Let’s cut actress-turned-activist Alyssa Milano some slack.
There’s no way Milano could explain away her support for Vice President Joe Biden in light of the crush of allegations against him.
Still, Milano’s belated response, after being called out across social media and by fellow #MeToo warrior Rose McGowan, is both too late and too insipid to believe.
The Democrats’ likely choice to challenge President Donald Trump this fall has a documented history of creepy behavior around women.
Much of it is on tape, too.
More recently, those incidents took a toxic turn when an ex-staffer alleged he sexually assaulted her in 1993. Tara Reade claims Biden attacked her in a graphic manner, but she’s been unable to rally any support for her story since then.
Even Time’s Up, the legal group created in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, chose not to defend her. Hollywood, meanwhile, remains silent on the matter. (So has the news media.)
Milano similarly stayed mum since the allegations went public late last month. Conservative media outlets took note of her lack of response, while most media outlets helped cover for the obvious issue.
Milano’s silence spoke the loudest because she’s been among the leading voices demanding we “believe all women.”
Now, she wants us to know “believe all women” is more nuanced than we were told.
The actress scrambled to find a friendly interviewer – Andy Cohen – to finally address the issue in play. There is no defense, of course, but her attempt says everything about her partisan purposes.
First, she attempted to explain away why she waited, and waited, to respond to the Biden allegations.
“It took me a long time to publicly share anything about Harvey [Weinstein] as well,” she told Cohen.
Not true.
The Weinstein scandal officially broke Oct. 5, 2017. Milano addressed the subject directly in an Oct. 15, 2017 Tweet that helped kick start her “activism.” She may have done so even earlier, but that Tweet remains early in the scandal cycle.
The interview isn’t off to a good start, and things got worse from there, even as Cohen avoided anything close to a follow-up question. Nor did he discuss the glaring inconsistencies in her narrative.
“Even though we should ‘believe women’ and that’s an important thing, and what that statement really means is that for so long the go-to has been not to believe them,” she says. “We have to societally change that mind set to ‘believing woman,’ but that does not mean at the expense of not giving men they’re due process,” she says.
“I like that … I like that,” Cohen cooed.
“I did do my due diligence [on Biden],” citing Time’s Up decision not taking the case, even though they did so on a technicality, not for any reason like Reade’s claim didn’t measure up to their standards.
“I just don’t feel comfortable throwing away a decent man I’ve known for 15 years in this time of complete chaos,” she concludes.
She didn’t give Brett Kavanaugh a similar chance, of course, even though the future Supreme Court justice endured five FBI background checks and faced the flimsiest abuse allegation possible.
How flimsy?
The accuser’s own father cheered on Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court ascension.
It gets even worse.
Last last year Milano pulled out of a fundraising for then-candidate Andrew Yang. Why? She claimed Yang hadn’t done enough to address a sexual abuse allegation against one of his staffers.
Yang denied the charge in an interview with Yahoo! News:
Yang said that he and his team conducted an internal investigation on the staffer allegedly involved in the misconduct and found no evidence of anything sexual in nature.” The staffer was dismissed instead for “management problems,” according to Yang.
“We take any allegation of misconduct very, very seriously,” said Yang. “We investigated as soon as we had any indication that something was amiss. And the person that was accused, we found that they had not done anything sexual in nature, but we decided to dismiss the worker anyway because there had been other, centrally, management problems.”
Hollywood hypocrisy is nothing new. Milano, though, works in hypocrisy “the way other artists might work in oils or clay. It was his true medium; a master…” with apologies to Jean Shepherd in A Christmas Story.
[Cross-posted from Hollywood in Toto.]
