Listen And Believe?: #MeToo Star Asia Argento Paid Hush Money After "Sexual Battery" of 17-Year-Old Male

via Instapundit:

   The Italian actress and director Asia Argento was among the first women in the movie business to publicly accuse the producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault. She became a leading figure in the #MeToo movement. Her boyfriend, the culinary television star Anthony Bourdain, eagerly joined the fight.
   But in the months that followed her revelations about Mr. Weinstein last October, Ms. Argento quietly arranged to pay $380,000 to her own accuser: Jimmy Bennett, a young actor and rock musician who said she had sexually assaulted him in a California hotel room years earlier, when he was only two months past his 17th birthday. She was 37. The age of consent in California is 18.
   That claim and the subsequent arrangement for payments are laid out in documents between lawyers for Ms. Argento and Mr. Bennett, a former child actor who once played her son in a movie.

Yeah...at the age of 17 I would have been happy--to say the least--to have sex with Asia Argento ca. 37-ish. So would most guys. So that's a fact that needs to be acknowledged right up front. What I'm getting at is: I'm skeptical that the having of sex with Ms. Argento has cost this guy almost $400k worth of pain and suffering. Not to mention $3.5 million. But, hey...dude is living on a mere $60k/year...abject poverty, obvs...  Anyway, though he could be telling the truth, I don't believe it just on the basis of the information contained in the NYT story. But, then, "listen and believe" is just more PC hogwash. I think such accusations should, ceteris parabus, be taken seriously when the accuser is female...slightly less so when the accuser is male...but "taken seriously" does not mean "automatically believed" in any case.
   So I'm not saying to lower the boom on Ms. Argento. I'm saying: stop treating accusations as proof, regardless of the sex of the alleged victim. People lie about and exaggerate and misunderstand such stuff all the time. Automatically believe is no better than automatically disbelieve.