Charming Charlie and Tricky Ricky
Commenting on sexual harassment allegations against Noel Clarke in an interview with Variety earlier this year, After Life producer Charlie Hanson said that abuse of power in the entertainment industry is “learnt behaviour that is not confronted enough”.
So
let’s confront it now:
According
to widely published reports at least eleven women have claimed that 'hands-on' Hanson has “promised them a starry career
under his wing, and then exploited their trust in creepy and illegal ways”.
Among the alleged victims is a
woman who says she met Hanson in 2008 to discuss a script and ended up having
non-consensual sex with him - in other words, that he raped her. Another accuses him of plying her with drinks and then molesting
her when she was semiconscious on a sofa after they met to discuss a script
she had written.
The pattern repeats itself. A foot in the door in exchange for a hand down the pants seems to be the modus operandi. The lack of witnesses, of course, makes such claims difficult to investigate or to prove, but similarities in accounts give them credibility and this is one of the main things police investigators will be looking at. They will be interviewing the alleged victims individually and seeing where the accounts tally.
The
fact that there often seems to be a script involved is interesting in another
sense. If Hanson has the power to get prospective scripts developed it follows
that he has access to material submitted to agencies in addition to production
companies across the industry and also to actors such as Ricky Gervais, who’s MO
seems to be to pass off other peoples’ work as his own.
And
if he is prepared to sink to luring young women with promises of
stardom in return for sexual favours, it doesn't take much of a leap of imagination to see him pilfering
works submitted to agencies in good faith. As he says himself in this interview, good
scripts are hard to find:
Without
wishing to diminish in any way the hideous experiences allegedly suffered by young women at Hanson’s
groping hands, there are parallels with intellectual property theft; Victims
of copyright infringement are often afraid to come forward for fear of not
being believed or being characterized as attention-seekers or cranks; It is difficult to prove; They are up against extremely powerful organizations with sophisticated PR machines
and vast financial resources; There is a risk of counterclaim for defamation, damage to careers, online abuse and the industry closes ranks.
Sexual assault
and copyright infringement are both serious crimes. Both are violations, one of the body and one of the mind.
With all-powerful individuals lurking in the shadows of an unregulated industry, submitting a script carries the risk of it being rejected, only to reappear later in the form of a major production with some bigshot celebrity name on it, but unlike the victims of sexual abuse, victims of IP theft cannot go to the police. Instead they have to find large sums of money to fund expensive litigation and their anonymity is not protected should the thief choose to use their substantial financial resources to defend the claim and intimidate the victim.
According to a BAFTA statement "The
behaviour that these accounts allege is abhorrent, in complete opposition to
Bafta values and has no place in our industry,"
I wonder how Bafta will feel if it
turns out that they have been handing out awards for stolen property fenced to
a fraudulent celebrity by a sex offender.
Incidental music courtesy of The Who, Boris the Spider, 1966.
Sources:
Charlie Hanson removed from Ricky Gervais' After Life over sexual misconduct claims - Mirror Online
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