When it was announced that Ryan Seacrest was still going to do interviews on the red carpet at the Oscars, supporters of the Me Too movement, including the founder of the Me Too movement, Tarana Burke, were not pleased that Seacrest would be there on the red carpet, The Huffington Post reports.
“I feel like we should be celebrating the fact that people are finally paying attention to what we’ve been talking about for decades,” Burke told Variety on Saturday.
Addressing the Me Too movement at the Oscars and on the red carpet requires a lot of sensitivity and understanding, but it would be hard to accomplish that with someone like Seacrest on the red carpet.
Burke did not think it was fair for the women on the red carpet to feel obligated to state their position by either agreeing or declining to have an interview with Seacrest, Variety reports. “They really shouldn’t send him [to the Oscars],” Burke said of E!, the NBCUniversal network. “We shouldn’t have to make those choices of, ‘Do we or don’t we?’”
“This is not about his guilt or innocence,” Burke said. “It’s about there being an accusation that’s alive, and until they sort [it] out, it’s really on E! News and shouldn’t be on us. … It will let us know where they stand in terms of how respectful E! News is of this issue ― and of women.”
Seacrest, according to HuffPost, was accused by his former stylist for sexually harassing her over a period of seven years. The stylist, Suzie Hardy, said that she was fired in 2013 after reporting the allegations to the human resources department at E!, HuffPost reports.
Seacrest has denied the allegations, and E! said last week that they had conducted a third-party investigation and Secreast had been cleared of any wrongdoing, HuffPost reports.
But Seacrest was able to avoid any uncomfortable encounters on the red carpet, CNN reports.
While the E! News host did interview actresses such as Allison Janney, and Mary J. Blige, E! News did seem to rely more on hosts Kristin dos Santos and Giuliana Rancic.
When Ashley Judd and Mira Sorvino arrived on the red carpet, dos Santos talked about their involvement in the Me Too movement, not Seacrest, CNN reports. The two actresses did stop on the red carpet for interviews with other news outlets, it appears that they were not interviewed by Seacrest.
Overall, Seacrest appeared to have an uneventful evening on the red carpet, but it was not considerate of the network to potentially put women in an awkward position, like Burke noted.