Time’s Up will formally cease all operations this month
Formed in 2018 following the #MeToo Movement, the organization will allocate all its remaining funds to the Time's Up Legal Defense Fund
Aux News Time's Up
Five years after forming as an advocacy group for survivors of sexual harassment, Time’s Up is ending all operations and directing its remaining $1.7 million of funds towards the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund (TULDF), according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Founded in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the #MeToo Movement, the Hollywood-based organization became more widely known through the 2018 Golden Globe Awards, where those attending wore pins bearing the group’s name as a form of protest; Oprah Winfrey closed out the show with an impassioned speech referencing Time’s Up.
According to THR, the group went on to raise more than $22 million in its first ten months, with support from some of the entertainment industry’s biggest names like Winfrey, Meryl Streep, Shonda Rhimes, Katie McGrath and the Creative Artists Agency (CAA).
However, in the past few years, the organization has been under fire for a series of scandals. In August 2021, a report from the New York Attorney General revealed that former governor Andrew Cuomo sought advice from Time’s Up chief Tina Tchen and TULDF co-founder Roberta Kaplan after facing sexual harassment allegations. Both Tchen and Kaplan resigned, with the organization completely overhauling its remaining governing board and members as a result of the revelations.
Prior to the Cuomo situation, concerns had already been popping up over conflicts Time’s Up faced between its mission and internal decisions. In early 2021, 18 members of Time’s Up healthcare division resigned after the group’s handling of allegations against co-founder and former board member Esther Choo for failing to report sexual harassment complaints made by a co-worker at Oregon Health & Science University. Back in 2020, activists questioned the group’s decision to side with Oprah Winfrey (one of Time’s Up’s original donors) after she dropped out of an executive producer role for On The Record, a documentary centered around the accusers of Russell Simmons.
While the organization will no longer operate, TULDF, which is separately controlled by the National Women’s Law Center in Washington, D.C., will continue to function and allocate its resources toward sexual harassment cases.
24 Comments
There’s a joke in here somewhere.
It’s curtains for Time’s Up!No, wait…It’s the end of the line for Time’s Up!Goddammit no. Hold on…
Exit…stage right! Stage left, even!
(Exit…pursued by a producer)
I guess you could say the allotted temporal span has concluded.
So an Orthodox Rabbi, Gene Simmons, and the entire state of Nebraska walk into a Denny’s right before closing. . .
Lenny’s?
Oh, you’ve heard this one.
I’m fuckin’ dis’custid, ‘n he’s deep in dis’ pear!!!
They did their job, they helped Joe Biden and a bunch of rich Hollywood scumbags get away with rape and sexual assault.
Given the push pull in so many directions and everybody wanting them to be exactly what only they want them to be, it isn’t surprising that Time’s Up: The Company and BLM itself (lots of anti-semitism) not to mention Occupy: Wall Street: The Organization (totally ineffectual and basically non-existent) have all been massive disappointments. However, helping Cuomo try to get away with it was really really really really bad. Roberta Kaplan was huge in getting gay marriage, but now this will always be a black mark.
They’re reminders that responding poorly to money and influence is unfortunately commonplace.
hey, black marks matter!I’ll see myself out.
It’s probably only a matter of time before we find out that Greta Thunberg likes to Roll Coal in her pickup truck,
She clubs baby seals not even for their furs… BUT FOR FUN.
Turns out she planned the down fall of Andrew Tate because she didn’t want the competition to her human trafficking organization.
Make Times Up Yours.
hahahahah, deep cut
Zeynep Tufekci has written a lot about how these hashtag movements become crazy successful in the short term but, because they’re not forced to build the infrastructure and interpersonal connections which can get the organization through hard times, flame out long term. Everything from Arab Spring to BLM to, now, this. Interesting but sad.
My cynical self makes me wonder that those who have the drive and natural skill to build long lasting institutions get snapped up young to work for the seats of power in charge already.
I think the awful reputation of non-profits precedes itself and even change-minded young professionals think they can make a bigger difference – and simultaneously make a better living – in the private sector. So it becomes a vicious cycle.
It’s also important to distinguish between social movements (the #MeToo Movement; BLM movement) and organizations that share/co-opt the names of those movements (Time’s Up, Black Lives Matter — the org). Time’s Up was founded by wealthy celebrities, who may indeed have also suffered at the hands of sexual predators in Hollywood, also never leveraged their power to excise sexual predators from Hollywood. But also all of the movements are taking on extremely powerful and entrenched status quos. Of course they’re going to face pushback and lose steam. Real activism is hard, relentless work.
how do you make interpersonal connections for an organisation designed to bring down the sort of people who make “interpersonal connections”?
They got sucked into New York’s machine politics, for the worse.
It also seems to be harder to build this infrastructure on the progressive side of things. There’s a lot more bickering and people using accusations of insensitivity and so forth to try and climb the ranks and get money. A lot more people who seem to be incapable of understanding that groups might need to prioritize, and can’t serve everyone’s interests at once.