Did the Me Too Movement Work?

In late 2017, two bombshell investigations by The New York Times and The New Yorker revealed years of alleged harassment, sexual abuse, cover-ups, and retaliatory behavior against women by Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. Those stories ultimately triggered hundreds of other voices across the film industry to speak out about its insidious nature. The #MeToo movement, originally created by Tarana Burke, was reborn, and people felt empowered to speak up about sexual violence in a way they hadn’t felt previously permitted to.

It was a tidal wave of accountability for badly-behaved men that would reach all the way to Capitol Hill, and the blowback was as immediate as it was public with each new emerging allegation. By some indications, we had reached a time where there was little room in the zeitgeist for bad, privileged men.

But as the decade comes to a close, a look back reveals that this reckoning didn’t quite reach everyone it was supposed to. On the other side of that shift exists a parallel reality where many men accused of offense still have jobs and have remained beloved by audiences and industry gatekeepers alike.

On Wednesday, Weinstein reached a tentative $25 million civil settlement with his dozens of accusers, as reported by The New York Times. According to lawyers involved in the negotiation, the film producer would not be required to admit wrongdoing or pay anything out of his own pocket to the accusers — the money will be paid by insurance companies representing the producer’s former studio, the Weinstein Company. But Weinstein does faces criminal charges from two women, stemming from incidents that occurred in 2006 and 2013. (He has repeatedly denied any non-consensual sexual activity.)

But Weinstein is just one man in a world where answerability is rare, and where people like him often come out unscathed. Take filmmaker Roman Polanski, for example. In 1978 Polanski fled the United States while awaiting final sentencing after he pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. Convicted of the charges a month earlier, Polanski was set to be sent to prison but instead fled to France where he remains in exile till today.

And despite admitting to the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl along with many other allegations of sexual impropriety with minors, Polanski went on to have a lucrative and much-celebrated cinematic career. He has made over ten feature films in the time since many of which have been nominated for prestigious awards. His latest project An Officer and a Spy opened in August of this year at the Venice International Film Festival, where it won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize. Meanwhile, allegations of sexual abuse and sexual violence have continued to follow him, even in recent years.

Then there’s Woody Allen. Arguably one of Hollywood’s most celebrated figures, Allen has enjoyed a cinematic career and cultural cache enviable by even the most accomplished of his peers. In 1992, his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow (then, only seven years old) alleged publicly that he had sexually abused her. In the time since those allegations were made, he’s gone on to develop dozens of his own screenplays (including other work), and win an Oscar and dozens of other major awards.

By the time Dylan — who is also the daughter of actress Mia Farrow — first spoke out about the alleged abuse, Allen had already been in therapy to address alleged inappropriate behavior toward her, as detailed by Vanity Fair. A judge in Allen’s legal battles with Mia stated in a 1993 custody ruling that the filmmaker’s behavior toward Dylan was “grossly inappropriate and that measures must be taken to protect her.” (Allen has repeatedly denied the allegations against him.) And then, as is widely known, Allen went on to marry Mia’s other adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn when she was 27 (he publicly confirmed their relationship five years earlier when she was 22 years old). He had been in her life since she was about nine years old.

With all this unfolding in full public view, why have these men seemed so impervious to the kind of accountability that #MeToo was supposed to bring about? What is it that precludes these relentlessly shitty guys from the same smite of cancel culture that many of their equally shitty peers have been subject to?

For Sarah Hagi, a culture writer and critic based in Toronto, it really comes down to the three basic ideals that underpin Hollywood and our relationship to it — money, power, and an unwillingness to separate art from the artist.

“They’re white men who've done remarkable things in their careers, and to a lot of people that’s more valuable than human life and what these men put people through,” Hagi tells Teen Vogue. She says it’s also why it took so long for men like R. Kelly and Bill Cosby to get their own reckoning.

“No one can really separate the things they love from the people who make them [and] the reason why they're able to get away with stuff is because they have been successful as artists in the past.”

And yet in talking about Allen, it is impossible to ignore the ecosystems of support around many of these men that have helped them maintain their status in Hollywood. On more than one occasion in the last year for example, actress Scarlett Johannson has made a point to voice her support of Allen, who she has worked with in the past. More recently, High School Musical alumna Vanessa Hudgens also said she would be interested in working with the director.

While there’s an obvious dissonance to be expected when you find out someone you know has been accused of doing monstrous things, Hagi says there’s little excuse for figures like Johansson go out of their way to endorse them not just as artists, but as people too.

“People have to reconcile that this person who I admired also did this bad thing,” she says. “[But] I think it's as simple as just being like, ‘Yes, I did work with this person or I knew this person. It was my mistake to continue enabling them.’”

And as long as these men continue to be empowered, supported and admired for their art, we’ll just have to wait to see any true accountability.

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue