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After a week of much-contested silence, Saturday Night Live returned to the screen with a biting spoof on the series of sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein. The sketch consisted of an actress roundtable, featuring Leslie Jones as Viola Davis, Cecily Strong as Marion Cotillard, and Kate McKinnon as Debette Goldry—a fictional actress who has lived through Hollywood’s worst eras for women. “Back then, we had a secret code among us actresses to warn each other about creeps,” McKinnon quipped. “The code was: He raped me.” McKinnon continued, saying, “That way, if any men were listening, they would tune us right out!”
This came after the previous week’s episode was noticeably devoid of Weinstein references, leading to criticism that the show was softer on liberals than conservatives. While TheWrap reported last week that the Weinstein jokes the show had written were removed because they simply “didn’t land,” it’s clear that this week’s Weinstein spoof packed a punch. The writers certainly didn’t lack material: Just Saturday afternoon, the Oscar board voted in an unprecedented move to strip Weinstein of his lifetime membership.
“I actually did have one meeting with Harvey, okay. I was invited to his hotel room, and when I arrived, he was naked, hanging upside down from a monkey bar,” McKinnon’s Goldry recalls. “He tried to trick me into thinking that his genitals were actually his face. It almost worked; the resemblance is uncanny.” The show also took aim at the public response to the exposés. As more men condemned Weinstein based on the fact that they are “fathers of daughters,” McKinnon hit back with a characteristically incisive response: “Having a lady in your family doesn’t make you some kind of hero. I mean, even Hitler had a sister.”