Article content continued

All that seems now so long ago, with so, so many others having trailed in his contemptible wake. There was the beady-eyed, Oscar-winning Kevin Spacey, who at least spared the ferns, but whose uninvited hand explored the underbrush and sought the nuggets of many a young male, from co-stars to barmen, and even Richard Dreyfus’ 18-year-old son. Spacey’s fondlings had the gusto and variety of Tiberius at Capri, and just yesterday we learned that they’d even reached to royalty. In 2007, at an annual Nobel Peace Prize concert in Oslo that he hosted, Spacey invited the former husband of Princess Martha Louise out “for a smoke” and then—I use the ex-prince’s own language—“touched me right on the balls under the table.” Fortunately for the ex-prince, he was a non-smoker, and any hoped for congress was thus averted.

Weinstein was merely the boulder that broke the Hollywood molestation damn

Now there have been multitudes of Hollywood’s high, and not so high, owning a day or two of the world’s headlines for equal, if not quite so insouciant, attacks. But this explosion of aggressive carnality did not harbour solely in the celebrated Hills of the rich and randy. Ravenous lust ranges the halls of some of the world’s most famous news shows. A gasp was heard round the world following the revelation that Matt Lauer, the 25-million dollar man of NBC’s The Today Show, the Ken Doll of the a.m. audience, is as liquourish and lecherous as a pack of minks coming off a chastity fast.

The mise-en-scene for wily Matt’s depredations was his corner office, wherein he housed cartons of sex toys and a desk equipped with a button that locked his door from the inside. The trembling female invitee to this Chamber of Unwanted Delights had to forgo the niceties of charm and courtship. Matt went full Clinton: the trousers were dropped, the command given. From there the options were few: faint, fight or fornicate. It was very much droit du seigneur for America’s lord of the morning.