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When Women Are Accused of Complicity
To watch The Handmaid’s Tale this week, or Showtime’s The Loudest Voice—in which Russell Crowe’s Roger Ailes was seemingly enabled in his alleged sexual harassment and abuse by his assistant Judy Laterza—was to see echoes of a recurring theme that keeps playing out in the news cycle. Laterza, according to accounts by the journalist Gabriel Sherman, approached pretty young interns and invited them to meet her boss. Maxwell allegedly functioned as a madam for Epstein, finding him a steady flow of girls. Harvey Weinstein was reportedly able to compel actresses to attend meetings in his hotel room because he had female assistants take them upstairs.
No system of female oppression can function, it seems, without women being complicit in it.
The 2016 election, in which 53 percent of white women opted to vote for a man who has bragged about assaulting women, showed that many women will prioritize their assumed economic security over the well-being of others. On the simplest level, money and power can act as powerful motivators. Before Maxwell met Epstein, she’d suffered a decline in her own fortunes when her father, the media tycoon Robert Maxwell, drowned in 1991 after falling from his yacht, Lady Ghislaine, off the coast of the Canary Islands. After his death, it emerged that Maxwell had plundered hundreds of millions of pounds from his company’s pension funds. His daughter was left with nothing but a personal trust granting her £80,000 a year. She fled to New York, leaving 32,000 of her father’s employees to deal with the emptying out he’d done of their retirement accounts.
Maxwell’s indefinable relationship with Epstein seemed to restore her financial and social capital—he apparently bought her a 7,000-square-foot townhouse on the Upper East Side, while his wealth renewed her access to socialites, playboys, and princes. But Epstein also seems to have had a hold on Maxwell that transcended status. She believed, according to reports in Vanity Fair, that if she did enough to please him, he would marry her. Maxwell allegedly had intimate knowledge of Epstein’s predilections for girls and young women, and yet she appears to have hero-worshipped him anyway. She saw the girls she recruited for him, according to Vanity Fair, not as vulnerable teenagers, but as inconvenient obstacles to her ultimate goal, describing them as “nothing” and “trash.”
The truth is that, in the end, such purported betrayal of other women’s trust seems to have its cost. Laterza lost her $2-million-a-year salary after Ailes was fired, and for her years of loyal service, he left her the relatively paltry sum of $30,000 in his will, from an estate totaling more than $100 million. Maxwell is the target of a new lawsuit accusing her of enabling Epstein’s abuse.
No system of female oppression can function, it seems, without women being complicit in it.
The 2016 election, in which 53 percent of white women opted to vote for a man who has bragged about assaulting women, showed that many women will prioritize their assumed economic security over the well-being of others. On the simplest level, money and power can act as powerful motivators. Before Maxwell met Epstein, she’d suffered a decline in her own fortunes when her father, the media tycoon Robert Maxwell, drowned in 1991 after falling from his yacht, Lady Ghislaine, off the coast of the Canary Islands. After his death, it emerged that Maxwell had plundered hundreds of millions of pounds from his company’s pension funds. His daughter was left with nothing but a personal trust granting her £80,000 a year. She fled to New York, leaving 32,000 of her father’s employees to deal with the emptying out he’d done of their retirement accounts.
Maxwell’s indefinable relationship with Epstein seemed to restore her financial and social capital—he apparently bought her a 7,000-square-foot townhouse on the Upper East Side, while his wealth renewed her access to socialites, playboys, and princes. But Epstein also seems to have had a hold on Maxwell that transcended status. She believed, according to reports in Vanity Fair, that if she did enough to please him, he would marry her. Maxwell allegedly had intimate knowledge of Epstein’s predilections for girls and young women, and yet she appears to have hero-worshipped him anyway. She saw the girls she recruited for him, according to Vanity Fair, not as vulnerable teenagers, but as inconvenient obstacles to her ultimate goal, describing them as “nothing” and “trash.”
The truth is that, in the end, such purported betrayal of other women’s trust seems to have its cost. Laterza lost her $2-million-a-year salary after Ailes was fired, and for her years of loyal service, he left her the relatively paltry sum of $30,000 in his will, from an estate totaling more than $100 million. Maxwell is the target of a new lawsuit accusing her of enabling Epstein’s abuse.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/08/ghislaine-maxwell-jeffrey-epstein-roger-ailes-judy-laterza-serena-waterford-handmaids-tale/596236/
17 replies
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Not that this would excuse his behavior, but often abusers are abused themselves.
