It's not just Harvey Weinstein on trial, but the entire #MeToo movement

Even if he really is a monster, that doesn't make all men monsters, writes Celia Walden. Photo / Getty Images

Comment: As Harvey Weinstein headed into court this week to faces allegations of raping one woman and performing a forcible sex act on another, the New York Times billed the case "Larger Than One Man."

And if it's too soon to call this the trial of the decade, there's no doubt that this is larger not just than one man, but the 80-plus women who have accused the Hollywood producer of everything from sexual harassment to assault over the past two years. Larger, even, than what actually happened in those hotel rooms.

After all, this is the case that sparked a revolution, exposing the prevalence of sexual harassment in the workplace and – we hoped – deterring prominent and powerful men from committing similarly heinous acts. And for many, the prosecution will straightforwardly be on the side of the angels.

But we're about to discover the downside of this and every cause célèbre. Because over the next few days, weeks and months, it won't just be Weinstein on trial, but the #MeToo movement.

Weinstein's defence strategy is a legal no-brainer. Using the text messages and emails sent by some of his accusers, the producer aims to dismantle every claim made against him. People who get assaulted, his lead attorney Donna Rotunno will argue, simply do not maintain contact with their perpetrators – much less thank them or gush about their "smile and beautiful eyes", as one alleged victim did.

And her "common sense argument" is likely to be supported by all those who have suspected Weinstein's accusers of either lying or embellishing their accounts from the start. Hollywood's long-standing sex-for-work 'casting couch' may be an ugly practice, that same camp believes, but it's a consensual one.

If I talk of 'camps', it's because ever since actress Alyssa Milano stuck a hashtag in front of the words MeToo on 15th October 2017, we've divided ourselves up into disciples and deniers, men against women. Politicised and polemicised to a degree that has made #MeToo less of a quest for justice than an abstract concept, we've often only succeeded in obscuring rather than clarifying the truth. It was this movement, let's not forget, that spawned the aberration "my truth".

It's no wonder that after a period in which #MeToo deniers and dissenters felt too scared to speak up, they then grew as loud and shrill as director Terry Gilliam, who in an outburst at the weekend said that he was "tired, as a white male, of being blamed for everything that is wrong with the world", and declared #MeToo "a witch-hunt."

"I really feel there were a lot of people, decent people, or mildly irritating people, who were getting hammered. That's wrong. I don't like mob mentality."

Just as #MeToo has pitted men against women, and the Trayvon Martin case in the US blacks against whites, that mob mentality is a direct consequence of the cause célèbre in a social media age (just imagine how much more polarising the Dreyfus Affair would have been had Twitter existed back in the 19th century).

Already the case of the British teenager found guilty last week of lying about being gang raped by 12 Israeli youths at a budget hotel in Ayia Napa is following a similar divisive pattern, with tribes and factions elevating it above the known facts on social media.

It may be that the 19 year-old Brit is telling the truth – or it may be that she's lying. But she should no more be made into a figurehead representing the whole of her sex than Weinstein's 80 accusers, whatever emerges over the next few days and weeks.

And if the producer is the monster he's been made out to be, that doesn't make all men monsters. It's true that Weinstein has always been "larger than." There's the girth, the wealth and the influence – besides which: how many men do you know who masturbate into plant pots? But in making him "larger than" the actions and crimes he did or didn't commit, we risk undoing much of the good to come out of #MeToo. Causes célèbres do have the power to highlight or expose larger truths, but in attempting to do that they should never overrule the truth.