According to his Thursday interview with the New York Times, while he was running around smearing police officers as “murderers” in 2015, Quentin Tarantino was also covering up for and enabling Harvey Weinstein’s alleged crimes against women.

Because of his excessive use of the N-word, and those painfully awkward moments where he pretends to be black, Oscar-winning director Tarantino has struggled for decades to earn some respect from black audiences.

Well, almost exactly two years ago, with his next Weinstein Company feature, The Hateful Eight, just weeks from release, Tarantino cynically believed his ticket out of that mess, his ticket to expanding his audience within a black community now capable of producing box office hits all on its own, was to embrace the noxious, cop-hating Black Lives Matter movement.

Just four days after the murder of a New York City police officer, Tarantino made his first mistake when he stood before an anti-police rally in New York to say of our men in blue, “I am a human being with a conscience. And when I see murder, I cannot stand by, and I have to call the murdered the murdered and I have the call the murderers the murderers.”

The blowback was immediate. Police unions called for boycotts. Embarrassed by his own estranged son, even Tarantino’s father spoke out. The director’s reaction can best be described as belligerent. While claiming that he is not “anti-police,” Tarantino shrugged off the boycott and said he wanted to “go further with” his attacks on police officers, and soon he would.

He not only accused police officers of being guilty of “white supremacy,” he rejected the notion of “bad apples.” In a December interview with Entertainment Weekly, Tarantino said, “I completely and utterly reject the bad apples argument …  It’s about institutional racism. It’s about institutional cover-ups that are about protecting the force as opposed to the citizens.”

To no one’s surprise, The Hateful Eight tanked. After glowing red hot with his two previous features and biggest box office hits to date — 2012’s Django Unchained ($162 million) and 2009’s Inglorious Bastards ($121 million) — Hateful Eight bottomed out at $54 million, which probably failed to cover its promotional costs. Its worldwide gross added just another $100 million, which means The Weinstein Company probably lost money.

As if all that was not bad enough, we now know that while he was smearing law enforcement as an institution filled with murderers and white supremacists, Tarantino, according to his own words, was covering for and enabling what Breitbart News must describe as Harvey Weinstein’s alleged crimes, but what Tarantino believes were crime-crimes, like the “unwanted touching” of Tarantino’s girlfriend Mira Sorvino.

“I knew enough to do more than I did,” he said, citing several episodes involving prominent actresses. “There was more to it than just the normal rumors, the normal gossip. It wasn’t secondhand. I knew he did a couple of these things.

…

Tarantino said in the interview on Wednesday that he had heard about Mr. Weinstein’s behavior long before those articles. His own former girlfriend, Mira Sorvino, told him about unwelcome advances and unwanted touching by Mr. Weinstein.

…

“Everyone who was close to Harvey had heard of at least one of those incidents” chronicled in the first few articles, he said. “It was impossible they didn’t.”

When he and Ms. Sorvino started dating in 1995, she told him that not long before, Mr. Weinstein had massaged her without asking, chased her around a hotel room and even showed up at her apartment in the middle of the night[.]

Tarantino now claims to be ashamed of his silence, which is fine. At least he is not pretending, as I assume many others are, that he was ignorant of what was going on.

Nonetheless, back in 2015, with millions already in his pocket, with plenty of other producers willing to work with him, Tarantino still enabled a monster. Worse, while doing so, he smeared and smeared and smeared American police officers all in an effort to put more money into his and that monster’s pocket.

So what will it take for Tarantino to finally be ashamed of defaming and ginning up rage against those who do act when a crime is committed, who do risk their lives (not their next movie) to stop that crime, and do so for what Tarantino would describe as pocket change.

 

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