Madonna Discusses Harvey Weinstein And Donald Trump In NYTimes Interview
Next week, Madonna is releasing a new studio album, Madame X, her first since 2015’s Rebel Heart. She’s the subject of a long New York Times profile that was published today that’s as wide-ranging as it is interesting. The pop star and enigma talks about her come-up in New York City, motherhood, aging, and much more. She’s also, naturally, asked about some looming current topics, including Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump.
As for Weinstein, whose company distributed her 1991 documentary Truth Or Dare, she had this to say:
Harvey crossed lines and boundaries and was incredibly sexually flirtatious and forward with me when we were working together; he was married at the time, and I certainly wasn’t interested.
I was aware that he did the same with a lot of other women that I knew in the business. And we were all, ‘Harvey gets to do that because he’s got so much power and he’s so successful and his movies do so well and everybody wants to work with him, so you have to put up with it.’ So that was it. So when it happened, I was really like, ‘Finally.’ I wasn’t cheering from the rafters because I’m never going to cheer for someone’s demise. I don’t think that’s good karma anyway. But it was good that somebody who had been abusing his power for so many years was called out and held accountable.
And as for Trump, who she has not been a fan of for a long time, she clarified that she definitely never asked him out on a date, as has been rumored in the past, and adds that Trump falls into the classic alpha male stereotype of being weak:
They’re overcompensating for how insecure they feel — a man who is secure with himself, a human who is secure with themselves, doesn’t have to go around bullying people all the time.” What about alpha women, I asked? “It’s the same,” she said. “It’s good to be strong, but again, it’s always about, where’s that strength coming from? What are your intentions? What is the context that you’re using your strength in? Are you abusing your power? Women can also abuse their power. And if that’s also backed up by a lack of intelligence, emotional or intellectual, a lack of life experience, a lack of compassion, then it’s really a bad mixture.
There’s a lot more in the profile about Madonna and her upcoming album, Madame X. You can read it here.
One fun fact to leave you with: Among Madonna’s many artworks and memorabilia, she has a handwritten lyric sheet of John Lennon’s “Imagine” — she’s covered the song — hanging above the toilet in her home.