When will women stop being blamed for what men do? More specifically, when will wives, or former wives, of disgraced, sometimes criminal, men stop being hounded, punished and scapegoated by malevolent whispering campaigns about “how much they knew”?
The latest bloodied wifely scalp belongs to Georgina Chapman, the British fashion designer behind Marchesa, and now former wife of Harvey Weinstein, with whom she had two children. After months of lying low, Chapman seems to be attempting a public rehabilitation. Scarlett Johansson wore a Marchesa gown on the red carpet and there’s been a sympathetic interview in US Vogue, in which Chapman explained that she had never known anything about Weinstein’s activities.
Unfortunately for Chapman, there will always be those who hiss: “She must have known.” But of course! The first thing that relentless sexual predators tend to do is go home and tell their wives what they have been up to. Except they don’t, do they? Such men wouldn’t want their wives to know about the adultery, never mind anything else.
Nor does the “must have known” thesis take into account the sociopathic personality, which is so skilled at donning masks, up to and including that of “devoted husband and father”. There’s the sense that, for someone as disturbed as Weinstein, perhaps part of the dark thrill lay in pulling off a double, even triple or quadruple, life.
All this considered, “must have known” swiftly starts looking like “last to know?”. A fat lot of good this does Chapman. She’s joined the hate-battered, vitriol-splattered pantheon of women who have been indelibly stained by their mere association with notorious men, whose activities range from grotty to criminal to unimaginable. From Harold Shipman’s widow (hounded and speculated about), Rolf Harris’s ill wife (who had to lie low), to infamous cases such as Hillary Clinton, in a surreal turnaround, betrayed wives sometimes seemed to draw more flak than their men.
On it goes: Dominique Strauss-Kahn (his then-wife tarnished); President Trump (though, in the very special case of Donald, daughter Ivanka gets to share the heat with Melania). It seems that the impulse to “cherchez la femme”, to blame-share for something a man has done, never falters. In the US, even the woman who was the first love of the suspected Golden State Killer, Joseph James DeAngelo, who broke his heart, allegedly inspiring a murderous rampage, is said to have gone into hiding.
This is what Chapman is up against. It’s as though innocence is not enough, that in certain quarters, nothing will sate the primal urge for women linked to such men to share their fate, almost to the point of being “buried alive”. It’s time to wonder: how feminist or fair is it for Chapman (her reputation and career) to “perish” with her former husband? Perhaps, even to ask: “Her too?”