Maureen Dowd’s devastating story about Uma Thurman’s experiences with Harvey Weinstein adds to the mountain of evidence against this serial predator. Clinging to the hope someone might still be fooled, Weinstein released photos today that his team says “demonstrate the strong relationship Mr. Weinstein and Ms. Thurman had over the years.” I started calling this “the home movie defense” years ago, when members of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation were providing images of smiling children as a would-be defense. Mark Pendergrast, for example, tried this ploy when he met with a reporter for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution in 1994.
By now, of course, we have all seen smiling pictures of gymnasts on the US Olympic Team. We have also seen smiling pictures of the Turpin family in Disneyland. And then there’s the images of Uma Thurman with Harvey Weinstein (although she doesn’t look very happy in this picture). It’s high time we recognize that the home movie defense is absurd. It makes as much sense as saying “just because I wasn’t abusive every moment of the day, I must never have been abusive.”