Harvey Weinstein’s defense of the indefensible dates back to the fall of man

Movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, who produced a slew of Oscar winners like Pulp Fiction and Sex, Lies and Videotapes, was cast out of the motion picture academy on Saturday. The 54-member board of governors, including Stephen Spielberg and Tom Hanks, voted to “immediately expel” as a consequence of multiple accusations of decades-long sexual harassment and rape. What does Weinstein have to say for himself? “We all make mistakes,” he told ABC News.

This is no faux pas

Mistakes? Typographical errors are mistakes. Violating women is far from an inaccuracy.

Yet dodging culpability as Weinstein does is standard practice these days. Donald Trump does it routinely. When he makes false statements and the media report it, he calls it “fake news” and faults reporters as “damned dishonest.” None of this is to say, however, that denying wrongdoing is a modern phenomenon. It dates back to the beginning of the world when Adam and Eve got booted out of Paradise after eating the forbidden fruit.

Excuses, excuses

Eating the forbidden fruit wasn’t the only sin that drove the expulsion. It was the first couple’s defense. When asked why he ate from the Tree of All Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam not only shifted blame to Eve, but also to his Creator. "The woman whom You gave me, she gave me the fruit of the tree, so I ate." And when Eve was asked, she said, “The serpent tricked me into eating it.”.

They didn’t own up

Adam and Eve knew better. They were warned: "You may eat all you like of every tree in the garden — but of the Tree of All Knowledge you may not eat...” Rabbi Stephen S. Pearce, faculty member of the University of San Francisco, has written that their big sin was trying to escape blame. And according to Pearce, that shying away from accountability not only continues today, but it has also become worse.

In his words, “The loss of personal accountability defines our age.”

Twisting the truth

And when truth gets twisted as Adam and Eve did with their excuses, those twists get even more mangled over time. You have only to look at Old Master paintings of the Eden story to see how distorted the truth became. Consider two famed artists who pictured Adam as innocent and Eve as the evildoer.

In both "The Temptation of Adam” by 16th century artist Jacopo Tintoretto and “The Fall of Man” by 17th century artist Jacob Jordaens, you see the world’s first man in a passive posture. His body language suggests that he’s recoiling from Eve who is pictured offering the apple with an emphatically aggressive stance. She’s becomes the bad guy in the story.

They had it coming

Can this be why literature has given us female monsters like Medea and Lady Macbeth, and why a man like Weinstein commit hostile acts against women – because they have it coming? Is this why he can say with a straight face to a news camera, “We all make mistakes”?