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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
In desperation I returned to Heidi Fleiss who, once again, deflected questions about the actor being a client. When pressed, she sounds frightened. "Look. Warren Buffett is the second-richest man in the world and he's working on Schwarzenegger's campaign," she said. "That's a lot of power and money coming down on me. I don't need that." Instead, she directs me to the videotape that she's been telling me about for days. It will soon be available for sale on her Web site. "Then, you'll have a story," she says. (When Salon finally sees the video, it turns out to feature an aspiring actress who claims to have dallied with an actor she jokingly refers to as "I'll be back," mocking Schwarzenegger's accent, but there's nothing in the video to link him to Fleiss' women, or to anything other than consensual sex -- and maybe not even that.)
On Thursday, Oct. 2, a scant five days before the election, the Los Angeles Times runs its long-awaited front-page story. A team of reporters have been researching the piece for seven weeks and their piece is based on six unnamed sources and one named figure, E. Laine Stockton, who used to be married to bodybuilder Robby Robinson, who has feuded with Schwarzenegger for years. Although the actor's camp will characterize it as "puke politics," the story is actually narrowly crafted -- to the disappointment of many of the Times' sources and the network of women trying to bring the stories forward. It centers not on the wild array of rumors reporters have been chasing down for weeks, but on specific incidents that could be classified as sexual harassment.
When the story comes out, a group of younger Hollywood women consider publicly condemning such behavior, but they balk at doing so. And who can blame them? Only 14 percent of the films released in 2000 were written by women and only 6 percent of those films were directed by females. "Hollywood has always been sexist," the screenwriter William Goldman tells me. What else is new?
Schwarzenegger, meanwhile, doesn't deny the Times' report of his sexual harassment. Rather he offers a general apology for "behaving badly" in the past, saying, "Where there is smoke, there is fire." He then goes on to deny that several of the specific incidents took place. He also attacks the messenger for reporting on his notorious bad behavior, calling the Times piece "trash news."
By Friday, there's a sense of unexpended trouble in the air. My network of Hollywood helpers has expanded in the past week to include women in Nashville, Tenn., New York and Vancouver, British Columbia. After weeks of trying to bring forth the allegations, several grande dames of Hollywood band together to denounce Schwarzenegger's treatment of women. Peg Yorkin of the Feminist Majority, actress Polly Bergen of the National Organization for Women, and Karen Pomer of Code Pink join religious groups in a press conference Friday criticizing the gubernatorial candidate.
The New York Times winds up printing not its own sexual rumors piece, but a story about the story in the Los Angeles Times. But the Times has its own mini-scoop, taken from a book proposal by a director, this one called "The Master Plan." It alleges that Schwarzenegger admired Adolf Hitler and incites another flurry of press conferences, allegations and denials. And on Saturday, the Los Angeles Times runs another story about Schwarzenegger's sexual behavior, bringing forth another five women who -- on the record -- repeat allegations of harassement.
By Sunday, four more women have come forward in the Times to accuse the Republican candidate of groping, fondling and sexually harassing them, bringing the total to 15 females. In retaliation, about 1,000 people cancel their subscriptions to the Los Angeles Times, the paper reports. Many of those interviewed about the cancellations are men, who claim that the Times' story was politically motivated, and that the women were cowardly to wait until now, a few days before the election, to speak out.
Far from being cowardly, though, I thought the women who told their stories were brave, given the sexism rampant in Hollywood. And in the end, I wound up admiring the network of Hollywood women who managed to wrestle the story of Schwarzenegger's dark side into the light. It's clear they managed to convince the last-minute tale-tellers to come forward, and to let their names be used. It's probably not over yet -- my would-be helpers were still phoning Sunday, on their way to dinner and meetings and Yom Kippur events as night fell -- to talk of more news about to break.
It's up to voters to determine if these stories of bullying and humiliation should disqualify the actor from becoming governor. I think about the agent who told me "young men don't care" about the allegations against Schwarzenegger. But it's clear many women do. In a normal election campaign cycle, there would be many more weeks for the story to unfold -- for more women to come forward, for the actor to shoot down the stories, for the electorate to weigh the evidence and decide what to make of it. The truncated recall campaign means it all has to happen by Tuesday. But some Democrats are promising another recall if Schwarzenegger is elected. It's hard not to believe that the stories of his "behaving badly" with women will keep unfolding in the weeks and months to come.
