The Harvey Weinstein apologist

0:00Harvey Weinstein is back in court this week. An appeals court overturned his 2020 conviction in New York, saying he hadn't gotten a fair trial. And so his accusers must now testify again. Weinstein has always had very good lawyers, but the court of public opinion was against him. Until now, it seems. After looking over this case, I've concluded that Harvey Weinstein was wrongfully convicted and was basically just hung on the Me Too thing. The commentator Candace Owens, who has previously defended Kanye and Andrew Tate. Andrew Tate and his brother were actually a response to a misandrist culture, women that hated men.

0:35Before Andrew Tate, there was Lena Dunham. Has taken up Weinstein's cause, and it seems to be gaining her followers. Coming up on Today Explained, when Candace met Harvey.

1:00It's so messy. It's so obvious. Everyone knows what you're doing. You're listening to Today Explained. Candace Owens is a 36-year-old far-right commentator who made her bones taking positions that are reliably aimed at owning the libs and occasionally spin out into country crazy. E.J. Dixon, a writer for New York magazine's The Cut, recently profiled Owens, whose telling of her own story begins with a terrible experience when she was quite young. She had a pretty high-profile experience with bullying when she was in high school. One night I was sitting on a couch with my boyfriend and I received anonymous phone calls.

1:37And at the end of watching Talladega Nights with my boyfriend, I picked up the phone. I listened to the voicemails. And there were people, four boys, that were screaming back and forth, calling me a dirty ******, saying we're going to tar and feather your family, saying we're going to do to you like we did to Martin Luther King, put a bullet in the back of your head, made references to Rosa Parks. It was really probably the nastiest thing that I've ever heard in my entire life. And it became like local news. Long story short, this was categorized as a hate crime. The FBI was involved. I was out of school for about six weeks.

2:08And just imagine, like, I didn't even want to report it. And then having like what felt like your entire life. It was front page of newspapers for two months. So that was sort of like her origin story was that she was actually the victim of bullying. And at first, she kind of has a pretty standard trajectory for somebody that's interested in communications. Like she got a journalism degree. She interned for Vogue. And it seems like politically she self-identified as fairly liberal. But then what happens in 2016, she launches this company called Social Autopsy that essentially publishes like the online footprint of anonymous people online.

2:47The goal is to sort of hold bullies and trolls accountable. What we do is we attach their words to their places of employment and anybody in the entire world can search for them. And a lot of people get really mad about it because they think it's like a doxing tool. What we are doing is figuratively lifting the masks up so nobody can hide behind, you know, Twitter handles or privatized profiles. This is around Gamergate. Doxing is very much like omnipresent in the culture. so she gets a lot of backlash for it and there are some major far-right figures like milo yiannopoulos if if you remember that guy i sure do i like to think myself as a virtuous troll you know i'm doing god's work women are not an oppressed class in the west there is no rape culture in the west yeah and mike cernovich and they offer her their support and they defend her and so she's kind of gets it into her head, it seems that like a lot of the backlash was led by leftists, which may or may not be true.

3:47But she said like them offering their support is kind of how she became radicalized like virtually overnight. I realized that liberals were actually the racist, that liberals were actually the trolls. Once she takes a turn to the right, what kind of opinions does she begin espousing and where does she begin espousing them? So she launched her own YouTube channel, which got pretty popular. Mom, I'm still black and I still like Hispanic people. I simply think that we should maybe put the economical future of this country ahead of the social issues. That is all. And then she went to this website PragerU, which is, you know, a right-wing, you know, conservative think tank slash website.

4:23I'm Candace Owens, author of Blackout, how black America can make its second escape from the Democrat plantation for Prager University. And then she kind of climbs the ladder to the Daily Wire, which is sort of like the conservative media outlet at the time. And she kind of says a lot of pretty controversial things like since the very beginning of her career. Oh, my God. Charlottesville. White supremacy is alive and well. Run. Stop. She was very anti-MeToo. There's not a shred of evidence, right? There's no proof. You say something and then you get to just disappear. You walk away. Right. It's like the only drive-by.

5:04It is a drive-by. It's a drive-by, right? She was anti-LGBTQ. She's called LGBTQ people like a sexual plague on society. She's been very critical of the Black Lives Matter movement. They turned me into public enemy number one for accurately talking about George Floyd, not in the capacity of a hero, but in the capacity of a person who was addicted to drugs and who had enough fentanyl in the system to kill a horse at the time that he died. She's also weirdly very focused on Jews and Jewish people. She has said that Joseph Mengele's experiments, Joseph Mengele, you know, the famous doctor during the Holocaust in Germany, which are very well documented, she said, Just slice a person in half and sew them together.

5:48That just sounds like bizarre propaganda. She's good friends with Kanye West. She defended many of his anti-Semitic remarks. She wore a White Lives Matter T-shirt in public with him in 2022 at the time that it was thought to be sort of like a white supremacist slogan. We put on a T-shirt to actually do something that was inclusive, to say, actually, white Americans, you are allowed to be a part of this, too, because literally all lives matter. So, yeah, the list kind of goes on and on. She's sort of just like a professional provocateur. Sure. Once upon a time, a person spouting these kind of takes would have been broadly viewed as kind of deranged and probably not given a lot of oxygen.

6:31It's 2025 and it's been 2016 for about a decade now. How do people respond to Candace Owens? Like who's in her audience and do they think she's crazy but funny or do they think, yes, this woman's a truth teller? Well, it seems like her audience has changed a lot. I mean, what's weird about this whole thing is that a lot of people on the right traditionally have thought she was quite extreme. Like as recently as last year when she was at the Daily Wire, she very publicly split with Ben Shapiro over some of her tweets, which he viewed as anti-Semitic and her views on Israel and her liking a tweet alluding to the blood libel conspiracy theory.

7:12She definitely has surprisingly gotten a lot more mainstream since she split from the Daily Wire over the past year or so and started her own podcast. Yeah. In your piece, you talk about a turn that she made into new territory that surprised a lot of people. Yeah. So she has been very focused on covering pop culture. And like, to be clear, she always has covered pop culture to some degree. and she starts putting out these episodes about the Justin Baldoni Blake Lively scandal that just go ridiculously ridiculously viral okay so basically um it centers around this movie it ends with us stop showing up at my flower shop and sending me flowers stop walking through this party following me around you just shut up for one second okay and when the movie came out last summer, there was a lot of negative press around Blake Lively and around the movie.

8:12But basically, last December, Blake Lively filed a lawsuit against her co-star and the director of the movie, Justin Baldoni, accusing him of improper workplace conduct. She said he made some inappropriate comments about her body, made her feel uncomfortable. She alleges that he walked in on her while she was nursing and a bunch of other things. But she also alleges that the negative PR that she was getting when the movie came out last summer was actually orchestrated by Justin Baldoni's PR team because she had filed an HR complaint against him and he had anticipated that she would go public with her allegations.

8:52So she basically alleges that Baldoni launched like a preemptive smear campaign against her before she publicly came forward. Baldoni has really, really strongly denied these allegations. And he's also launched a countersuit claiming, no, he never did any of this. Like this was all a fight over creative control over the movie. And that Blake and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, are trying to destroy his career and get him blacklisted from Hollywood, essentially. It's all super, super complicated and thorny and difficult to sit through and everyone in Hollywood is taking sides. And whose side is Candace Owens on?

9:31So Candace Owens is very firmly on the side of Justin Baldoni. Blake Lively is not a good person. So no matter what happens in this lawsuit, no matter who wins in the end, do not let it distract you from the fact that she has proven herself not to be a kind person, okay? Her belief has essentially been that any woman who accuses a man of harassment likely has an ulterior motive and women should not be automatically believed. She is a modern feminist, which means that she grew up wealthy. Her life has been perfect. And so she has to create struggle where there just isn't any. OK. The videos go wildly, wildly viral.

10:08Like just for context, I pulled up some data from the site Social Blade. She had 1.5 million YouTube subscribers. last May, which is a lot, right? But now she has a little more than 4.2 million. And a lot of it has to do with the success of these videos. Last year, she had 132 million views total on her channel. This year, she has a little more than 688 million. So it's just been tremendous, tremendous growth. Why do you think her pro-Baldoni message is so popular, like popular enough to just jack up her YouTube following. Yeah, I mean, I think it's part of a larger cultural shift rightwards. I think that she is capitalizing on this very strong anti-feminist streak among Gen Z in particular.

10:59I think that there's a lot of justifiable, frankly, frustration with my generation. I'm a millennial, like my generation's brand of feminism, which was essentially very like girl bossy lean in like if you work hard you can have it all type of feminism i think i think that gen z women are sort of seeing that um correctly to be um a sham and sort of leaning into the opposite direction like just going totally further on the other side of the pendulum and that's where a lot of this is coming from i think a lot of a lot of the increasing conservatism for Gen Z women. It's this frustration with Me Too, this backlash against Me Too.

11:39And it's also this, I think, in some ways, justifiable backlash against the version of feminism that they have been inculcated with. So she's representative of something that is bigger than her. And her videos, the appeal of her videos goes beyond, hey, here's a woman saying a provocative thing about Blake Lively or a mean thing about Blake Lively. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. She's very good at what she does. Like, she's amazing at marketing. She has a way of distilling very complicated ideas into very simple packages. Another thing that she's really good at is she can sort of, like, adopt the language of journalism without actually doing traditional journalism.

12:19So she'll do research, as she puts it, which is essentially, like, culling together a lot of different stuff that she finds on Reddit or stuff that, like, she calls them her TikTok mommy sleuths, her fans center from TikTok. and she sort of presents them with the veneer of facts, even though she doesn't really like do the fact checking or the reporting to bear it out. So it's very persuasive. The fact that she's mainstream, I think, or like bordering on mainstream now is I think really reflective of the direction that the culture in general is going. And I also think that a lot of what we should take away from it has to do with like the erosion of the traditional media ecosystem and creators like Candace becoming more empowered.

13:07She's not delivering like the best information or the most reliable information, but it doesn't really matter because reliability is not really the metric anymore. The metric is who is keeping eyeballs on the page, who's saying the most shocking thing, who's saying the most extreme thing, who's packaging this in the best way. Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively, that story is kind of peaked. It's now on the downswing. So presumably she wants to continue capitalizing on this. What is she covering now? When I spoke to her, she was just launching a series that was sort of investigating the claims against Harvey Weinstein.

13:43I believe he was wrongfully convicted. I don't want to say Harvey Weinstein is a moral or an innocent man because that sounds like I'm saying he behaved well. But there is a difference between being immoral and being a person who abuses their power and being a person who was running the peninsula like his own personal brothel and being a cold-blooded rapist. She sort of frames it as like I'm the one journalist who's brave enough to listen to his side of the story.

14:08E.J. Dixon of The Cut. Harvey Weinstein back on trial in New York. But this time, the momentum behind Me Too has stalled and it may even be running in reverse. Coming up, Candace Owens and the Me Too backlash.

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17:31Today Explained Some breaking news now. New York's highest court this morning overturning Harvey Weinstein's 2020 rape conviction. Today's legal ruling is a great day for America because it instills in us the faith that there is a justice system. In the 2020 trial, the judge allowed prosecutors to present testimony from women who had accused Weinstein of sexual assault, but who weren't pressing charges against him in that trial. While the trial centers on the accusations of two women, many other women who were victimized by Weinstein have attended the trial. Each time an accuser is on the stand, they break down into tears.

18:16It's a consistent theme to see that they have to take a pause. So at the time, the argument was that their testimony would establish a pattern of behavior from Weinstein. But in the appeal last year, the judge was like, if you don't have enough evidence to actually charge him with the specific crimes that these women say he committed, then you really just shouldn't be presenting testimony about it at all. So now the whole trial has been invalidated and they're doing it over again without that corroborating testimony.

18:45All right, so Candace Owens is making the argument for him. Is she making the same argument that his lawyers are making? In a lot of ways, she is making a very similar argument to the one his lawyers are making. This woman spoke out, and she hates Harvey, and he said he grabbed her butt, and she said blah, blah, blah. None of these people brought us into the courtroom. They both involve a lot of just like the most spurious bad faith possible interpretations of everything that the women accusing Weinstein have done. And the ones that brought it into the courtroom, they were getting their cases dismissed for very valid reasons because they couldn't describe his penis, which is unique and one of a kind because he had gangrene and he had his balls removed.

19:25So they were all saying he made me fondle his balls, but Harvey Weinstein doesn't have balls. Candace Owens has basically two central arguments in Weinstein's defense. The first one is 130 women. I mean, I was like, something's just basic odds here. Something's going on. Someone's got to be telling the truth. And then I realized I didn't even know why he was in prison. I didn't even recognize how many women actually put him in prison. And it came down to just three. In all those cases, three women. I do want to quickly name. She has said that he was convicted on the basis of three women's stories.

19:59That's not correct. He was convicted on the basis of three women's stories in New York and five stories in L.A. So that's eight women's total. For most people, that would be a lot. But it is true that for Weinstein, that's only about 10 percent of his accusers who made it to the courtroom. You know, I'm beginning to believe that we might need an entirely separate judicial system to look at cases that involve sex workers. Because the details of this next woman's relationship with Harvey Weinstein, for which he earned, by the way, three years in prison, are absolutely offensive to my senses. She is making a lot out of the fact that a lot of the women who have accused Weinstein stayed in contact with him after their alleged attacks.

20:44How does someone get raped over five years? Some of them sent him friendly or affectionate messages or they asked for professional favors. So Candace Owens' take is that this proves that they were being what she calls sugar babies. So she pursued what I would describe as a sugar baby, sugar daddy relationship when she got to L.A. And she admits that Harvey was very nice to her. and that they had a quid pro quo set up of asking for professional advancement in exchange for sexual favors. Who is she convincing with this argument? For one thing, she has convinced Joe Rogan. I was eating elk steaks, watching Candace Owens on my fucking YouTube.

21:26I love her. He said that he used to believe that Weinstein was guilty and that Candace Owens has convinced him otherwise. It's crazy. She's like, I can't believe I'm on Harvey Weinstein's side. Right? Crazy. Like, I thought he was, like, guilty of, like, heinous crimes. And then you listen to it and you're like, wait, what? She has two big demographics that are compelled by her story. And they're actually kind of similar to Joe Rogan's audience, but maybe more feminine leaning. So she has a lot of people who identify as sort of, quote unquote, free thinkers, who don't like the narratives that are offered by the media and are maybe susceptible to some conspiratorial thinking.

22:06She's also got an audience of young women who are not particularly engaged with politics and are kind of just there for her takes on celebrities. Has Harvey Weinstein said anything about Candace Owens' crusade to exonerate him? Yeah, so Weinstein actually said that he originally tried to dissuade her from getting involved because of her history of anti-Semitism. Oh, wow. And he says, you know, I give a lot of money to the ADL. And I'm going, okay, here we go. But he has said that since then, after having a lot of conversations with her, he has changed his mind and he thinks that she's a star. And I said, yeah, well, I'm not your friend.

22:46And we obviously have nothing in common in terms of our politics, the causes that we support. But I can guarantee you that if I look into something and I believe that there is something there, I will stand up against the entire world to say something that I believe to be true. Around the time that Me Too was in the public consciousness, so seven or eight years ago, I'm guessing that someone like Candace Owens would not have been given a lot of leeway to defend someone like Harvey Weinstein. The public was disgusted overwhelmingly. People did not like this man. People wanted to see him pay. But now she's defending him and she's getting new fans by defending him.

23:31What do you think has changed in the culture that's making Candace Owens' defense of Harvey Weinstein not only acceptable but popular? This is something that I think we see happen a fair amount. Susan Faludi is a feminist scholar who first identified this phenomenon. She talks about it in her book Backlash, which came out in the early 90s. What I'm telling people is that in the last, at least the last decade, really ever since the modern wave of the women's movement got started, there has been this counter reaction or backlash to put women back in their place. Essentially, every time that in American culture, it looks as though women are making some sort of social or political progress, that's very rapidly followed by a period of intense backlash where people announce that this movement has gone too far.

24:35It's overreached. We have to roll it back and go back to a time when things are more sensible. One of the things that Susan Faludi says that I think is important to note here is that it really doesn't matter whether the feminist movement actually made any gains in this moment of apparent overreach. It's just that people think that things are changing. So in the Me Too movement, there weren't any real legislative changes. There were a few high profile arrests. There were a lot of think pieces, but it's hard to say that there was a big material shift in how American culture works. But the perception that there might have been is enough to drive this kind of backlash.

25:29Constance Grady, you can find her work at Vox.com. Gabrielle Burbay and Avishai Artsy made today's show. Amina El-Sadi edited, Laura Bullard fact-checked, Patrick Boyd and Andrea Christensdottir are our engineers. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.