The hypocrisy of Linda Bloodworth-Thomason
Remember Linda Bloodworth-Thomason? The Hollywood writer from the Friends of Bill days, the crafter of President Clinton's Monica Lewinsky talking points, the woman caught jumping on the bed in the rented out Lincoln Bedroom?
With so many Hollywood denizens coming out of the woodwork in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, Bloodworth-Thomason has a guest column for the Hollywood Reporter, decrying the culture of sexism such as she saw it herself in Hollywood, and then offering a half-baked old-hat Hollywoodish proposed solution about the girls teaming up to fight the establishment (as if that hadn't been acted out before in 20-year-old movies such as Nine to Five). It's not going to work, given the very structure of Hollywood, such as it's described well by John Podhoretz here.
And it's hardly a column of principle about the matter in any case. Despite several well written and fairly interesting vignettes describing the different acts that went on with the Hollywood elites, she uses that as a platform to work in a shot at President Trump, and then really reveals her cards by excusing the same behavior coming out of her good friend Bill Clinton. Apparently, sex harassment is OK so long as the sex harasser is a friend of yours.
One of the best friends I will ever have and a man I love dearly, former President Bill Clinton, has certainly taxed my feminist conscience, but always without diminishing my affection. I even helped write his apology to the nation for his own sexual misconduct, was sitting next to him when he delivered it, and believe to this day it was based on something that was none of our business.
In writing that, she blows her whole indictment of Hollywood out of the water. Because far from Clinton's acts being "none of our business," they were so prevalent that they commanded a special prosecutor whose investigation was about perjury. Is Bloodworth-Thomason really saying that a powerful man preying on an intern, in the Oval Office, no less, was none of our business? Or that the long string of previous victims that led up to it, from Gennifer Flowers to Paula Jones to Juanita Broaddrick to Kathleen Willey – a long, continuous string of victims stretching out throughout all of Clinton's career – was nothing? That commissioning Arkansas troopers to procure women was nothing? That there were no power relationships involved, whether of state contracts, federal employment, or physical force? Or that it's always OK so long as one is friends with Linda Bloodworth-Thomason?
The fact that she defends Bill while decrying his same types of activities going on in Hollywood is what makes her argument fall apart. Obviously, she defends her friends and gets revenge on everyone else, through guest columns in the Hollywood Reporter. She must be trying to get back at all her coevals in Hollywood, given that she makes exceptions for Bill. She just wants to say #MeToo while she's doing it.