Moira Donegan

From The Blog
7 January 2020

A dense crowd of reporters surrounded the women on the damp pavement across the street from the criminal courthouse in lower Manhattan. It was the first day of Harvey Weinstein’s criminal trial, and some of his most famous accusers had come outside to address the cameras. In the scrum, iPhones were extended upwards to record the women’s statements; boom mics hung overhead. Rosanna Arquette stepped up to the microphone. She has accused Weinstein of sexually assaulting her in a meeting. ‘These abusers make it unsafe for women to go to work every morning, to take a business meeting, to report a crime without retaliation,’ she said. ‘We are here to ensure that the focus of the criminal case is on the perpetrator – the perpetrator’s actions and not his victims.’ She was interrupted by a shout from the back of the crowd: a brief fistfight had broken out, as two cameramen jostled for the same shot of Arquette.

From The Blog
22 August 2018

Jimmy Bennett can’t drive, so a family member dropped him off at Asia Argento’s hotel in May 2013. Legal documents leaked to the New York Times allege that Argento gave him alcohol and sexually assaulted him. Bennett was 17, Argento 37. They had met when Bennett was seven, and cast as Argento’s child in The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, which she also directed. They seem to have had an unnerving habit of referring to one another as mother and son. Bennett brought a lawsuit against Argento, who denies his claims,

From The Blog
23 July 2018

Cynthia Nixon stood in the middle of a crowd of several hundred onlookers, holding a wire coat hanger. Donald Trump had nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and the likelihood was that Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalised abortion across the US, would soon be struck down. Nixon, a former actress and now a candidate for governor of New York State, wanted to emphasise the significance of the appointment. ‘This is something that women in this state and this country were driven to use out of fear and desperation,’ she said, brandishing the coat hanger. ‘Performing abortions on themselves, often with devastating effects on their health and sometimes their life.’ Nixon described the ‘awful and scary’ abortion her mother had had in New York in the days before legalisation. ‘She wanted to make sure that I knew her history, so I can fully value how crucial reproductive freedom is.’

From The Blog
14 December 2017

It was snowing heavily, in New York’s first real snowstorm of the winter, and the women leading the demonstration at Columbus Circle had to cover their microphones with plastic bags to keep them from getting wet, muffling their chants. There were roughly 150 protesters standing with hunched shoulders while fat snowflakes dampened their caps. Their signs had pictures of growling pussycats and the ♀ symbol with a clenched fist in the centre. A woman with facial piercings had draped a large sheet over her shoulders: on the back, it was embroidered with the words ‘CUNT QUILT’, along with a diagram of a uterus made from pink and red underwear.

From The Blog
5 April 2017

Everyone was wearing the same T-shirt: black, with a pink triangle near the neck and white letters underneath, SILENCE = DEATH. The crowd was about three hundred strong, filling a side street in New York’s West Village, and many were carrying the same image on signs. An elderly man in a leather jacket spoke into a microphone. ‘In 1989 we shut down trading on the New York Stock Exchange, the only time trading has ever been stopped by a mass demonstration!’ There were cheers. ‘In 1992 we held the Ashes Action, where we dumped the ashes of Aids victims onto the White House lawn – right in George Bush’s backyard!’

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