Harvey Weinstein’s lawyer wasted little time jumping on accusations of sexual assault levelled against Asia Argento in a New York Times exposé. He released a statement to CNN, telling the American broadcaster the accusations of sexual assault reveal “a stunning level of hypocrisy.”
Argento has denied the allegations.
“It was like, ‘Aha! Hypocrisy!’” says Samantha Manewitz, a therapist and social worker who specializes in sex therapy and trauma in Massachusetts.
Argento is accused of sexually assaulting actor Jimmy Bennett in a hotel room in 2013 when he was only 17 – below the age of consent in California – when she was 37. Bennett, now 22, sent a notice of intent to sue. He asked for US$3.5 million in damages for the “intentional infliction” of emotional distress, assault, battery, and damage to his career.
Argento, now 42, allegedly paid a $380,000 settlement last October, shortly after publicly claiming that Weinstein raped her. She said the assault happened in 1997 during the Cannes Film Festival when she was 21. Weinstein denies the allegations.
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Put aside the he-said, she-said for a moment, Manewitz says, and it’s important to remember: whatever Argento did or didn’t do has no bearing on whatever Weinstein did or didn’t do.
The problem, she explains, is that public discourse seems to thrive off obvious good guys and obvious bad guys.
“We want this to be a very neat and clean narrative,” Manewitz says, but “the reality of this is so much messier and the reality of abuse and what abuse looks like can be really counterintuitive.”
There’s a lot of psychological research on the cycle of abuse, explains Judith Taylor, an associate professor in the sociology, and women and gender studies departments at the University of Toronto.
Although not everyone who experiences violence at a young age will go on to repeat it, some do — more commonly men than women.
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But if you look at both Bennett and Argento’s respective allegations, Taylor says, there is an “eerie similarity between the two cases” that could indicate a repeating cycle of violence (both stories are contested). Manewitz also raises these similarities, noting that it’s possible to have empathy for what Argento says she experienced while also holding her accountable for the hurt Bennett says she has caused him.
Translating that into the public sphere, where our understanding of guilt and innocence is very dichotomous, is tricky, Taylor says.
Indeed, the statement from Weinstein’s lawyer goes on to use the Bennett allegations as some sort of indication that Argento’s allegations against Weinstein are false.
“The sheer duplicity of her conduct is quite extraordinary and should demonstrate to everyone how poorly the allegations against Mr. Weinstein were actually vetted and accordingly, cause all of us to pause and allow due process to prevail, not condemnation by fundamental dishonesty,” the statement ends.
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One does not preclude the other, says Lucia Lorenzi, a postdoctoral fellow at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., whose current research delves into representations of perpetrators.
“Often we kind of fall into that all or nothing, black and white,” she says. “Sexual violence is a really difficult thing and I think sometimes we make these binaries in order to try and make sense of it.”
Making sense of it is difficult, Lorenzi says, and facing her own discomfort was a catalyst for her current research.
We can get caught on “hyper-legalistic understandings,” Taylor says, but that’s not really what the #MeToo movement is about.
“One of the things the #MeToo movement is asking people to do is to think about what’s a violation of workplace policy, what’s a violation of the law, and then what is just something culturally that doesn’t feel right that people want to change.”
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