Gabriel Byrne says Liam Neeson is wrong about the Me Too movement.
Gabriel Byrne
Liam caused controversy recently when he declared that the wave of sexual harassment allegations in Hollywood has become "a bit of a witch hunt" but his friend and fellow Irish actor Gabriel Byrne thinks the movement has not gone far enough.
Speaking on Ireland's 'The Late Late Show', he said: "I love Liam, I've been a friend of his for many, many years and of course everybody is entitled to their opinions but I would say the movement has not gone far enough and I would say the pendulum has been so far in the opposite direction for so long, centuries and centuries of women silenced and discriminated against. When they say 'witch hunt', I don't like that phrase because it was women being burned alive because they were believed to be going against the system. I think that people who say it has gone too far are trying to stop it, trying to keep it contained. What we're talking about in the end is human rights and we're talking we're talking about 50 per cent of the population of the world and we're talking sisters, wives, mothers, it's not an abstract thing."
Gabriel, 67, also spoke of his own thoughts on disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein, who has been accused of sexually harrassing and assaulting a number of women, and admitted that while he knew Harvey was a "ferocious bully", he had no idea of the depths of his depravity.
He said: "He was an absolutely ferocious bully, that I knew, but I knew that about other people too. But what happened to those unfortunate women, and I know five of those women who were compromised by him, happened behind closed doors so nothing could be proved and it was he said/she said. And because Harvey had such incredible power, and we know from our own culture here that power and institutions are protected, even when the individual is involved, the institution has to survive. Harvey was a moneymaker but nobody really knew, and I agree with Meryl Streep when she says this, nobody really knew about the violence of his sexual behaviour. I think most people did not know."
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