"I felt cornered and powerless as law enforcement officers began questioning me while the last of my mother’s life was fading."

"I wanted to be comforting her, telling her how she was about to see her daddy and younger brother as she 'went away home,' as we say in Appalachia. Instead, without it being indicated I had any choices about when, where and how to participate, I began a series of interviews that felt mandatory and imposed on me that drew me away from the precious end of my mother’s life. And at a time when we ourselves were trying desperately to decode what might have prompted her to take her life on that day, we each shared everything we could think of about Mom, her mental illness and its agonizing history. I want to be clear that the police were simply following terrible, outdated interview procedures and methods of interacting with family members who are in shock or trauma and that the individuals in my mother’s bedroom that harrowing day were not bad or wrong.... This profoundly intimate personal and medical information does not belong in the press, on the internet or anywhere except in our memories. We have asked the court to not release these documents not because we have secrets."

Writes Ashley Judd, in an essay in the NYT.

"Judd’s opinions on sex work should be given as much time and space as the Pope’s opinions on period cramps."

Said Kate D’Adamo, a sex-worker rights advocate, quoted in "Ashley Judd’s Anti-Prostitution Crusade Angers Sex Workers: ‘You Are Harming People’/The actress and #MeToo trailblazer has come under fire from sex workers for her broad anti-prostitution platform" (HuffPo).

Quote from Judd: "I believe body invasion is indeed inherently harmful, and cash is the proof of coercion. Buying sexual access commodifies something that is beyond the realm of capitalism and entrepreneurship: girls and women’s orfices [sic]."

The worst movie I've ever seen links the newly accused Morgan Freeman with the key Harvey Weinstein accuser Ashley Judd.

Last fall, when the stories about Harvey Weinstein were breaking, I blogged about him repeatedly and got pushback from commenters who thought my blogging was out of proportion to his importance and to the significance of his alleged misdeeds. Sample comment on a post titled "Not even one 'Weekend Update' joke about Harvey Weinstein on last night's 'SNL'":

We talked about Benghazi for months and months despite the lower death toll and lack of new information.

But Ann buries [the Las Vegas massacre] under a flood of Weinstein topics. Not even our pussy grabber in chief got such attention about his harrassing ways.

This is the kind of comment that caused me to abandon comments when I tried them in the first few months of the blog, this insinuation that I'm doing something devious by blogging about one thing when something else is more important and that this imbalance reveals that I favor one political side over another. When I restarted comments, later that year, I worked on not taking that bait. I write about what I find bloggable, following my various instincts. You can analyze what's happening in my head, but I don't need to wreck my momentum to examine and articulate why I'm writing about this and not that.

But on the Weinstein topic, I see that I did react, perhaps because that post is premised on the idea that the Weinstein story is so important that failing to address it on "SNL" means something. That is (I can see now), I was doing to "SNL" what commenters have done to me. Anyway, I wrote this in the comments:

The idea that people don't know Weinstein is ridiculous. The movie business is one of the businesses that Americans are most interested in. We consume the product in mass quantities.

Whether you recognize the name of one of the most prominent executives or not, his misdeeds are important news, especially since he was making decisions on what went into a product that we ingested into our brain and our culture.

Even if you yourself don't watch movies, you should care about what's going into the head of your fellow citizen.

Those who are trying to tell me I'm giving to much importance to this story could try addressing these reasons, not just emptily complaining that I'm giving this too much attention. I suspect that you are agitated by how damaging this story might be to something you care about.

By the way, I saw the movie Ashley Judd made at the time she had her encounter with HW. It was called "Kiss the Girls," and it came out in the 90s, when I consumed a lot of movies. I saw it because it was touted as "neo-noir" and supposed to be excellent. But afterward, somebody just reminded me, I said it was the wors[t] movie I'd ever seen. I'd forgotten that, but the person I saw the movie with remembered and said: "you thought it was sexualizing female victims and trying to titillate the audience when the women are crime victims, while acting like it’s taking a perspective that is against crime."

Ashley Judd was important. Three days before that SNL-didn't-talk-about-it post of mine, the NYT wrote about Judd in "Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades."

When Mr. Weinstein invited Ms. Judd to breakfast in Beverly Hills, she had been shooting the thriller “Kiss the Girls” all night, but the meeting seemed too important to miss. After arriving at the hotel lobby, she was surprised to learn that they would be talking in his suite; she decided to order cereal, she said, so the food would come quickly and she could leave.

Mr. Weinstein soon issued invitation after invitation, she said. Could he give her a massage? When she refused, he suggested a shoulder rub. She rejected that too, she recalled. He steered her toward a closet, asking her to help pick out his clothing for the day, and then toward the bathroom. Would she watch him take a shower? she remembered him saying.

“I said no, a lot of ways, a lot of times, and he always came back at me with some new ask,” Ms. Judd said. “It was all this bargaining, this coercive bargaining.”...

"Kiss the Girls" triggered me when I saw it in 1997.  I thought, as my movie companion vividly remembered, "it was sexualizing female victims and trying to titillate the audience when the women are crime victims, while acting like it’s taking a perspective that is against crime."

The reason I'm talking about all of this now is that Judd's co-star in "Kiss the Girls" was Morgan Freeman, and this week, the big news is "Women accuse Morgan Freeman of inappropriate behavior, harassment" (CNN). (And here's a NYT article about the CNN reporter, "She Went to Interview Morgan Freeman. Her Story Became Much Bigger.")

I just wanted to note the Judd connection and to restate my hatred of that terrible movie, the one I called the worst movie I'd ever seen.

Mira Sorvino cries over confirmed suspicion.

Just seeing this after I awoke, I burst out crying. There it is, confirmation that Harvey Weinstein derailed my career, something I suspected but was unsure. Thank you Peter Jackson for being honest. I’m just heartsick https://t.co/ljK9NqICbm

— Mira Sorvino (@MiraSorvino) December 15, 2017

ADDED: Here's the underlying story. Excerpt:

"I now suspect we were fed false information about both of these talented women [Ashley Judd and Mira Sorvino] - and as a direct result their names were removed from our casting list " [said Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson].... "My experience, when Miramax controlled the Lord of the Rings... was of Weinstein and his brother behaving like second-rate Mafia bullies. They weren't the type of guys I wanted to work with - so I haven't," he said.

"But this time, it was clear to me he would never let me finish this movie without him having his fantasy one way or another.... I had to say yes...."

"I arrived on the set the day we were to shoot the scene that I believed would save the movie. And for the first and last time in my career, I had a nervous breakdown: My body began to shake uncontrollably, my breath was short and I began to cry and cry, unable to stop, as if I were throwing up tears. Since those around me had no knowledge of my history of Harvey, they were very surprised by my struggle that morning. It was not because I would be naked with another woman. It was because I would be naked with her for Harvey Weinstein. But I could not tell them then. My mind understood that I had to do it, but my body wouldn’t stop crying and convulsing. At that point, I started throwing up while a set frozen still waited to shoot. I had to take a tranquilizer, which eventually stopped the crying but made the vomiting worse. As you can imagine, this was not sexy, but it was the only way I could get through the scene."

From "Harvey Weinstein Is My Monster Too" by Salma Hayek (NYT).

"Mother Jones magazine’s editor and chief executive acknowledged on Thursday that they investigated Washington bureau chief David Corn for inappropriate workplace behavior..."

"... warning him about touching female staffers and insensitive descriptions of sexual violence, and would now probe the allegations further in light of two emails written by former staffers in 2014 and 2015 and obtained by POLITICO."

One of the emails, written in 2015 by a former staffer outlining concerns she had heard from other women in the Washington office, said Corn, now 58, made “rape jokes,” “regularly gave [several women] unwelcome shoulder rubs and engaged in uninvited touching of their legs, arms, backs, and waists,” and “made inappropriate comments about women’s sexuality and anatomy.” The other email, from 2014, was by a former female staffer who claimed that Corn “came up behind me and put his hands and arms around my body in a way that felt sexual and domineering.”

ADDED: I guess it's just a coincidence, but clicking on my David Corn tag, I get back to 3 old posts about — of all people — Ashley Judd. (Ashley Judd is in the news lately because she's made accusations of sexual harassment against Harvey Weinstein.)

I wrote on April 9, 2013: "Secret recording of Mitch McConnell strategy session about how to go after Ashley Judd."

I love when real lefties outflank the Hillary-Clinton-level lefties.

Here's Ted Rall bitching about the Women's March:

A good indication that the Women's March got coopted into a Democratic boo-hoo Hillary/Cory Booker-in-2020 pep rally was that the speakers were limited to celebrity millionaire liberal Democrats like Michael Moore, Ashley Judd and Gloria. Had this been a militant action (i.e., one that might frighten Trump and the GOP), or a coalition of liberals who welcomed and respected their leftist allies rather than merely wanting to vampirize their righteous anger and energy into midterm votes, the roster of speakers would have included people calling for revolutionary change and action outside of the existing system. There would also have been some radical activists you'd never of who do important work.

Celebrity liberalism and pleas to vote Democratic are where the Left goes to die....

"No one would be in trouble over this scandal if only David Corn had the news judgment to recognize a nonstory."

Says James Taranto. The distinction between this bland chat about things Ashley Judd wrote in her memoir is nothing like the explosive conversation in Bartnicki v. Vopper, the Supreme Court case that said "a stranger's illegal conduct does not suffice to remove the First Amendment shield from speech about a matter of public concern."

[M]embers of the Pennsylvania State Education Association discussed violently retaliating against school board members who were their adversaries in collective-bargaining negotiations. A quote from the tape: "If they're not gonna move for three percent, we're gonna have to go to their, their homes.... To blow off their front porches, we'll have to do some work on some of those guys...."

In Bartnicki, Justice Stevens (joined by Justices O'Connor, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer) says there's "a conflict between interests of the highest order — on the one hand, the interest in the full and free dissemination of information concerning public issues, and, on the other hand, the interest in individual privacy and, more specifically, in fostering private speech." But: "The normal method of deterring unlawful conduct is to impose an appropriate punishment on the person who engages in it." And: "It would be quite remarkable to hold that speech by a law-abiding possessor of information can be suppressed in order to deter conduct by a non-law-abiding third party." 

Secret recording of Mitch McConnell strategy session about how to go after Ashley Judd.

David Corn at Mother Jones has lots of audio clips and transcript, but he doesn't tell us who made the tape and gave it to him. Surveillance on a political campaign? If that's not bad, should we revise our opinion about the Watergate burglary?

Corn would like us to think he's got material that's quite nefarious, because "McConnell and his aides considered assaulting Judd for her past struggles with depression and for her religious views." But doesn't every campaign brainstorm about everything that could possibly be used? One campaign aide said:

"Democrats Try And Fail To Catch Conservatives Cheering Ashley Judd's On-Screen Death."

"Judd supporters hoped her on-screen death would make for some viral video when played before the audience at annual conservative gathering, and promised BuzzFeed a recording of the event, however it came out..."

Incredibly lame, but "Democrats"... which "Democrats"?

But kudos to Buzzfeed for getting people to link to a story about nothing happening. Think of all the times various politicos are there, ready to catch things that can be used against the other side. All the gotchas should be massively diluted by all the times nothing happened. Let this one nothing stand as a reminder of all the nothings in the mix.

Judd puffy.

Everybody's talking about Ashley Judd talking about everybody talking about Judd looking "puffy."