From Hollywood to Washington to the anchor desks and C-suites of Big Media, powerful men have preyed on women in the workplace — and for years gotten away with it — because, as President Donald Trump so infamously asserted, they were stars, with a network of like-minded alpha males to protect them.

Now, household names like Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose and Harvey Weinstein have been brought low in a flash by the unblinking witness of their victims, precisely because their bad behavior gave an inescapable face and name to conduct that advertisers, readers, viewers and employers will no longer accept.


But if the long-delayed response of the elite private sector to allegations of sexual misconduct has been swift and unyielding, the reaction of official Washington to comparable charges against politicians — including a dozen allegations against the president himself — has been considerably more measured, even subdued. And left largely unspoken is the extent of the problem in more quotidian walks of life.

“In the world in which we live — media, entertainment, politics, the elite world, I do think we are at an inflection point,” said Hilary Rosen, a veteran Democratic strategist who was the recording industry’s longtime chief lobbyist in Washington. “But I don’t think these issues are unique to this world, and I’m convinced that there’s as much abuse and harassment from the plant manager to the line worker or the cook to the waitress as there is in Hollywood or Washington, and it doesn’t get the same attention. My great hope is that the attention on politicians and Hollywood moguls will actually help those in darker corners, which is why the real work is to inspire change across the board.”

The casting couch is as old as Hollywood itself. Indeed, as the film historian Cari Beauchamp noted, the Central Casting agency was established in the 1920s not only as an impartial industry clearinghouse but as a safer alternative to unscrupulous independent casting agents who held their auditions in hotel rooms.

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Stars from Shirley Temple to Judy Garland faced producers and executives who flashed them or groped them. Broadway was just was bad. The young Shirley Jones, freshly cast in the movie version of “Oklahoma!” fended off a “cold-blooded pass” from the composer Richard Rodgers only by telling him he reminded her of her father.

The real-life Washington of 50 or 60 years ago was a carousel of workplace sex, drinking on the job and open influence-peddling that would seem implausible in an episode of “Scandal” or “House of Cards.” In a ribald oral history for the Senate Historical Office, the longtime Democratic aide and fixer Bobby Baker, who died this month at 89, spoke of senators openly groping passing secretaries or sending page-boys out to buy condoms for daytime sex in the office.

“The first thing when we talk about Washington and talk about Hollywood, is they’re two examples where — beyond ‘critical mass’ — it’s been 90 percent white men in power,” said Beauchamp, who began her career in politics and was Gov. Jerry Brown’s press secretary in his first tour in the job four decades ago. “And whenever the balance is that skewed to one group, that power is going to be abused by a subsection of those guys. When you get more women and more people of color in the room, and it’s inclusive, that’s going to open up a lot of eyes.”

If the response of corporate management to the latest cases has been decisive — in Lauer’s case, even before detailed accusations against him surfaced publicly — the bureaucratic, defensive reaction in Washington — to accusations against Rep. John Conyers, or, for that matter, against Trump himself — has been a striking contrast.

“I can’t really explain it,” said one veteran congressional and White House aide, who now works as a lobbyist and asked to speak anonymously so as not to offend sitting members, “other than the Congress is like a trade association. There’s so much autonomy, and they just don’t feel as if they have to be accountable for other members. Maybe members are doing things about Conyers privately that we don’t know, but it’s pretty amazing that nobody — except some junior members with absolutely nothing to lose — have said anything publicly.”

Another longtime Capitol Hill staffer noted, “There’s not really a mechanism fire somebody in Washington. You serve through the decisions of your constituents, and every two years have to get reelected. There is a way for the process to scrap you, but it takes time. In a corporate setting, you can be fired for cause. A senator could fire his chief of staff for misbehavior in a minute. But when you get to be a senator yourself, it’s more complicated.”

Culture can change. Fifty years ago, in the “Mad Men” era, the mail rooms of major newspapers and television networks were filled with Christmas cases of Scotch from sources, and reporters might get a crisp $100 bill tucked inside a card from a business they covered. By the early 1980s, institutions like The New York Times issued stern annual warnings to the staff against accepting such gifts, and even provided free shipping and a polite standard note to return them with thanks, but no thanks.

“It’s like a volcano, in the sense of how many years this has been bubbling under the surface,” said Beauchamp, a Hollywood historian whose “Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Power of Women in Hollywood” explored the path-breaking roles of female writers and directors in the silent and early sound eras. “And the first response to this by the guys currently in power is fear. And that’s another commonality between Washington and Hollywood: How many decisions does fear rule? That’s the ruling emotion,” whether of audience reaction or constituent wrath.

Marcia Nasatir, an early female studio executive at United Artists in the 1970s, told the author Stephen Galloway that the old boy culture was taken for granted when she began working in Hollywood. “Sexism doesn’t have to be about making a pass, but just an attitude about women,” Galloway quotes her as saying in “Leading Lady,” his new biography of the pioneering studio chief Sherry Lansing. “Everyone is sexual prey.”

Just what will emerge as the new normal remains very much an open question. But Rosen said she believes some things have already changed forever.

“I think it already has changed in just these few short months,” she said. “I have outrage and anger against behavior that when I was in my 20s I just ignored, and I don’t think I’m alone.”