Natalie Portman played a starring role in the creation of Time’s Up.
The group, forged in the wake of producer Harvey Weinstein’s downfall on sexual abuse allegations, vowed to prevent future Weinsteins from attacking women.
Fellow stars like Ashley Judd, Eva Longoria, Meryl Streep, Kate Capshaw, America Ferrera, Rashida Jones, Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington either donated huge sums or joined an advisory board to oversee the fledgling group.
That’s where the “Black Swan” star came in.
Portman served on an advisory board that did nothing to correct a series of catastrophic errors which led to the group’s dissolution last year.
Time’s Up:
- Ignored Tara Reade when she alleged Joe Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993
- Ignored Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax after two women claimed he sexually assaulted them
- Ignored other charges that Biden was sexually inappropriate with multiple people
- Promoted paper-thin accusations against a conservative judge’s bid for the Supreme Court
- Actively counseled Gov. Andrew Cuomo after 10 women came forward alleging he sexually mistreated them
- Or, as Portman tells The Hollywood Reporter, the group made a few mistakes along the way.
I think a lot of people made mistakes, but mistakes are deadly for activism. You have to be so perfect in order to demand the change that you want to see, and I don’t know, maybe acknowledging all our imperfection as humans and saying that people can do something wrong and also be good at something else, having a little bit more shades of gray might actually let us get to more progress … For an entire movement to not be allowed to exist because of individual mistakes or even collective mistakes, I think that we have to be able to make mistakes and learn from them and allow that.
A better scenario?
A powerful woman who volunteers to oversee an organization actually oversees said organization and prevents it from making one gargantuan “mistake” after the next.
Did Portman ever step in to fix the sinking ship? She happily joined the Women’s March movement during a GOP presidency, a protest group that went missing when Biden spoke the oath of office in 2021.
Chances are Portman either didn’t care enough to fulfill that obligation or agreed with Time’s Up becoming a hack partisan outfit that sided with powerful Democrats.
Here’s betting she chose the latter option.
Now, she’s washing her hands of the group, shrugging her shoulders at the mistakes that brought it down.
No. Sorry.
She played a role in its destruction, and reporters aren’t willing to press her, or her famous chums, about it.
Time’s Up is no more, and women in and out of Hollywood have one less place to turn. That falls on Portman’s shoulders, whether she’ll publicly confess to it or not.
