Madoff-style unwinding of job positions and cash compensation in Hollywood and elsewhere?

Our media has spent the last couple of months highlighting Hollywood’s sex-for-advancement system (formerly the “casting couch“). Our culture now considers this an illegitimate method of allocating scarce positions and the managers of this method are being punished with job loss, civil lawsuits, and criminal prosecution.

What about those who advanced under this system and those who were left behind? The media has highlighted some people who had sexual encounters with decision-makers in Hollywood as victims, but shouldn’t people who didn’t have sex also be considered victims? At least some of them failed to get a job that would otherwise have obtained.

[See “Harvey Weinstein accused of rape by actor Natassia Malthe” for example:

After the incident in Los Angeles, Malthe said she called Weinstein and told him being in his movies was “not worth what he wanted to exchange”. … Malthe said he barged into her room and named A-list actors whose careers he had made because they slept with him.

“Actresses should not have to demean themselves to be successful,” she said. Malthe explained that she had experienced harassment from many men in Hollywood, but the experiences with Weinstein were “the worst”.

]

Let’s consider the unwinding of the Madoff hedge fund fraud. It was determined that Madoff was operating an illegitimate system for allocating profits to investors. The managers of the allocation system were punished with fines and imprisonment. Those who profited from the system had their profits taken away (“clawed back”). Those who were losers under the system are being compensated to the extent possible (but Bloomberg notes that the administrators of the unwinding are doing better than the victims!).

Is it time for an unwinding like this in Hollywood? Once Harvey Weinstein and friends are securely in prison or hiding out in a country that won’t extradite them, we can get from them the names of film industry workers whom they advanced because of sexual favors exchanged. (This assumes that producers, directors, and top actors can actually remember the names of most of the folks with whom they had sex.) We can also see if they remember the names of qualified people who didn’t get jobs because they walked out of hotel rooms upon seeing His Majesty in a bathrobe. Then it is time for a job swap?

Related:

• If you are against inequality can you also be against Harvey Weinstein?
• May 1998 Vanity Fair article: “Clearly the Monica Lewinsky scandal is not a case of illegal sexual harassment. But if Clinton had the relationship with her that the available evidence suggests he had, it flew in the face of the law’s spirit and reasoning: among other things, by potentially penalizing all the interns with whom he did not have affairs.”