Dec 12, 2017 4 min read

When The New York Times unleashed its meticulously reported story in the first week of October about the serial sexual predations of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, there was every reason to believe that the story would be an isolated one, that what had apparently been long whispered about in the upper echelons of the movie and media industries was at last being aired.

And, it should be noted, part of the reason it was coming to light was that some of the accusers believed they no longer had that much to fear from the 65-year-old Weinstein, that his days as an Oscar-grabbing power broker were on the wane, his once unfailing ability to make or break careers mostly a thing of the past.

The revelations about Weinstein, as revolting and vivid though they may be, are now buried under layer upon layer of revelations about other prominent and influential men in the entertainment, media and political universes. Rather than Weinstein being a singular case, he turned out to be the tip of a large and long-undetected iceberg.

U.S. Sen. Al Franken, the Minnesota Democrat and former “Saturday Night Live” star, resigned last week after accusations piled up of untoward behavior toward various women. The career of Oscar-winner Kevin Spacey has almost certainly been destroyed as a result of allegations about groping and other forms of sexual misconduct by the actor. Charlie Rose, the well-respected interviewer who hosted a program on PBS and more recently had been a co-host on “CBS This Morning,” was shown the door after several accusers came forward with tales of workplace misbehavior. Perhaps even more stunning, given his greater preeminence in the early-morning television derby, was the unceremonious ouster of Matt Lauer from NBC-TV’s “Today Show,” after onetime subordinates came forward with tales about, among other things, Lauer exposing himself in his office.

Comedian Louis C.K. Political analyst Mark Halperin. James Levine, the music director of New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Author and public radio favorite Garrison Keillor. There might well be more.

There have been times in the past when we have theoretically been moving toward a “conversation” about sexual harassment. Over the last couple of years, Bill Cosby’s image as a homespun family man (and, to an extent, a righteous scold), has been leveled over allegations that he repeatedly drugged and molested women, using the possibility of career assistance and advancement as a lure. Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel was given the boot last year because of his unseemly conduct toward women. We can also go back 26 years, to the Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, when he faced allegations of sexual harassment by Anita Hill when she worked with him at the U.S. Education Department and at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

But it could very well be that this moment is truly a turning point, the juncture where workplace behavior is changed for the better.

In its “Person of the Year” cover story about what it calls the “silence breakers” who have come forward about sexual harassment and assault, Time magazine notes that “like ‘the problem that has no name,’ the disquieting malaise of frustration and repression among postwar wives and homemakers identified by Betty Friedan more than 50 years ago, this moment is born of a very real and potent sense of unrest. … This reckoning appears to have sprung up overnight. But it has actually been simmering for years, decades, centuries. Women have had it with bosses and co-workers who not only cross boundaries but don’t even know that boundaries exist … They’ve had it with the code of going along to get along.”

And not a minute too soon.