Perez said that she urged Sciorra to speak by describing her own experience of going public about her assault. “I told her, ‘I used to tread water for years. It’s fucking exhausting, and maybe speaking out, that’s your lifeboat. Grab on and get out,’” Perez recalled. “I said, ‘Honey, the water never goes away. But, after I went public, it became a puddle and I built a bridge over it, and one day you’re gonna get there, too.’” — 305: 3988-3992
And I know with every fiber of my being that if my male makeup artist was not — 306: 4001-4002
“You keep saying you’re the one who takes the hit and it wasn’t you. So where does it come from?” I asked finally. “My boss! Okay? I have a boss. I don’t run NBC News exclusively,” he said, then seemed to catch himself. “You know, everyone was involved in this decision. You can speculate what Kim Harris’s motives are, you can speculate what Andy’s motives are, you can speculate what my motives are. All I can tell you is at the end of the day, they felt like, you know, there was a consensus about the organization’s comfort level moving forward.” He reminded me, twice, that he’d revived my career after my show was canceled. That we’d been friends. He hoped we could get a beer and laugh about it all in a few months. I struggled to understand what he was asking for. Gradually, he let it out. “I’m just making a plea,” he said. “If the opportunity ever does present itself to you to say that maybe I’m not the villain in all this, I would be grateful.” And there it was, at the end of his arguments: an unwillingness not just to take responsibility but to admit that responsibility might, in some place, in someone’s hands, exist. It was a consensus about the organization’s comfort level moving forward that stopped the reporting. It was a consensus about the organization’s comfort level moving forward that bowed to lawyers and threats; that hemmed and hawed and parsed and shrugged; that sat on multiple credible allegations of sexual misconduct and disregarded a recorded admission of guilt. That anodyne phrase, that language of indifference without ownership, upheld so much silence in so many places. It was a consensus about the organization’s comfort level moving forward that protected Harvey Weinstein and men like him; that yawned and gaped and enveloped law firms and PR shops and executive suites and industries; that swallowed women whole. Noah Oppenheim was not the villain. — 404: 5240-5255