Harvey Weinstein Expelled From Motion Picture Academy

Update: According to the LA Times, Harvey Weinstein’s reign in Hollywood is officially over: the embattled film mogul – a once-dominant force in the Academy Awards who rewrote the rules of Oscar campaigning – has been expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Hollywood’s de facto governing body, in response to mounting allegations of sexual harassment and assault against him.
In removing Weinstein from its ranks, the academy said in a statement, “We do so not simply to separate ourselves from someone who does not merit the respect of his colleagues but also to send a message that the era of willful ignorance and shameful complicity in sexually predatory behavior and workplace harassment in our industry is over. What’s at issue here is a deeply troubling problem that has no place in our society. The Board continues to work to establish ethical standards of conduct that all Academy members will be expected to exemplify.”
The Academy’s board of governors made the decision at an emergency session after investigations by The New York Times and The New Yorker revealed sexual harassment and rape allegations against him going back decades. In a statement, the academy said the vote was ‘well in excess of the required two-thirds majority.’
The film academy’s 54-member board of governors, which includes such industry luminaries as Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Kathleen Kennedy and Whoopi Goldberg, voted in an emergency meeting on Saturday morning to remove Weinstein from the organization’s ranks in an unprecedented public rebuke of a prominent industry figure. The move marked the latest blow in Weinstein’s stunning downfall and, in symbolic terms, amounts to a virtual expulsion from Hollywood itself. As the NYT adds, although largely symbolic, the ouster of Mr. Weinstein from the roughly 8,400-member academy is stunning because the organization is not known to have taken such action before – not when Roman Polanski, a member, pleaded guiltyin a sex crime case involving a 13-year-old girl; not when women came forward to accuse Bill Cosby, a member, of sexual assault; and not when Mel Gibson allegedly went on anti-Semitic tirade during a drunk driving arrest in 2006 or pleaded no contest to a charge of battery against an old girlfriend in 2011.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on Oct 14, 2017.