By Bari Weiss, Opinion, August 21, 2108<\/p>\n
No gender has a monopoly on hypocrisy or harm.<\/em><\/p>\n Women are hypocrites. Women are opportunists. Women are liars.<\/p>\n They are abusers and bullies and manipulators. They are capable of cruelty, callousness and evil.<\/p>\n Just like men.<\/p>\n This obvious fact \u2014 that women are fully human \u2014 bears repeating in light of the stunning news<\/a> that a figurehead of the #MeToo movement has herself been accused of abuse.<\/p>\n Asia Argento, the Italian actress and director, was a key figure in Ronan Farrow\u2019s explosive New Yorker story<\/a> in October 2017 about Harvey Weinstein\u2019s predations. She was the victim who called the Cannes Film Festival his \u201chunting ground.\u201d She was the one who gave that unforgettable quote about Mr. Weinstein forcibly performing oral sex on her at a hotel there when she was 21 years old: \u201cA big fat man wanting to eat you. It\u2019s a scary fairy tale.\u201d<\/p>\n In the months that followed, Ms. Argento was rightly hailed for her bravery in speaking out publicly against a serial assaulter. But in private, according to The Times, she was paying off her own accuser $380,000 to keep quiet.<\/p>\n Ms. Argento met Jimmy Bennett on the set of the movie \u201cThe Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things.\u201d He was 7. She played his mother.<\/p>\n Ten years later, in May 2013, the two met at the Ritz-Carlton in Marina Del Ray, Calif. Mr. Bennett was 17; Ms. Argento was 37. The age of consent in California is 18.<\/p>\n According to The Times, which based its report on documents between lawyers for Ms. Argento and Mr. Bennett, the actress asked Mr. Bennett\u2019s family member to leave so that she could be alone with him. She gave him alcohol, \u201ckissed him, pushed him back on the bed, removed his pants and performed oral sex. She climbed on top of him and the two had intercourse, the document says. She then asked him to take a number of photos.\u201d<\/p>\n On Tuesday, Ms. Argento issued a statement categorically denying<\/a> that any sexual encounter ever took place. She says that her boyfriend Anthony Bourdain arranged the payment to Mr. Bennett \u201cbecause he was afraid of the possible negative publicity that such a person, whom he considered dangerous, could have brought upon us.\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps she\u2019s telling the truth. But switch the genders in this story \u2014 he gave her booze, he pushed her back on the bed, he removed her pants, he climbed on top of her \u2014 and you can instantly conjure the collective outrage.<\/p>\n Some powerful voices haven\u2019t hesitated to condemn Ms. Argento and offer support to her accuser. In a Twitter thread, the #MeToo founder Tarana Burke wrote that \u201cSexual violence is about power and privilege. That doesn\u2019t change if the perpetrator is your favorite actress, activist or professor of any gender.\u201d<\/p>\n “I\u2019ve said repeatedly that the #<\/span>metooMVMT<\/span><\/a> is for all of us, including these brave young men who are now coming forward. It will continue to be jarring when we hear the names of some of our faves connected to sexual violence unless we shift from talking about individuals”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But others in Hollywood offered sober calls for caution and context. These are particularly striking when they come from those who typically deliver public statements with muzzle velocity, like the #MeToo leader Rose McGowan:<\/p>\n “None of us know the truth of the situation and I\u2019m sure more will be revealed. Be gentle.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Ms. McGowan, herself a victim of Mr. Weinstein, has a point. We ought to reserve judgment. We ought to take seriously the ruining of a person\u2019s reputation and career until we have all the facts. We ought to consider the context of the accusation.<\/p>\n But the advice is a bit rich coming from a person who has insisted that anything less than immediately believing accusers is moral cowardice:<\/p>\n “It\u2019s quite simple, all who have worked with known predators should do 3 simple things. 1) Believe survivors 2) Apologize for putting your careers and wallets before what was right. 3) Grab a spine and denounce. If you do not do these things you are still moral cowards.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n It is a bit confusing coming from someone who has advocated mercilessness toward alleged sexual harassers:<\/p>\n “If I seem merciless, it’s because I am. Mercy is reserved for the deserving, not the perpetrator.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Given that Mr. Bennett seems to have been financially strapped when he made the accusation against Ms. Argento, there are reasons to wonder whether he had an ulterior motive. But this willingness to weigh the complicated context of such an allegation is one the movement has seldom applied when the accuser has been a woman. Perhaps that will change.<\/p>\n The larger question is whether the Argento story might undermine the #MeToo movement. Harvey Weinstein\u2019s lawyer certainly hopes it will<\/a>. So do various anti-feminists, right-wing bloggers and conspiracy theorists, who are already fashioning<\/a> the Argento plot twist into Pizzagate 2.0.<\/p>\n Most people aren\u2019t going to fall for this nonsense. They\u2019re not going to stop taking sexual abuse seriously because of one high-profile hypocrite.<\/p>\n But I do think the stakes at this moment are high for the #MeToo movement. Outspoken feminists will lose credibility if they ignore this story or try to explain it away with clich\u00e9s, however true, about how hurt people hurt people<\/a>.<\/p>\n For an object lesson in what not to do, they need only look at the bizarre spectacle<\/a> currently playing out at New York University. There, Avital Ronell<\/a>, a feminist star professor, has been accused by her former graduate student, a man named Nimrod Reitman, of sexually harassing him over the course of three years. After an 11-month Title IX investigation, the university decided to suspend Professor Ronell for the coming academic year.<\/p>\n Believe survivors, right? Not so fast. In a letter signed by some of academia\u2019s biggest feminist luminaries, including Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak, Mr. Reitman is accused of waging a \u201cmalicious campaign\u201d against the professor. The signatories \u201ctestify to the grace, the keen wit, and the intellectual commitment of Professor Ronell and ask that she be accorded the dignity rightly deserved by someone of her international standing and reputation.\u201d Apparently, dignity is a privilege reserved for the tenured.<\/p>\n \u201cWe hold that the allegations against her do not constitute actual evidence, but rather support the view that malicious intention has animated and sustained this legal nightmare,\u201d they wrote.<\/p>\n The tone-deafness here is almost comical. A young up-and-comer blows the whistle on a powerful mentor who wielded control over his career. Entrenched interests rush to the defense of the accused, venerating the powerful and actively smearing the character and motivations of the accuser. It\u2019s a repeat of the sexual harassment stories we\u2019ve spent the past year reading about, only with the genders flipped.<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t a good look. And it will become increasingly untenable as young men come forward with similar stories of harassment and abuse, as they surely will in this new stage of #MeToo. \u201cBelieve women\u201d only works as a rule of thumb when all women are good. That myth falls flat outside Victorian England.<\/p>\n