Me Too
When the Me Too movement began four Octobers ago, I was reminded of something that Jennifer Lawrence said in late 2016 about Ellen Page in early 2014. During the Oscar season (a couple of months before the release of X-Men: Days of Future Past), they attended a party at Guy Oseary’s house where Jennifer wasn’t feeling too well due to a combination of inebriation and passive smoking. She wanted Ellen to accompany her to her own car, but Ellen (who isn’t one of her friends) didn’t think that Jennifer could be attacked when she apathetically told her: “Not my problem.”
It’s all too timely that a month before the movement began, the people who run Twitter increased the number of characters that a person can tweet from 140 to 280. I also want to highlight the timing of the Internet Movie Database’s forum being closed down 8 months before the Harvey Weinstein scandal. That’s not a coincidence. One needs to address the fact that the movement happened a year after Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential race. Trump is guilty of sexual misconduct. Again, that’s not a coincidence. This movement was a long time coming.
After doing some research about sexual harassment during the making of the original Wonder Woman series, I learned that Ted D. Landon was who Lynda Carter was referring to when she said: “There was a cameraman who drilled a hole in my dressing room wall on the Warner Brothers lot. They caught him, fired him, and drummed him out of the business.”
His last year of work was 1977, when he worked on three episodes of Starsky and Hutch.
Reese Witherspoon mentioned that she was sexually assaulted by a director when she was 16. After looking at the filming dates of her films by going to the “filming locations” sections on IMDB, I have worked it out. It was Mikael Salomon circa 1992 during the making of A Far Off Place (released in 1993). It can’t have been Andy Tennant during the making of Desperate Choices: To Save My Child (1992), because he went on to direct her in Sweet Home Alabama (2002). Mikael is still working.
Even in the world of adult entertainment, boundaries need to be respected. Veronica Avluv told me what it was like to work with Bobbi Starr: “She violated a hard limit after I was hog-tied and gagged and injured me the day I worked with her. As a top, that’s unconscionable, hard limits are hard limits. I lost work for a week because of what she did. I didn’t go back to Kinky for over a year, they had to beg me to come back. Never worked with her again…whatever, it was a long time ago. I just have no respect for people that violate the protocol in BDSM.”
Another porn star, Heaven Leigh (real name: Trina Sanderson) ironically got involved with porn because of sexual harassment: “I have a degree from Northwestern and had a regular job, but the boss told me to blow him or I would get no raise. He was a lawyer. He not only groped me but cornered me in his office. He wanted me to jump the bones of the local judge. When I said no, I was fired. I decided, at that point, to move to L.A.”
