Culture

You Need To Watch Yael Stone Speak About Geoffrey Rush And The Complexity Of Consent

"Consent is very complicated."

by Sam Langford  18 December 2018
Yael Stone raises new allegations about Geoffrey Rush.

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Last night, the ABC’s 7.30 aired an extraordinary interview. Orange Is The New Black actor Yael Stone appeared on the program to share new allegations of inappropriate workplace behaviour by Geoffrey Rush, describing her own experience working with Rush almost a decade ago.

Stone alleged that Rush did a number of things that made her uncomfortable when they worked together on the play The Diary of a Madman in 2010-11. The allegations include that Rush held a shaving mirror above a shower cubicle in order to see Stone naked in the next stall, that he danced naked in front of her, that he stroked her back intimately and that he sent her a series of sexual text messages. Rush denies the allegations.

In addition to the allegations, Stone offered a thoughtful and compassionate perspective on society’s problems with the idea of consent, and where we need to go from here. She was able to articulate the way power imbalances shape whether people are able to truly consent to different actions, and the way that these same power imbalances can make it hard for perpetrators — men in particular — to see that their actions have crossed a line.

The nuance of Stone’s perspective became clear when 7.30 host Leigh Sales asked her whether “the fact you didn’t complain strongly at the time may have led [Rush] to believe that not only did you not have a problem with his behaviour, but that you actually welcomed it?”

“I think that there is great complexity in these issues,” Stone responded. “I think that talking in this way about the complexities of these issues is really critical for us to all move forward collectively, culturally to make a healthier world around this kind of stuff.”

“So, yes, I can say that would have been very confusing for him. I would add that consent is very complicated. And almost impossible in a dynamic where the power is so drastically imbalanced. And I would say in any working environment, where there is that imbalance of power, the subordinate doesn’t have a great opportunity for expressing themselves freely. So the onus is on the more powerful person not to put the subordinate in that position.”

That response is already being hailed as one of the most insightful summaries of this year of #MeToo: victims make allegations, alleged perpetrators deny them, and we reach an impasse.

By acknowledging that the same problem — a dire lack of meaningful conversation about consent — leads to both problematic behaviour and that behaviour seeming normal to many, Stone points to a way to move forward and stop this from happening altogether.

As she puts it herself in the interview, “I saw [Rush] as a friend. And a really respected colleague. And we’d become close over the years. He’s an incredibly fun, charming man.” She told 7.30 that she actually wrote a private email to Rush months ago, to finally “say to him, in very clear terms, things happened at made me uncomfortable.”

“I wrote in the conclusion of that email, that this was written in the spirit of healing and that I hoped we could come together privately and work through it,” Stone said. “Unfortunately I didn’t receive any response.”

That is unfortunate, because a frank conversation about consent, power, and the subtle ways our behaviour can make the people around us uncomfortable or unsafe is pretty clearly what we need right now. You can watch Yael Stone’s full interview over at 7.30, and we highly recommend you do.