Gretchen Mol Shut Down That Rumor About Her And Harvey Weinstein 

Back in the olden days of gossip when we had Nicole Richie instead of Sofia Richie and Courtenay Semel instead of Hailey Baldwin, there were blind items about an actress who was living a Lana Del Rey song by fucking for roles. Several blind item sites wrote about it.  But the 2009 blind item that Lainey at Lainey Gossip wrote about that rumor has been pulled out of the archives, dusted off and is making the rounds again because of the Harvey Weinstein grossness.

Back then, Lainey wrote about a married “major player” and the starlet who had sex with him for roles. The starlet’s career had dried up a little so she went back to the “major player,” but he was done with her and had moved on to a blonde TV actress with a “perky rack” who was trying to make a break into movies. On Monday, Vox interviewed Lainey about the Harvey situation, and her blind item was brought up. Lainey said that she’s never confirmed or denied who that blind item is about and she’s not planning to change that. But well, anybody with a PhD in blind items (hell, anybody with 2 blind item credits from a community college) knows it was probably about Gretchen Mol, Harvey Weinstein and Blake Lively. But Gretchen Mol has stood up to shit on that rumor and more.

In an op-ed piece for The Hollywood Reporter, Gretchen writes that like many, she was disgusted by Harvey using his power to prey on young women. Gretchen says that both Jodi Kantor of The New York Times and Ronan Farrow contacted her for their pieces. Gretchen didn’t have much to say about Harvey, so she knew her name wouldn’t make it to print. But when both Harvey exposé were splattered onto the internet, the old blind item came up again and so Gretchen feels like she should kill it for once and for all. You can read Gretchen’s entire piece here, but I put together the parts about the blind item below:

For 10 years or so, I’ve been aware of rumors that I had some kind of transactional relationship with Harvey Weinstein. They seemed to start on a gossip website that made money by peddling ‘blind’ items. A few facts had been taken from my Wikipedia page, were combined with stories about a movie mogul who was known for harassing women, quotes from “reliable sources” were added and a malicious, viral rumor was born.

Over the years, it was gleefully embroidered, becoming increasingly bizarre and baroque — but the salacious, slut-shaming and misogynist message to the fable remained the same: In Hollywood, a young woman must build her career by humiliating herself and sleeping with powerful men.

No. I did not exchange sexual favors with Harvey Weinstein, or anyone, for advancement in my career. I was never paid any settlement. The truth is that I have never been alone in a room with Harvey Weinstein. The extent of my interactions with him has been a handful of polite hellos at various premieres and award shows. This is in no way a defense of this person, it is merely a statement of fact.

I had heard similar rumors about other actresses and Harvey Weinstein for years, even before I heard them about myself. I knew that it was not true in my case, so I naively assumed it was equally false in general. The consistent implication was that actresses were eager for the bargain, that we wanted fame and fortune so desperately that we would make this kind of nauseating concession. This is another kind of misogyny, and blame-shifting.

It makes the victim complicit. The facts that are known are much simpler, and there is only one person to blame — a perverse, power-drunk man who sexually assaulted women.

Lainey also told Vox that it wasn’t only actresses, models and his female staff who feared Harvey. It was everyone in the business from reporters  to producers and on and on. Everyone is scared of the giant sweaty ball of ick. She also wrote the other day, in so many words, about being scared to spit out the real names in her stories because she got a scary warning letter from Harvey. Yeah, so it looks like Lainey is taking the answer to that blind item to the afterworld with her. Even then, if you went up to her in the afterworld and asked her who that BI is about, she’d look around first and make sure Harvey Weinstein didn’t make it to the same place.

Pic: Wenn.com