Ricochet: Meryl Streep: Moral Coward

​In a puff piece promoting their new film, the New York Times interviewed screen legends Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep.

​Since the latter has spent most of her career pushing progressive politics and positively gushing about disgraced movie exec Harvey Weinstein, the interviewer (shown in bold type) asked why she’s been so quiet about the #MeToo movement.

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 I’ve got to shift conversation to the news these days, sexual harassment. One thing that struck me after the accusations broke was people were saying, “What is Meryl going to say?” They were waiting for you.

STREEP I know. I found out about this on a Friday and went home deep into my own life. And then somebody told me that on “Morning Joe” they were screaming that I haven’t responded yet. I don’t have a Twitter thing or – handle, whatever. And I don’t have Facebook. I really had to think. Because it really underlined my own sense of cluelessness, and also how evil, deeply evil, and duplicitous, a person he was, yet such a champion of really great work.

You make movies. You think you know everything about everybody. So much gossip. You don’t know anything. People are so inscrutable on a certain level. And it’s a shock. Some of my favorite people have been brought down by this, and he’s not one of them.

What do you make of the fact, though, that people are waiting for you to speak?
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STREEP: I don’t want to hear about the silence of me. I want to hear about the silence of Melania Trump. I want to hear from her. She has so much that’s valuable to say. And so does Ivanka. I want her to speak now.

How convenient. Just like when Weinstein took a leave of absence to fight the NRA.
If memory serves, Melania Trump didn’t praise Harvey Weinstein from the Academy Awards stage. Ivanka Trump wasn’t harassed by the plant-molesting mogul and blacklisted when she ran away.

Instead, it was Meryl Streep who used her 2012 Globe speech to thank “God – Harvey Weinstein.” It was Streep who claimed she knew nothing, nothing! about her close collaborator while the rest of Hollywood talked about it endlessly.

When pressed about the scandal in October, Streep claimed, “I didn’t know about these other offenses; I did not know about his financial settlements with actresses and colleagues; I did not know about his having meetings in his hotel room, his bathroom or other inappropriate, coercive acts. And if everybody knew, I don’t believe that all the investigative reporters in the entertainment and the hard news media would have neglected for decades to write about it.”
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Why would the press fear multimillion-dollar lawsuits and repeated threats of blocking access to a wide array of movie stars? The answer is all too obvious.

The fact is that Streep is a moral coward and a hypocrite. She knew. She just placed her paycheck above the safety and careers of other actresses.