Looks like time might be up for Time’s Up.
As The Post reported in a devastating exclusive last weekend, the glittery Hollywood organization — meant to help underprivileged women fight workplace sexual harassment and abuse — spent just $312,000 of the more than $3 million raised in 2018, its inaugural year, on legal bills for victims.
The rest went to salaries ($1.4 million), advertising and p.r. ($400,000), and nearly $1 million on a multinational law firm with lobbyists in D.C.
After Harvey Weinstein was outed as a serial predator and rapist in October 2017, Time’s Up, along with #MeToo, exploded. In Weinstein’s wake powerful men fell like dominoes: Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Kevin Spacey, Amazon Studios head Roy Price, Louis C.K., Russell Simmons, former Olympic team doctor Lawrence G. Nassar, Jeffrey Tambor, Garrison Keillor, former U.S. Senator Al Franken, Mario Batali and The Spotted Pig’s Ken Friedman — all before that year was out.
Inspired by an open letter from Alianza Nacional de Campesinas (The National Women’s Farmworkers Alliance) to Hollywood’s women, expressing sorrow and solidarity, Time’s Up formally launched on January 1, 2018. The message: All women, regardless of socioeconomics, are in this fight together.
Days later, black-clad actresses including Meryl Streep, Laura Dern, Emma Watson and Amy Poehler walked the red carpet with women’s activists. Michelle Williams, infamously underpaid compared to co-star Mark Wahlberg for her nominated work in “All the Money in the World,” brought activist Tarana Burke, who coined “Me Too” in 2006.
At that same awards ceremony, Oprah Winfrey gave such a fiery, impassioned speech — “I want all the girls watching here and now to know that a new day is on the horizon! . . . The time when nobody ever has to say ‘me too’ again” — that, for a brief time, a presidential run seemed likely.
What happened?
#MeToo will have a long and permanent tail, perhaps nothing more vindicating than the conviction of Harvey Weinstein in February of this year, after complicated testimony from victims who admitted to continuing sexual relationships with Weinstein after he raped them.
The one-time mogul’s banishment to a maximum security prison for 23 years was a quantum leap in our understanding of power dynamics, sexual abuse, the ways abusers manipulate and the confusion they sow in their victims — and this was a jury composed of seven men and five women.
But unlike Time’s Up, #MeToo is an idea and a movement, not a 501(c)3. There is no fundraising and so no potential for the misallocation of funds. Nor are there issues of leadership (inaugural Time’s Up chair Lisa Borders stepped down after sexual misconduct allegations against her son), no charges of politics or hypocrisy (the refusal to back a Joe Biden accuser), no promises made and not kept.
The Time’s Up legal defense fund was meant to help women without resources, financial and otherwise. It was meant for the woman who worked at McDonald’s, not the A-lister with a team of lawyers on speed-dial. Time’s Up legal defense fund, launched on GoFundMe in December 2017, raised more than any campaign in the site’s history — $24 million.
Where has all that money gone?
Hollywood comes under attack, often and legitimately, as a self-satisfied community of elite liberals who preach one thing and do another — whether it’s flying private while hectoring us about the environment (Leo) or condemning Trump as a bully while celebrating Roman Polanski (Streep) or castigating America at large for being racist and exclusionary while moving with glacial slowness on diversity and inclusion (the industry at large).
Time’s Up, doubtless founded with the best of intentions, is about to meet a most formulaic Hollywood ending. Who will dare rewrite this script?