The Nexus Part I: Through the Looking-Glass

The Power to Control Politicians, Information, and Movements Sits with a Precious Few

Consider the following. When New York Times’ reporters Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey were nearing the end of their investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, Twohey was following up on yet another possible Weinstein misdeed wherein the film producer might have funneled money raised at an AIDS charity auction into the hands of investors on one of his film projects.

With full knowledge that the pair were working on the infinitely more problematic story of his decades of sexual predation in Hollywood, Weinstein agreed to come to the Times building in person on September 19th 2017 to meet with Twohey and answer her questions. 

Among the legal entourage that accompanied Weinstein to the meeting that day was the attorney Roberta Kaplan. Just months later, after Kantor and Twohey’s devastating series of articles would reveal the scope of her then client’s sexual misconduct, Kaplan would co-found the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund and assume the mantle of board chair of Time’s Up itself. 

Advocating for her client that day, Kaplan leaned in to try to quash the money funneling piece, cautioning the New York Times reporter that “if the Times followed through with this story it could hurt AIDS patients around the world.” 

Kaplan resigned her board chair position in August after it was revealed that Time’s Up, under both her and now former Time’s Up CEO Tina Tchen’s leadership, had consulted with former New York governor Andrew Cuomo and offered guidance to the embattled Democrat as he fought off his own allegations of long term sexual misconduct directed at female staffers. 

But the Cuomo scandal aspect of Kaplan and Tchen’s leadership at Time’s Up was only one of a host of complaints by women who’d attempted to use the Hollywood-born organization to seek justice against powerful sexual predators. And it was in the highest profile of incidents that the organization consistently presented itself as far more of an impediment than an ally to those who turned to it for help during the worst moments of their lives. 

Former U.S. Senate aide Tara Reade came to Time’s Up in 2020 with her story that then Senator Joe Biden had sexually assaulted her in 1993. But CEO Tchen told her organization to pull back from supporting Reade and that she [Tchen herself] “was in touch with the Biden people.” Time’s Up would ultimately only provide legal referrals to Reade and no funding, hiding behind the notion of protecting its non-profit status by not interfering in the upcoming presidential election. 

When music producer Drew Dixon spoke to the Daily Beast about Tchen’s “whisper campaign” at Time’s Up perpetrated against the documentary film On The Record that focused on her own sexual assault by hip hop and fashion mogul Russell Simmons she was “scolded and bullied” by long-time Democratic Party operative and former Recording Industry Association of America CEO Hilary Rosen. 

This follows Tchen’s own earlier personal entreaties to Dixon at the moment Oprah Winfrey pulled her support for the film.

“Tina Tchen said to me on the phone the night Oprah backed out of the film, ‘The filmmakers are bad people’ and when I disagreed with her she said, ‘You have to trust me on this,’” the survivor said. “She implied that Time’s Up would support me as a survivor, but only if I backed away from the film.”

So consider this as well. Early in Barack Obama’s first term, Tina Tchen would serve as Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, which Wikipedia describes as being “responsible for interacting with various interest groups.” 

From 2011 until 2017, Tchen was Chief of Staff to First Lady Michelle Obama. In 2017, not long after her father Barack Obama left office, Malia Obama would land an internship at the Weinstein Corporation, the now defunct film studio founded by Harvey Weinstein and his brother Bob. Four years earlier, in 2013, Malia’s mother, the First Lady, speaking at a White House Student Film Symposium event to young aspiring filmmakers, said of the now convicted rapist, “He is a wonderful human being, a good friend and... a powerhouse.”

But the truth is that despite a worst-kept-secret history of using his stature in the entertainment industry to facilitate decades of sexual harassment, abuse, and rape against both actresses and staffers, Harvey Weinstein enjoyed a close proximity to political power in Washington long before the Obamas. As noted in the Daily Beast. Weinstein had “strong ties to both the Clintons and the Obamas, as well as to the Democratic Party establishment overall” and had “hosted fundraisers for candidates and even a birthday party for Hillary in 2000, during her candidacy for senator of New York.”

So now consider the following. At the time Ronan Farrow happened to be working on the story of bombshell sexual misconduct allegations against Weinstein in 2017 for NBC News, he’d scheduled an interview with Hillary Clinton as part of his research for an upcoming unrelated book on the subject of American foreign policy. But before that interview would take place, Hillary’s communications director Nick Merrill is alleged to have informed Farrow that the “big story” he was working on represented “a problem for us.” The interview was called off.

And then consider this venture into the bizarre. On a list compiled by Slate Magazine of the eleven most outrageous stories about Harvey Weinstein is one reported in Vanity Fair in 2014. In the article, Weinstein is alleged at some indeterminate date to have screamed at one Terry McAuliffe, “You motherfucker! I’ll rip your balls off!” 

At the time of this incident, McAuliffe was Chairman of the Democratic Party. Weinstein denies the altercation ever took place. 

McAuliffe is a former governor of Virginia who is once again running for that office in 2021. He was also the chair of Hillary Clinton’s failed 2008 bid for the Democratic nomination. On the surface, this incident might seem to indicate not much more than a heated moment between two powerful political allies. But to fully understand the implications of a Hollywood mogul comfortably screaming at the Chairman of the Democratic Party it might be important to consider that at any particular time in the last half century, the very same Democratic Party controls roughly half of the richest and most powerful government the world has ever known. 

So then consider this. When Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, at the time a rising star in Democratic Party politics, bucked party leadership and resigned from her position as vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee to endorse Bernie Sanders in 2016 instead of the party’s chosen candidate, Hillary Clinton, she received an email from two executives at Creative Artists Agency (CAA) informing her of their disappointment with her decision and the fact that they would be cutting her off from receiving any further political support from them.

CAA is arguably the largest and most powerful talent agency in Hollywood, which means that it’s also most likely the most important talent agency in the world. Its about page rightly stakes claim to the entertainment and media conglomeration’s position as being at the very nexus of talent, content, brands, and technology, allowing it to create limitless opportunities for the storytellers, trendsetters, icons, and thought leaders it represents. 

One of the two CAA agents whose name was on that email sent to Tulsi Gabbard was Michael Kives. The Guardian reports that “Kives’s road to becoming a big wheel in the Democratic money machine began in June 2001, when he was an undergraduate at Stanford. Bill and Hillary Clinton were flying in for Chelsea Clinton’s graduation. Kives admired Clinton - his intelligence, his ballsiness, that determination not to let enemies or idiots get in the way of whatever he wanted. He became a Clinton guy.”

When Kives was married in November of 2018, his wedding was characterized in The Hollywood Reporter as a ‘power summit.” Other than both Bill and Hillary Clinton, THR says notable attendees were reported to have included, “Power players from the worlds of politics (Sen. Cory Booker, Arnold Schwarzenegger, L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti), royalty (Princess Beatrice, Crown Prince Hussein of Jordan), tech (Tesla guru Elon Musk, ousted Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, Google’s Eric Schmidt, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg with Activision’s Bobby Kotick) and branding (do-it-all moguls Jessica Alba and Reese Witherspoon). A source tells THR that Sen. Kamala Harris was expected but couldn’t make it last minute.”

Much of this was reported on in 2019 in a must-read piece by Robbie Jaeger you can find here. 

Jaeger writes of CAA’s clients, “Look at the names on that list. It’s a “who’s who” of mass media. The influence these agencies and their executives hold is beyond the realm of imagination. One can only ponder the possibilities of the power of possessing access to a network of such size and scope. It’s information control, the power to seamlessly transfer ideas from one side of the societal spectrum to the other under the guise of genuine public response or outrage.”

Tulsi Gabbard would find out what it meant to cross the likes of an uber-political CAA powerhouse like Kives when she threw her hat into the ring for the Democratic nomination for president just four years later. Gabbard found herself routinely both attacked and interrogated by a plethora of CAA and UTA (United Talent Agency) clients in the news media, including Jake Tapper, Chris Cuomo, Bill Maher, and Whoopi Goldberg. 

Now consider this. On October 15th 2017, ten days after the first Weinstein story was published in the New York Times and the very day that actress Alyssa Milano would submit to the world the tweet that launched the global #MeToo phenomenon, Hillary Clinton is reported in The Guardian to have been “shocked and appalled” by hearing the news that her party’s long time financial benefactor Weinstein was a sexual predator.

In an interview in The Hollywood Reporter, Clinton defended her long association with Weinstein. “How could we have known? He raised money for me, for the Obamas, for Democrats in general. And that at the time was something that everybody thought made sense. And of course, if all of us had known what we know now, it would have affected our behavior.”

But in their December 5th 2017 New York Times piece, Weinstein’s Complicity Machine, Kantor and Twohey report that “Tina Brown, the magazine editor, and Lena Dunham, the writer and actress, each say they had cautioned Mrs. Clinton’s aides about his treatment of women.”

The Daily Beast provides more detail and significant receipts: “Both Lena Dunham and Tina Brown (former editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast) allege that they told Hillary’s aides about the stories going around about Weinstein—Brown says she did so in 2002, and Dunham in 2016, during Hillary’s presidential campaign.”

“Dunham told the Times that, in 2016, during the Clinton presidential campaign, she warned Hillary’s aides—including the campaign’s deputy communications director Kristina Schake and spokeswoman Adrienne Elrod—that Weinstein was a rapist and known throughout the industry to be a predator. According to Dunham, Schake said they would share this information with campaign manager Robby Mook, who is now a political pundit on CNN. Both Elrod and Schake deny that Dunham “mentioned rape,” and Hillary’s current communications director Nick Merrill implied to Times reporters that Dunham should’ve contacted the police, not Hillary’s aides, about the allegations.”

It should be noted that Milano, the former child star turned unstoppable liberal issues activist who would trigger the most consequential sexual misconduct reckoning ever, is also a part of the Creative Artists Agency family and her connections to CAA are both professional and personal. She’s a client and her husband, David Bugliari, was a longtime super-agent there at the time that the Weinstein stories would inspire his wife to make her call for anyone who’d been sexually harassed or assaulted to reply with the words, “me too.” 

So now, finally, consider the following. In 2017, around the same time Malia Obama would land her internship with the Weinstein Company, Variety reported that career DC politician, two-term vice president, and twice failed Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden had signed with Creative Artists Agency, “Forming a relationship designed to help the former Vice President and his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, “amplify” their post-White House public policy endeavors.”

The former vice president and now current president’s statement at the time read, “Jill and I remain more dedicated than ever to addressing the critical issues of the day, and we see in CAA a shared passion and shared values that are at the core of our family and our goals.”

Most American politicians might find sharing values with a Hollywood entertainment agency like CAA to be anathema to their careers. Wikipedia describes a party the agency hosted at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival where guests mingled with “lingerie-clad women pretending to be snort prop cocaine” and “erotic dancers outfitted with sex toys” and an “Alice in Wonderland look-alike performing a simulated sex act on a man in a rabbit costume.” Wikipedia’s entry on “Alice” in Lewis Carroll’s 1865 children’s novel “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” states that the book’s title character is “widely assumed to be seven years old.” 

So what do all of these things you’ve been asked to consider actually mean? The only answer to that question is another question followed by many more questions: How can we ever really know? Or, maybe, how can we not know? What we can do is to try to look unflinchingly at what’s plainly visible and continue to pursue answers to our questions. And there is so much more to see and so much more to question.

Starting with this. 

Who would deny that we should be looking at how Tara Reade’s account of a sexual assault by a CAA client and current president has been quashed by shadow players and on-camera talent alike using tactics aimed at destroying both her character and credibility? Didn’t we see the same methods employed by CAA agents and clients working both the back channels and over the airwaves against Tulsi Gabbard? And we must ask ourselves how much the nexus of power that we know exists between our political system and Hollywood’s media and information empire is continuing to smother Ms. Reade’s attempts to be heard and to find justice for her assault at the hands of the man who now sits in the Oval Office.

We also have to ask why the most powerful and publicly visible journalistic voices in America, most situated on the other side of the country, are so consumed with their own career self-interests that they would choose to contractually avail themselves of the services of a Hollywood entertainment agency conglomerate with a deep hold on one of the two major political parties in the United States, sullying their reputations and their profession in the process by summarily dispensing with any expectations the American public might have of being served by a fair and impartial press?

I’m a lifelong Democrat. And by that I mean I’m a voter, not someone who has made his living working as a Democratic party operative. And I’ve long used whatever writing abilities I have to advocate for and defend the Democratic politicians I once believed in online. But now I believe we must put aside our own partisanship and ideological loyalties and ask ourselves (and honestly answer) the question of how, within just one year’s time, #MeToo, an idea that was created with the sole intent of revealing the extent of sexual predation in the entertainment industry, would instead become most prominently deployed as a weapon to be used against Democratic Hollywood’s traditional political issues and enemies in Washington? 

We’re going to continue to examine all these questions and more as well as taking a hard look at the major stars and bit players who have contributed to this dark backstory to the #MeToo revolution in The Nexus Part II: Everyone’s Gone to the Movies. 

Thank you for reading and please stay tuned. ;-)

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