone was wronged? In other words, what is the shelf life of outrage?

Take, for example, the woman who claims Sen. Al Franken grabbed her fanny during a photo op at the Minnesota State Fair in 2010 while her husband took the picture. I’m not defending Franken if he actually did grab her butt, but the shelf life on that outrage is about 30 minutes or until you leave the fair, whichever comes first. If I’m the wife, I turn around and slap the hell out of Franken. If I’m the husband, I punch the SOB in the nose.

At some point we have to separate the wheat from the chaff. Who is to be believed. Beverly Young Nelson, the woman who says Roy Moore of Alabama sexually assaulted her in his car back in 1977 gave a very convincing performance with Gloria Allred before the cameras. It wasn’t until Moore’s attorney revealed that she had her divorce petition thrown out by Moore’s court in 1999 that she was exposed as a fraud. Even now, many in the press discount that little factoid. It’s impossible to now believe she wasn’t acting out of vengeance.

In a Vox article on suspended New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush, he’s accused of leveraging his position of power in journalism to accost women. Let’s examine that for a moment, this “leveraging of power.” It’s one thing if Thrush is your boss. That kind of leverage for sex is older than the water cooler. What we’re talking about here are women who worked alongside him as reporters. Apparently it was impossible to say no to Thrush. 

One reporter recounts that after a Politico going-away party, where they both worked, Thrush somehow ended up at her place. Hmmm. “I remember stopping him at one point and saying, ‘Wait, you’re married,’” she told the New York Times. “I remember that by the time he left, I didn’t have much clothes on.” Really? I wonder how that happened. Thrush’s super power must be the ability to melt clothes off women.

I should remind you that Glenn Thrush is the “journalist” caught in the Wikileaks e-mails from John Podesta sending a draft article that dealt with Podesta to Podesta to edit. He admitted in the e-mail that “I have become a hack.” Yeah, Glenn, you have. And apparently a drunk, groping, creep of a hack.

So, now the Vox folks are revisiting Bill Clinton’s predatory ways. They’ve wrongfully come to the conclusion that Monica Lewinsky was a victim via the same Thrushian logic of leveraging power. Monica Lewinsky was a stalking opportunist trying her best to “do” the president the first chance she got. That doesn’t let Bill off the hook for his rogue behavior but she’s not a #MeToo.

Whether it’s PBS’s Charlie Rose walking around naked (a revolting thought) or Harvey Weinstein’s casting couch, there seems to be a theme. Too many people for way too long believed that type of conduct passed for appropriate behavior. Here in the real world, the world of relative morality that these liberals ridiculed for generations, we all knew better.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not doubting a lot of what happened to these women happened. What I’m questioning is how outraged they actually were when it took them years, sometimes decades, to come forward. Apparently some of their outrage has the shelf life of a can of beets.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Hollywood has no moral high ground

I was in Europe last week for a river cruise. I highly recommend it, by the way. My wife and I would wind down from the day’s excursions with BBC news. I don’t know what everyone was talking about back here in the States but it was wall to wall Harvey Weinstein. This is not purely a political issue, but I find it so ironic that this pig was hailed far and wide by liberals all across Hollywood as a wonderful guy who gave selflessly to liberal candidates and causes. The irony is that all the while Harvey Weinstein’s sexual harassment was legendary.

And now starlet after starlet is coming forward to reveal that they too were sexually harassed by Weinstein. They kept their silence because they were afraid it would hurt their careers. What does that say about them?

Everyone’s focused on Harvey, as well they should be, but we have to have a conversation about culpability. You can’t at once say you kept silent to advance your own greedy desires to succeed in Hollywood and call yourself a victim.

I don’t want anyone to misunderstand my point here. There are plenty of women who have been sexually harassed by pigs like Weinstein. They keep quiet for a variety of reasons. Some know they’ll lose in a he said/she said situation. Others actually like the guy and don’t want to ruin his career over what they hope is a temporary lack of judgement or an isolated indiscretion.

What I’m talking is the Hollywood community that knew full well that Harvey Weinstein was a monster. Still, they dealt with him because he could help them. And I’m talking men and women. What they should’ve done was lived by the principles they preach to everyone else and stop dealing with people like him. Instead, they fed on Weinstein for decades when it served their own purposes.

Hillary Clinton is one of them. She’s now going to give the money Weinstein gave to her campaign to charity. Or so she says. She’s using the Weinstein story to bash Trump. “After all, we have someone admitting to being a sexual assaulter in the Oval Office,” she told Andrew Marr on BBC. I’m sitting there screaming at the TV, “What about your frickin’ husband?” Of course, Marr never brought that up.

And another piece of irony is Weinstein helped pay Bill Clinton’s legal bills during the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.

Again, Hollywood knew full well about Hillary’s husband and not only never said anything, they continued and continue to give to the Clinton machine. Hillary once said on the campaign trail that any woman who accuses a man of rape should be believed. Unless that woman happens to have been raped by her husband. Then she needs to be destroyed.

This whole Weinstein thing isn’t just a Harvey Weinstein scandal. It’s a Hollywood scandal. It’s about people like Ashley Judd who put up with Weinstein asking her to watch him take a shower and never say anything, then publicly complain about an airport employee who says she’s pretty. It’s about the countless actresses who came to town very willing to take their turn on the casting couch if it got them that big part and now cry that they’re victims.

And, yes, there are plenty of victims. I just don’t think a whole community who knew of the monster in their midst and tolerated him because he was powerful are among them. Let’s stand against not only the monsters like Weinstein but the many enablers who keep a predator like that in business.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.