Sean Penn is still vehemently against the #MeToo movement, this time insisting that the campaign against sexual misconduct didn’t inspire his new Hulu series, “The First.”
“I’d like to think that none of it was influenced by what they call the movement of #MeToo,” Penn, 58, told “Today” on Monday. “I think it’s influenced by the things that are developing in terms of the empowerment of women who’ve been acknowledging each other and being acknowledged by men. This is a movement that was largely shouldered by a kind of receptacle of the salacious.”
“We don’t know what’s a fact in many of the cases,” he explained. “‘Salacious’ is as soon as you call something a movement that is really a series of many individual accusers, victims, accusations, some of which are unfounded. The spirit of much of what has been the #MeToo movement is to divide men and women.”
“I’m gonna say that women that I talk to — not in front of a camera, that I listen to, of all walks of life — that there’s a common sense that is not represented at all in the discussion when it comes to the media discussion of it, the discussion where ‘if Sean Penn says this, so and so’s going to attack him for saying this, because of that.’ ”
The Oscar winner said he thinks the movement is “too black and white,” lamenting, “I don’t want it to be a trend, and I’m very suspicious of a movement that gets glommed on to in great stridency and rage and without nuance. And even when people try to discuss it in a nuanced way, the nuance itself is attacked.”
Penn previously denounced the #MeToo movement in his poorly received debut novel, “Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff,” in which he wrote, “Once crucial conversations/Kept us on our toes/Was it really in our interest/To trample Charlie Rose … Where did all the laughs go?/Are you out there Louis C.K.? … And what’s with this ‘Me Too’?/This infantilizing term of the day/Is this a toddler’s crusade?/Reducing rape, slut-shaming, and suffrage to reckless child’s play?”
C.K., 51, admitted to masturbating in front of several women, some of whom worked with him, against their will.
Rose, 76, was fired from “CBS This Morning” and PBS after more than 30 women accused him of sexual harassment and misconduct.
Penn was spotted dining out with Rose after the newsman was axed from the airwaves.