How Widely Will the Sex Abuse Scandals Spread Before They're "Contained"?

by Gaius Publius

Just a heads up. The liberal-side sexual abuse scandal that's spreading widely, catching both greater and lesser lights, is not likely to let up. Large fish (for example, Harvey Weinstein) and smaller (for example, the Washington Spectator's Hamilton Fish V) are getting entangled in the net of long-delayed, entirely appropriate outrage. The circle of scrutiny is wide, enough so that even apparently innocent people, like Matt Taibbi for instance, feel compelled to post preventive pieces like this.

Spreading Like a Fire

We're in the spreading phase of this wild fire. Soon the firefighters will come to tamp it down. Will they succeed? My guess is yes. After all, the practice is apparently so rampant that the sheer number of people taken out — on our side, good progressives, yes, but also guilty of what we most claim to disavow — may prove too large, with too many of the names too prominent.

Hollywood tried circling, to some degree, its wagons around Weinstein, and those who early on defended him are coming for their own share of shame. As many have noted, yours truly included, there are many ways the Weinstein world and culture touches the larger liberal world and culture.

My best guess is that the powers that be in the left-mainstream world will look for a time to shout "Enough already. We get the point. Let's not spill any more blood," surely a move to defend those many about to be touched. Watch for that.

As an example of what still hidden from most eyes, and what will most definitely, with backstage force, remain buried from wide public view for as long as possible, consider the following.

A World Hiding Serial Harassers Hides Serial Pedophiles As Well

A world like Hollywood or mainstream politics — on both sides of the aisle — hides not only many individuals who "get away with it" because, well, they can. It hides self-sustaining and reinforcing groups of those who "get away with it" as well.

Consider Fox News, for example, as not just a place where lots of sexual abusers work(ed), but as an organization that proactively attracts and enables those people. This is not passive allowance of a crime, but proactive creation of it. If the organizational heads at Fox News were engaged in procuring people to be put into lives of prostitution, for example, we'd call the organization by a gangland term, a "prostitution ring."

Which leads us to the other main point of this piece. It looks like there is or has been a pedophile ring operating in many of the Hollywood circles inhabited by good "liberal" people like Harvey Weinstein.

This comes from former child actor Corey Feldman via Zero Hedge:

For years, actor and former child star Corey Feldman has been warning anybody who would listen that Hollywood is a place where adults have more inappropriate contact with children than probably anywhere else in the world.

So it’s unsurprising given the renewed focus on sexual assault and harassment brought about by the Harvey Weinstein scandal that Feldman’s accusations would receive renewed attention, considering he made the media rounds as recently as 2016 to talk about how a pedophile ring in Hollywood abused him and his friend, fellow actor Corey Haim – actions Feldman blames for Haim’s eventual death from a drug overdose.

And yesterday, he returned to the “Today” show and, during an interview with Matt Lauer vowed to release the names of six men who he alleges participated in the abuse of himself, Haim and other young stars. The interview followed Feldman’s announcement in a YouTube video last week that he was launching an Indiegogo page to try and raise money for a feature film about pedophilia in Hollywood that he hopes to direct. However, as Lauer pointed out, Feldman’s target budget - $10 million – appears lofty. But the former child star appears determined to tell his story the way he wants it to be told.

See the video above for Feldman's interview with, to my ears, a defensive Matt Lauer asking the questions. A brief segment:

LAUER: “Why are you talking to me? Why aren’t you talking to the police right now?”

FELDMAN: “I told the police. In fact if anyone wants to go back to 1993, when I was interviewed by the Santa Barbara Police Department. I sat there and gave them the names. They are on record. They have all of this information, but they were scanning Michael Jackson. All they cared about was trying about to find something on Michael Jackson.”

LAUER: “Who you said, by the way, did not abuse you.”

FELDMAN: “Who Michael was innocent. And that was what the interview was about with the pollice in 1993. I told them, he is not that guy. And they said, maybe you don’t understand your friend. And I said, no, I know the difference between pedophiles and somebody that is not a pedophile because I have been molested. Here’s the names, go investigate. And let me push this forward, there are thousands of people in Hollywood that have the same information. Why is it all on me? Why is it, if I don’t release the names in the next two months, six months or a year, I’m the bad guy. I’m the victim here. I’m the one who has been abused. I’m the one who is trying to come forward and do something about it.”

LAUER: “But —“ [crosstalk]

FELDMAN: “Please, I’m sorry. There are thousands of people out there, Matt, who have this information. Any one of those child actors that went to the teenage soda pop clubs with me when I was a kid, know who those people are and the people who ran it. Anybody can go back through history and look at the Teen magazines and say what was the name of that venue they were promoting and who ran that venue own who endorsed it.”

If you noted the references to "soda pop clubs" in Feldman's comments, one name that keeps coming up is "Alphy's Soda Pop Club." We're in Rumorville here, so I'll just link to one piece discussing it. Names associated with Alphy's club, of which Feldman and Corey Haim appear to be founding members, include then-teens like "Alyssa Milano, Nicole Eggert, Ricky Schroeder, Drew Barrymore, Alfonso Ribero, Scott Grimes" and more. Many, few, or none of those people may have been victims, but still, that's a lot of name people.

Notice too that Feldman mentions "soda pop clubs," plural. Are there more?

In addition, Feldman has blamed a "Hollywood mogul" for his friend and fellow child actor Corey Haim's death, not as a direct cause, but an indirect one (Haim died after years of substance abuse):

In 2011, Feldman claimed that a "Hollywood mogul" who abused Haim was to blame for his death.[93] The 2013 memoir by Corey Feldman, Coreyography, details the sexual abuse he and Haim suffered as young actors in the film industry; during the filming of Lucas, Feldman stated that Haim "allowed himself to be sodomized",[94] and "had been tricked into engaging in a painful session of anal sex by a man on the movie set. The man told Haim that sex between men and boys was normal in Hollywood, saying that 'all the guys in the entertainment world do it.'

Note also the inability to people to criticize Kevin Spacey, as his name rises again into this discussion. Not part of any "ring" per se; there are no such allegations. But he has a past that includes admitting he "may have" handled a 14-year-old inappropriately. Will his current status as a darling of the left play mitigate the renewed criticism he may encounter?

Bottom Line

Again, just a heads up. Your takeaways for now:

• This scandal could grow very very big, implicating many.

• If a coverup comes, it will come in force. Watch for it.

• If a coverup comes, everyone involved in making it seem lighter that it should be, or making it go away, is complicit.

Just saying. This will absolutely be a test of mainstream liberal, and possibly progressive, adherence to a principle which that culture claims to honor deeply.

GP
 

"Recount" does remind us of the orgy of evil that was unleashed by the 2000 election outcome. But is there really anyone who's forgotten about that?

Yes, there's a real Ron Klain, seen here at right with Kevin
Spacey, who plays him in Recount. There's a conversation
between them on HBO's website, which has many such
features that look more interesting than the film itself.

It was a strange feeling sort-of-watching HBO Films' Recount, a recounting of the 2000 Florida presidential election recount drama, last night.

I only sort-of-watched because, to begin with, I had forgotten about it until Howie mentioned it while we were talking, which turned out to be about 50 minutes into the thing. So then I set the DVR to record the 1am (ET) replay, but I also sort-of-watched the rest of the 9pm showing. And then this morning I watched some of the beginning.

Of course it's not difficult to get into the plot, whose outlines remain all too familiar even after all these years. At the same time, there's always that problem when you're watching a fictionalized version of real events--and you have to assume it's fictionalized when the re-creation is being presented as anything other than a documentary--the problem being that you never quite know what's God's-honest-truth and what isn't. (Howie suggests that this is like watching CNN. I can't argue.)

So you watch, sort of mentally checking stuff off: oh yeah, the Palm Beach ballot, and the Crazy Woman (I'd just as soon not mention her name) playing fast and loose with election law, essentially making it up as she goes, and the respectable-looking gangs of thugs sent by the GOP recount command to intimidate the Miami-Dade County recount, and on and on.

You get a sort of different response when there's a character or detail you don't remember. Did this or something like it really happen? For example, with Kevin Spacey clearly cast as the star of the show, you sort of figure there must have been a Ron Klain, who had been Vice President Al Gore's chief of staff until he was forced out by the machinations of later-to-be-ousted-himself campaign director Tony Coelho, at which point Ron was brought back into the campaign in a humiliatingly lower position, and wound up being the Democratic point man on the recount. They wouldn't have made that all up. Would they?

As the thing unreels, you never quite figure out what the point of the exercise is, except maybe for people who are truly unfamiliar with these events, or want to test their recollection/understanding of them -- or perhaps to remind us of the evil that was to follow, the reign of terror that was ultimately unleashed by our very own election-fixing Supreme Court.

I guess what leaves me most uneasy is that the film stirs all this stuff up without giving us a clue as to what we're supposed to do with/about it all.

It should go without saying that in the very act of casting you're slanting the material, and by and large the process tends to favor the Republicans, at least when the process is controlled by people who are trying to be fair (in other words, not to be confused with, for example, ABC's patented far-right-wing faux-docu-hatchet-job unit), if only because casting basically normal people tends to whack off the extremities of a pack of vicious, slimy characters.

Laura Dern, for example, is an interesting choice for Krazy Katherine (oops, I let part of her name slip). As an out-there actress, she's willing to give us an intimation of not-too-brightness and even of not-too-saneness, but she still manages to suggest that this is, on balance, a more or less balanced individual. Of course the editorial decision not to have the makeup crew do even a partial let alone a full Katherine on the handsome Ms. Dern also unbalances the portrait in the direction of nonexistent balance.

Or there's the casting of the almost always interesting Tom Wilkinson as Jim Baker, the GOP jack-of-all-trades-slash-enforcer (and bosom buddy of the Republican presidential candidate's Poppy) sent in to do whatever had to be done to save Florida, and the election, for the party. At this point Wilkinson has Americanized himself so successfully that he didn't even need the vaguely Texan twang to hide his English origins. I suspect that most viewers had no idea that he is English. But we inveterate watchers of British TV on public television and cable know him as one of his home country's busiest actors, with a fascinating ability to create characters who seem to be likable except for a certain something that you can't dismiss (and that usually turns out to conceal serious personality disorders). I couldn't help thinking that Wilkinson's performance lent the wily Baker more dignity than he deserves.

In the end, I was mostly reminded of the basic truth about a difference between the major parties in modern U.S. history: Where Democrats often (not always, but often) attempt to get to the truth of a factual issue, Republicans (pretty much always) just want to win. Oh, Recount shows us plenty of Republicans who seem sincerely to believe that it's the Democrats who are trying to steal the election, but it seems clearly that they're either ideologically blinkered or just not very bright.

At one point, Spacey's Ron Klain laments that he just wants to find out who really won Florida. Of course we have no way of knowing whether such a person ever thought or said such a thing, but it's also quite clear that no such thing could ever have been thought or said by anyone on the GOP side.

No doubt the less ingenuous of those GOP-ers justify their unconcern-bordering-on-contempt for truth with reference to their possession of a "higher" truth that seems to be the birthright of the modern Loony Right, a delusion most fully incarnated in the otherwise-bewildering person of "Big Dick" Cheney, a man who has probably unleashed and enforced more lies than any individual on record, all of it presumably justified by his unshakable belief in the demented nerve firings ricocheting around his corroded brain.

In this regard, the pragmatic Jim Baker does stand apart from the modern-day GOP elite--he's of that older generation of Republicans personified by his pal George H. W. Bush, so resolutely repudiated by George W. And in this regard, it was probably sensible to put as interesting actor as Tom Wilkinson in the part. My quibble is that Wilkinson is probably too interesting an actor, and winds up lending the character more dimension than I suspect he in fact has.

I'm curious as to how other people have reacted to Reunion. As suggested, I found myself focusing most on the long-term effect of where we know the story is headed, and maybe that is the idea. When, at the end, after the Supreme Court has played fairy godmother to W., the poor sincere, stoogelike Republican counsel played by Bob Balaban (a famous liberal, isn't he?), blithers at the end that the shame of Bill Clinton is about to be erased, can the intended effect be anything but ironic?

We know all too well that what the Court election-fixers in fact unleashed on the country was a regime that, heedless of the thinness of its "victory," was about to unleash an assault on reason, decency, international comity, democracy, and honest government -- all wrapped in a mantle of near-sociopathic ineptitude -- without precedent in U.S. history.

The only thing is, is there anyone out there who had somehow managed to forget this lesson?

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