Harvey Weinstein was once one of Hollywood’s kingmakers, basking in prestige at glitzy events before an abrupt fall from grace.

In Hollywood’s pantheon of power, Harvey Weinstein reigned like a deity. His name glimmered in film credits and award speeches, thanked as frequently as God himself.

For decades, the heavy-set movie mogul could do no wrong – he had the Midas touch, turning indie films into Oscar gold and starlets into superstars.

Politicians courted him; A-list actors praised him. Behind closed doors, however, whispers about the real Harvey Weinstein swirled. Some joked, nervously, about the “Harvey tax” actresses paid for stardom, or the rumors of a hotel room predator.

But on the surface, he remained untouchable – Hollywood’s golden idol with a sycophantic entourage polishing his pedestal.

In retrospect, the cracks were visible long before the statue toppled. Take the 2013 Oscars: host Seth MacFarlane quipped to the Best Supporting Actress nominees, “You five ladies no longer have to pretend to be attracted to Harvey Weinstein.”

Laughter rippled through the room, but it was the uneasy kind – a joke that cut too close to the bone. Still, Weinstein sat smugly in the audience, untouchable. He had built a Teflon-coated empire. Under Miramax and later The Weinstein Company, he produced prestige hits and collected Oscars like trading cards. As one analysis later noted, he was thanked or praised 34 times at the Academy Awards – “as many times as God”.

In Tinseltown’s pagan culture of statue worship, Harvey Weinstein was a god.

But gods can fall. And when they do, the impact shakes an industry. In October 2017, the ground gave way. The New York Times published a scathing exposé – decades of hushed payoffs to women in exchange for silence, a pattern of predatory behavior hiding in plain sight.

Days later, Ronan Farrow’s piece in The New Yorker added fuel to the inferno, revealing even more graphic allegations. Suddenly, Harvey went from Hollywood god to its greatest villain. The media devoured the story with morbid fascination. Headlines multiplied, each new accusation more lurid than the last. More than 80 women ultimately came forward – an avalanche of horror that crushed Weinstein’s empire overnight.

His fall was swift and absolute. Harvey’s own brother helped oust him from their company.

Studios stripped his name from projects. His wife, fashion designer Georgina Chapman, fled their marriage as the allegations mounted.

Paparazzi captured Weinstein – once the king strutting down red carpets – being perp-walked in handcuffs into a Manhattan courthouse, a grim smile on his stubbled face. It was a scene nobody could have imagined just a year prior.

#MeToo was in full swing, and Weinstein became its monstrous mascot, the high-profile predator finally brought to bay. He exchanged his tuxedo for a prison jumpsuit, his Oscars for an inmate ID number.

Hollywood, which had long enabled and even idolized him, scrambled to distance itself. The same insiders who only yesterday lauded “Uncle Harvey” now lined up to condemn him. It was as if a collective spell had been broken, revealing a rotting portrait behind the public persona.

Late-night hosts turned him into a punchline; former friends denied ever knowing him. “Hollywood turned its back on their beloved Harvey,” Candace Owens later observed, noting the abrupt about-face. It was a classic story of a king cast down to become a cautionary tale. Yet as satisfying as this fall from grace was to many, something about it nagged at the corners of the public’s mind.

How could a man who was once the center of the Hollywood universe be so utterly erased? Did the media feeding frenzy truly tell the full story, or just the most sensational version?

Down the Rabbit Hole of Doubt

Conservative, outspoken, and an avowed critic of Hollywood’s liberal elite, Owens had little in common with the disgraced producer. “Harvey Weinstein and I are an extremely unlikely pair,” she quipped, noting how he donated millions to Democratic causes and the Anti-Defamation League while she’s a Republican who’s literally on the ADL’s enemies list.

Yet, driven by a gnawing morbid curiosity and her instinct to question mainstream narratives, Candace found herself doing just that. What began as a single tentative phone call in 2023 morphed into a two-year clandestine correspondence.

In a plot twist worthy of a Hollywood thriller, the firebrand commentator became a sort of confidante to the fallen mogul. Owens herself was stunned by this turn of events: “Imagine [him] and I having conversations over a prison line,” she mused to her audience, inviting them to picture the sheer strangeness of those dialogues.

On one end of the line – a man vilified as a predator; on the other – a woman who had built a career on calling out predators (albeit usually of a different stripe). Their conversations, conducted in guarded tones and under the watchful eye of prison authorities, would form the backbone of something explosive: an investigative series titled “Harvey Speaks.”

Candace Owens had gone down the rabbit hole, and what she discovered there was deeply unsettling. As she peeled back layers of Weinstein’s case, she encountered evidence and testimonies that suggested the story wasn’t as black-and-white as the public had been led to believe.

Yes, Harvey Weinstein was no innocent – by multiple accounts he was a bully and a philanderer, a man who “was cheating on his wife… running the Peninsula hotel like it was a brothel” and treating underlings like dirt. Owens doesn’t sugarcoat Weinstein’s character flaws. “He was an immoral man,” she states emphatically. But the question looming over her investigation became:

Do even immoral men deserve a fair trial?

What Owens found made her blood run cold. In her chats with industry insiders – actresses, singers, even former boy-band members (the Backstreet Boys, she hints) – a pattern emerged. These sources whispered that Weinstein’s downfall was not a spontaneous reckoning but perhaps a coordinated hit.

A term pops up: “criminal network.” The #MeToo movement, laudable as its stated goals were, had in some instances been hijacked by what Owens describes as “a cartel of sorts operating in plain daylight”.

According to this theory, a cabal of powerful figures saw an opportunity in Weinstein’s vulnerability. Journalists would be the hitmen, taking aim with their pens (or keyboards). Lawyers would apply pressure in the shadows, orchestrating lawsuits and leaks. The endgame? Possibly a transfer of power – “using a movement about sexual abuse to wrangle publishing rights and ownership away from certain people,” Owens explains.

In other words, Weinstein wasn’t just brought down for his sins – he was taken out because someone bigger wanted him gone.

It’s a reversal of the narrative. In this version, Harvey Weinstein – who by all accounts was a sexual predator – might also have been a pawn in a higher stakes game among Hollywood kingpins.

As Owens digs deeper, she recalls a warning from none other than Michael Jackson. The King of Pop once hinted that mysterious forces in Hollywood punish those who oppose them. He was subsequently drowned in allegations of his own (so many and so sensational that they permanently tarred his legacy). Too many allegations. The pattern is eerily familiar to Owens now. “I believe the media has been used… to take down certain people or companies for reasons not immediately clear to the public,” she says.

Weinstein, she suspects, stepped on the wrong toes – perhaps he refused a deal, angered a rival, or simply was an inconvenient holder of Hollywood’s darkest secrets.

Could it be that Weinstein’s very grotesqueness made him the perfect target? An immoral man who made an easy villain, allowing far more immoral (or at least, more powerful) figures to hide in the chaos of his fall.

Owens confesses that reconciling this idea was hard for her: how to accept that Weinstein might have been “intentionally wrongfully convicted” on certain charges , even if he was guilty of others? It’s a morally gray quagmire. There’s no exonerating Weinstein for his mistreatment of women and colleagues – Owens is clear on that. But if, as she implies, evidence was manipulated or withheld in the legal process, then our justice system has a rot of its own to answer for.

Owens addresses the audience of citizen sleuths directly, urging “TikTokers, mommy sleuths” to join the fray and dig into the backgrounds of the journalists who took Weinstein down.

“When Harvey Weinstein had so much power,” Owens reminds them, “so many of you A-listers…went from calling him God to then throwing him under the bus.” She then drops the hammer: “I would imagine, Harvey Weinstein might have been your first phone call when you yourselves were in trouble.” Oof.

One can almost hear the gulp in the throats of certain celebrities reading that line. The implication is clear – Weinstein knows things. Perhaps things those stars did, or secrets they confided in him during desperate moments. And now that he’s cornered with nothing to lose, what’s stopping him from burning it all down out of spite or survival?

Which brings us to the most macabre prospect of all: Harvey Weinstein’s voice. Silenced so far by prison walls and court gags, Weinstein has nonetheless found a way to speak – through Candace Owens. And if what Owens hints at is true, Hollywood has reason to tremble. “That’s why you want him in prison. That’s why you never want him to speak,” she says to the power players who once banished Weinstein . “Harvey Weinstein probably knows where a lot of the Hollywood bodies are buried…because he probably helped bury them.” It’s a darkly comedic turn of phrase – literally burying bodies – yet in the context of Tinseltown’s endless scandals, it doesn’t feel purely metaphorical. There are careers, reputations, maybe even lives at stake if Weinstein starts naming names. The morbid curiosity that held the public rapt during his trial is now flipping: what dirt might Harvey dish out from his cell? In a karmic twist, those who cheered at his downfall may soon find themselves in his crosshairs.

The receipts

Candace Owens stands at the crossroads of this unfolding drama, equal parts investigator and instigator. With a touch of dark humor, she acknowledges how insane her quest might sound. She knows people will call her crazy for suggesting Weinstein’s Los Angeles conviction could be overturned next , or that he might have been a pawn rather than a criminal mastermind. But she confidently shrugs off the skeptics: “Trust me, I have the receipts,” Owens says, holding up thick binders of research on camera. “The receipts here are long and they are dark.”

As Harvey Weinstein’s retrial approaches, the stage is set for an epic confrontation. On one side, prosecutors will once again paint him as a predatory monster – and given Weinstein’s own admissions and apologies in the past, it’s hard to argue he isn’t. But now, on the other side, Owens and perhaps others will be scrutinizing every move, shining light on everything that doesn’t add up. It’s a high-wire act of truth-seeking in a circus of sensationalism. Owens has invited the public to watch closely, to not be blinded this time by the glare of celebrity scandal. In doing so, she’s tapping into a vein of skepticism that runs deep: how much of what we see in the media can we really trust? Are we, the audience, just consuming the story we’re fed, or can we discern the larger truth hiding behind it?

The question now is: who will be left standing when he’s done talking?

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