"It's like the #MeToo movement. Being a woman was the same from Eve until, like, eight months ago." - Fran Lebowitz
“You may think that what happens in Hollywood doesn’t affect you. You’re wrong.” - Rose McGowen
"I’d honestly rather fall into one million manholes than have one single dude tell me to watch my step" - Lena Dunham
Those three quotes pretty much encapsulate the reasons why I’m here and, hopefully, why you as a reader might be compelled to join me on this great platform Substack affords all of us who have something to say.
A link to this piece of writing will find a home of its own on my About Page for this newsletter. The About Page will be added to as needed so that it always presents the clearest picture of my newsletter’s intentions as well as my latest perspectives and also because it will invariably be the first thing someone reads here on #MeToo CONFIDENTIAL that explains what it is all about.
First, I’m not a reporter or a professional journalist of any kind. I won’t be collecting new information and breaking news on #MeToo CONFIDENTIAL. Maybe.
What I will do is quote and link to published pieces that support the insights and assertions I’m making here with what I consider to be solid truth-telling journalism on the subjects I cover.
Invariably someone will say that none of the content on #MeToo CONFIDENTIAL is news. Not new. Covered in other articles. So let me address that right now.
Dissemination of information depends on many voices telling the truth, not just a precious few. Some will see one piece written on a website somewhere and none of the many others published on other websites. They will tell someone else and that person will only read the piece they were told about. That’s one tendril of exposure that reaches only where it reaches. Many thousands of tendrils are required to alter the perspectives of enough people to shift the landscape so that change becomes possible.
That was, to use one very pertinent example, the entire purpose of #MeToo.
Also, all of us are largely dependent on a corporate elite-driven press for our information that is not, as its highest priority, operating on our behalf. The entities that influence our political systems also exert great influence over the news gathering and reporting mechanisms in this country. We’re all in a constant struggle to get the truth out if we have truths to tell or, as consumers of news and information, to hear the truth and the facts so that we might better understand our world and how what is happening in it impacts our lives.
Even today in our highly politicized times living in 24 hour news cycles, far too many of us have never been exposed to the actual truths about how money affects our political system and how large and powerful are the forces aligned with a complete indifference to the will of the people in this country. Too few know who really lurks behind those curtains or, for instance, how Hollywood shields itself from both change and consequences for any of its nefarious behaviors by way of its hold on a significant portion of our partisan political machinery.
Many people know none of this. And most wouldn’t know what to do about any of it, nor would they as individuals have the power to do anything about it, if they did know. I can attest better than most how hard it is to get our personal truths heard in this world of 8 billion deeply individual stories. And knowledge is only one necessary component of change. How many of us citizens possess that knowledge is usually the difference between progress and perpetual stasis and failure.
What those of us who know things do with the knowledge we possess is critically important to the future of this country and the world and so widespread dissemination must always be at the top of our to-do lists.
What we create from this information personally are insights. We form them from our experiences and observations and from our own innate capacities to discern what is right and what is wrong, what is true and what is untrue and, from all that, our own perspectives are formed. Insights aren’t necessarily news or the impartial reporting of facts. Insights are unique to the person who has them. And how effective they ultimately are in bringing about change often depends as much on the communicative skills of the person sharing those insights as it does on the quality of the insights themselves.
Much of what is offered here on my Substack newsletter will not be news to everyone. But some of our insights are, at this moment, extremely valuable and aren’t being shared nearly to the degree they must be to create awareness on the part of the public about how things happening very far away and to other people can affect their own lives and how those far away things can, in turn, be impacted by what they, the public, come to know about them.
So don’t look for much original reporting of confidential inside information here on my Substack newsletter. What you will find instead is something else entirely. My insights. That’s what I have to offer readers.
One such insight is on display in the first piece I published on #MeToo CONFIDENTIAL. The title is The Great Pretenders Part I: Hollywood’s Carbon Tax is Exposed. That principle insight I discuss in that piece was born fully formed the moment I first heard the words “Time’s Up” on the Golden Globes telecast of January 7, 2018. My thoughts were that Time’s Up was a diversion to distract the public away from #MeToo and displace it as a repository of hope for women everywhere who were clamoring for real and tangible changes in, not only the workplaces that make up the massive entertainment industry, but in their own workplaces as well.
That insight would NOT have been popular in that moment had it fallen on the ears of women everywhere. But it was my immediate gut response to what I saw and heard from the ballroom of the Beverly Hilton, as I sat in my living room a mere 1000 feet from that stage.
But by now the word is out on Time’s Up and women are hearing the truth about what the organization is and what it was doing to survivors seeking help through it and these new perspectives on Time’s Up are perfectly in line with the opinions formed almost in real time by me the moment I heard those two words used on the Golden Globes telecast in January of 2018.
Know these things about the person who authored and called for the #MeToo revolution. I’m not woke in the way that the weaponization of that word has come to imply and I’m decidedly not politically correct. I’m my own person and I have an anti-racist anti-sexist political world-view that predates any of these more divisive current efforts to change the world we’re living in.
I have an occasionally foul mouth and a sense of humor that lives on the margins of what is appropriate. Seventy-five percent of what comes out of my mouth or from my devices is intended to keep myself and anyone else who is as twisted as I am laughing. It keeps me sane.
I know, as much as anyone who can only imagine someone else’s experiences and merely attempt to project the effects they might have on a person, how hard it must be for sexual assault victims to report their attackers to authorities and how exponentially more difficult it would be to bring what happened to them in front of the public.
#MeToo was intended to be a vehicle for women who’d come through the entertainment industry and who’d experienced sexual predation at some point to come forward and, as Alyssa Milano unoriginally shared on October 15, 2017, give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem. That it came to be used by women and girls worldwide for the same purpose was a stunning and miraculous development.
Reporting a sexual assault is one of the most difficult things any woman or girl can ever do. I believe survivors should be taken at their word by law enforcement and by the public in every instance and that their cases should be investigated as the incredibly damaging heinous crimes they are with great sensitivity and deference on the part of highly trained teams of investigators.
That’s my definition of believe survivors. And it is and always has been my only gut response to hearing a woman or girl telling of an incident of their being sexually assaulted. It is my default psychological response, something I can never change. It does not mean, however, that I believe it is wise to turn my default response or anyone else’s into a political slogan.
Because I also believe in liars. And I know that out in the real world, far from the sometimes necessary grandstanding that takes place in the gender politics wars, every sentient human being does as well. Liars are all around us all the time. Their dishonesty is a part of all of our lives.
Most of us, if we’re being perfectly honest, know this about our fellow human beings. But if that's too dark a vision of humanity for you or if it doesn’t correlate with your views on those who might exist within the #MeToo space then please go away from here because #MeToo CONFIDENTIAL was literally created to expose those who I’ve found to be any or all of these things.
Because, on a much larger stage, where the stakes and rewards for being an effective professional liar are much higher, is where we encounter the sell-outs. In this country, being a sell-out has actually become a lucrative career path that will always be very attractive to a certain type of person. And these sell-outs have, unfortunately but quite predictably, played an incredibly outsized role in the ongoing #MeToo story.
It’s my belief that the focus, range, impact and even the trajectory of what #MeToo has become, all have been greatly altered by liars and, most of all, sell-outs. And we’re going to tell many of their stories here on #MeToo CONFIDENTIAL. This I promise.
So what exactly do I mean by the trajectory of #MeToo? Well, I believe the chance that #MeToo had of catching on with a much larger swath of the broader public was lost by it becoming politicized along party lines and by it becoming weaponized and deployed in partisan battles over traditional wedge issues.
And I also believe that anything that would help weaken #MeToo and diminish its wider appeal across ideological lines and therefore bleed it of the power to create even more far reaching change would’ve fit very well within the plans and purposes of the nexus of power that exists between Hollywood and the world of politics.
And just as this disastrous ill-advised venture into partisan politics altered the trajectory and range of #MeToo, so too did the early criticisms touching on race that resulted in some women in Hollywood recoiling from continuing to rally themselves around the viral hashtag phenomenon and led them instead to embrace and organize around the now disgraced industry founded Time’s Up effort.
The tragic irony is that there are countless women of color pursuing their artistic destinies in the creative fields of endeavor that the entertainment industry offers to women of all races. To have not understood this allowed for those leveling such criticisms to trample through these on-the-ground realities with a blinkered perspective far removed from the actual professional landscape of Hollywood.
For at any moment, there are tens of thousands of black women pursuing careers in the entertainment industry, all incredibly vulnerable to the same culture of sexual predation that has permeated Hollywood from its very beginnings a century ago. I would suggest that black women working in entertainment and media are in fact exponentially more vulnerable than white women. They needed #MeToo to hit its intended targets in Hollywood and keep on hitting them as much or more than anyone else in the vast entertainment industry.
But we are going to talk about all of these things openly and honestly here on #MeToo CONFIDENTIAL.
The irony of the Lena Dunham quote at the top of this page is particularly tragic. Because it was Ms. Dunham’s lament in the New York Times, Harvey Weinstein and the Silence of the Men that triggered my comment to her article which called for a “Me, too” response from women in Hollywood who’d been presented with a sex/career quid pro quo in pursuit of their dreams in the entertainment industry.
Is Ms. Dunham alone among women in her sentiment about men helping her?
Do women need the help of men in their battles to end rampant sexual predation in workplaces everywhere?
Let’s take an honest look at the lessons learned from the Time’s Up debacle I opened my new Substack newsletter with.
There are certainly many lessons. Here are some.
Women aren’t necessarily going to help other women, even if they run an organization that’s said to have been created for that exact purpose. It’s because of the prevalence of sell-outs in any effort to force positive change upon powerful entities. And, in the case of Time’s Up, some of the key players in that organization are what I would call ringers: professional hired-guns brought in to take over an effort and make sure it only does what the powers invested in it wants it to do.
What else did we learn?
Women of color aren’t necessarily going to help other women of color even if they themselves have earned iconic stature in their industry and have the power to do so sitting at their whim and fancy. We don’t need to provide examples here at this point, do we? No, I don’t think so. I’ll certainly be covering exactly what has transpired in future segments here on #MeToo CONFIDENTIAL but, until I get there, anyone who doesn’t know what I’m referring to should take the time to explore this part of the Time’s Up story and educate yourself.
What we’ve learned, or should have learned, is that those who share your gender won’t save you. Those who share your skin color will not stand up for you. These are simply unrealistic false hopes that don’t take into account something that is so much more powerful in the real world than loyalty to one’s own kind.
That would be the tremendous impact that success and money and power has on the lives of those who achieve it in the entertainment or media industries or in the political sphere and the irresistible lure that such success has on every human being on this earth. It really appears at this point that no one is immune to forgoing their heart and soul causes in exchange for what being contractually engaged with Hollywood might bring to a person’s life.
The only ones who will fight for you are the ones who are already fighting for you. Those who have, at the great peril we all know exists for anyone engaging in this fight against sexual predation in high places, already moved all the chips that they have on to your side, to weigh in and fight on your behalf, for you, and with you.
Conversely, if someone is in the #MeToo space and they’re only taking up space in this movement and not using their voice to take on your abusers and career oppressors, then they are most likely working with your abusers and oppressors to silence your calls for justice and change.
This is the sad, devastating, but now proven to be true reality of the world we’re all living in.
Not everyone is a fighter. It’s not a weakness; life would be unbearable without those whose default response is to turn away from a fight. A sexual assault doesn’t necessarily transform someone into an aggressive out-front voice calling for change. We know, in fact, that it can just as easily drive a person much deeper into themselves to deal with their trauma alone. That’s why it’s so critically important to recognize and embrace allies who are fighting on behalf of all of those who are unable to carry on the fight themselves.
I am an ally. I was born with a core that is hostile to the idea that anything bad might be happening to any girl or woman anywhere. And I’ve lived with a proximity to the entertainment industry in Hollywood that precipitated my being able to hear and see so many things that would have quite naturally engaged and riled that hostility that’s within me by knowing that every day, talented and hopeful young women were being sexually harassed, exploited, or abused right in my own backyard. Combine all these things and then add to them a very public scandal finally blowing the lid off the worst kept secret in Hollywood and the ingredients were all in place to combust within me and produce an idea like #MeToo.
So my intent as well as my credential to be doing what I’m doing here on #MeToo CONFIDENTIAL should be unquestioned. I’m here to fight on this issue, to the very end of my ability to do so. I’m fighting for all the many tens of thousands who have been victimized and for all the many more who have not yet been victimized. And, as you will learn if you continue to visit #MeToo CONFIDENTIAL, for what has been done to me by those in the news media and, sadly, by many of those who occupy the #MeToo space, I’m here fighting for my own voice to be heard as well.
So grab your popcorn and enjoy the show!
Thank you for being here and thank you for taking the time to hear what I have to say.
donald barnat