As the world grapples with the recent revelations of Matt Lauer’s alleged inappropriate sexual behavior towards his colleagues and the button under his desk that turned his workspace from an office to a playground for sexual misconduct, many have Taken to Twitter to share their thoughts. This includes Geraldo Rivera:
Mercifully, Rivera appears not to know how to thread tweets, but if you click on that first tweet, you’ll see that his thoughts continue. Here’s another:
Seems like Geraldo cares a lot about this issue. Why ever could that be?
In 1991, Geraldo Rivera published a memoir called Exposing Myself, which, per the Washington Post’s review of the book, promised to reveal what “his public was dying to know about his alleged conquests of Bette Midler” and other luminaries. In the above clip—recently tweeted by reporter Kinsey Schofield— of Bette Midler talking about Rivera, though, her side of the story is different.
Per the Washington Post, here’s what Rivera had to say about his encounter with Midler: “We were in the bathroom, preparing for the interview, and at some point I put my hands on her breasts.” Consent, implied or otherwise, is murky in Rivera’s description, but what Midler tells a pink-suited Barbara Walters is much more distressing:
“One thing I do remember—and that was how I met Geraldo—and that was not funny,” Midler says. “Should I tell you?” When Walters responds with a steady “Why not?” Midler demurs, saying that she doesn’t want to “get in trouble,” but at Walter’s encouragement, she relays the following tale.
Geraldo and his producer came to do an interview with me, in the ‘70s, in the early ‘70s. This was when he was very hot. He and his producer left the crew in the other room, they pushed me into my bathroom, they pushed two poppers under my nose, and proceeded to grope me...I did not offer myself up on the altar of Geraldo Rivera. He was unseemly.
Midler laughs it off, eventually saying that had she known Rivera was going to be a “slimy talk show host,” twenty years later, she “never would have let him in the room.”
DISCUSSION
Funny how so many apologists keep parroting on about “why didn’t these women say anything sooner?”, and apart from the fact that there are a million valid reasons that most victims don’t come forward at the time, there’s also the fact that actually a lot of them did and were utterly ignored because no one gave a shit at the time.