Early Wednesday, The New York Times published an eye-opening report titled “Harvey Weinstein’s Complicity Machine.” In it, five reporters spoke to over 200 sources to examine how far the movie mogul and accused serial rapist’s tentacles spread across various industries in order to provide him cover for his alleged crimes, with the former Miramax honcho allegedly employing spies, gossip columnists, media executives, power-agents, and more to do his bidding.
One of the more shocking revelations in the exposé concerned Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, a longtime friend of Weinstein’s who benefited from his not-so-benevolent largesse.
During her historic presidential run, one of her most outspoken celebrity surrogates, Lena Dunham, claims to have informed Kristina Schake, Clinton’s deputy communications director, of Weinstein’s predation. “I just want to let you know that Harvey’s a rapist and that is going to come out at some point. I think it’s a really bad idea for him to host fundraisers and be involved [with the campaign],” Dunham alleges to have told her.
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Team Hillary appears to have brushed aside Dunham’s warning—as well as one from Tina Brown, a former business associate of Weinstein’s—and allowed the then movie exec to continue to host lavish fundraisers for the Clinton campaign, including a star-studded Broadway fete one week before Election Day. To make optics worse, Hillary also had dinner with Weinstein and his team days after her election loss, where the group discussed plans to develop a TV documentary about her campaign.
All of this proved very, very confusing for longtime Hillary superfan Samantha Bee.
“Just today, we learned more about the network of powerful people who turned a blind eye to Harvey Weinstein’s demonic behavior—including powerful people who should really, really, really, really know better. Really,” said Bee on her late-night show Full Frontal.
She added: “Oh, my admiration for you is so complicated! Maybe she actually did have a stroke in the specific part of her brain that identifies shitty men.”
But the comic then shifted the blame during her Wednesday night monologue from Hillary to the cabal of “shitty media men” who Bee believes treated candidate Clinton unfairly, offering that “virtually every man who ever expressed an opinion about her in front of a camera turned out to be a huge creep.”
Bee then addressed many of the “shitty” men in media who’ve been accused of sexual misconduct, from Mark Halperin to Glenn Thrush to Matt Lauer to Charlie Rose. And there was Rose, on his PBS program, grilling candidate Clinton on her emails—just as Lauer did during his infamous turn hosting NBC’s Commander-in-Chief forum, wherein the ex-Today host treated candidate Clinton much harsher than Trump—repeatedly shushing and talking over her, while letting Trump run roughshod over him.
“It’s time to ask ourselves: Can men who hate women be objective journalists? That was a trick question! Everybody knows that men who hate women can be anything they put their minds to,” cracked Bee.
She then threw to a montage of media figures taking shots at candidate Clinton’s “shrill” voice, her “likability,” her “robotic” nature, and how “guarded” she appears to be.
“We’ll never know how much these pubes affected this election, but what we do know is that their industry gave us four times more coverage of Hillary’s email scandal than they did of Trump’s gross behavior to women,” said Bee, alluding to the twenty women who accused candidate Trump of sexual misconduct. “But to be fair, they were probably typing it with one hand.”
