Олон нийтийн анхаарлыг татсан олны танил эрхмүүдийн эргэн ирэлт ба нийгмийн ой санамж

Recent comeback efforts by comedian Louis C.K. and actor Armie Hammer may be moving in different directions — but both are helping to disprove the adage that there are no second acts in American lives.

And celebrities who faced “cancellation” over bad behavior that was alleged, acknowledged — or even witnessed in real time by millions of TV viewers — can now revive their careers in record time, experts say.

“You have a society that is perpetually overstimulated and overly distracted, and their short-term memory, or collective memory, seems to be very nil at this point,” Ryan McCormick, a media relations specialist in New York City, told The Independent.

“So, somebody could have committed something pretty bad, and they’ll maybe give them a chance — not because they want to, but because they really don’t have the memory.”

C.K.’s latest Netflix special premiered last month, after accusations that he masturbated in front of several women — which he promptly admitted were “true” — led the streaming platform to drop him for nearly a decade. Hammer also appeared last month in his first top-billed movie role, the controversial European thriller Citizen Vigilante, since facing a series of troubling sexual misconduct allegations in 2021.

Former Universal Pictures executive Paul Hardart told The Independent that the American public wasn’t “totally forgiving,“ as demonstrated by Maine Democrat Graham Platner’s forced withdrawal as a U.S. Senate candidate over a former girlfriend’s sexual assault allegation, which he denies.

But, Hardart said, “the news cycle is so fast now that we move on much quicker than we used to.”

“I think Donald Trump is a good example of this,” he said.

“I was listening this morning to how people are up in arms about the amount of money he’s made” since being reelected president, Hardart said, referring to Trump’s earnings of at least $2.2 billion during his first year back in the White House.

“But we’re going to move on to something else really quickly,” Hardart added.

The former film exec, now a distinguished clinical professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, also noted recent remarks by Vice President JD Vance’s, who said the Watergate scandal that forced President Richard Nixon from office in 1974 would be “like a 12-hour story” were it to happen now.

“I think maybe we’re just more forgiving because the news cycle is so fast that we can’t keep up,” Hardart said.

Stranger Things star Winona Ryder’s example highlights a contrast to the current short-memory culture, with her 2001 shoplifting arrest impacting her career for more than a decade. until her trumphant return in Netflix’s Stranger Things.

In a 2024 interview with UK Esquire, the 1990s “It Girl” actor recalled the “giant effect” of the scandal on her life. “There was a period when I was not in season,” she recalled, that lasted “like 10, 12, 15 years.”

But in 2022, when Oscar-winner Will Smith stunned the world by slapping comedian and actor Chris Rock live on broadcast TV at the Academy Awards ceremony, it took little more than two years before he was back on the silver screen in the fourth installment of his Bad Boys movie franchise.

That 2024 blockbuster, Bad Boys: Ride or Die, sold in excess of $193 million worth of tickets in the U.S. and almost $405 million worldwide, making it the second most successful of the series, behind the $426.5 million raked in by 2020’s Bad Boys for Life, according to the Box Office Mojo website.

Sony Pictures put the movie on pause following the slap, according to The Hollywood Reporter, but Smith and costar Martin Lawrence used a social media video to triumphantly announce it was back on track just 10 months after the incident.

“It was a cold, calculated risk assessment,” New York City-based publicist John Kwatakye-Atiko told The Independent. “Basically, the Sony global box office projections mathematically eclipsed the PR friction of the Oscar slap.”

Smith now has another leading role lined up as an FBI agent in the action thriller Supermax, with Amazon MGM Studios paying about $70 million for the rights to stream the movie worldwide, Deadline reported in May.

A Sony Pictures representative didn’t respond to an inquiry from The Independent.

California public radio host Sam Sanders drew a blunt conclusion about celebrity comebacks during an interview with The Independent.

“The entertainment industry is amoral,” said Sanders, whose weekly, pop culture-focusedThe Sam Sanders Show is broadcast by KCRW in Santa Monica.

“We think that everyone is concerned with right and wrong. Hollywood is obsessed with money and power. If you have money and you’re powerful, it doesn’t matter if you’re wrong. That is the Hollywood algorithm, the entertainment industry calculus.”

In admitting the accusations against him, C.K. said he’d convinced himself “that what I did was okay because I never showed a woman my d*** without asking first” but had since realized that he had power over the women because “they admired me.”

“And I wielded that power irresponsibly,” he wrote in 2017.

Hammer, who’s reportedly expressed regret over starring in Citizen Vigilante, saw his career start to unravel in early 2021 when a series of text messages in which he discussed sexual fantasies involving violence and cannibalism were posted on social media.

He was subsequently accused of rape by a former partner and investigated by the Los Angeles Police Department, with authorities concluding in 2023 that they couldn’t successfully prosecute the case because of the “complexity of the relationship and inability to prove a non-consensual, forcible sexual encounter.”

Last year, Hammer — who’s adamantly denied the rape allegation — told documentarian and podcaster Louis Theroux that he’d been “selfish, and inconsiderate, and an a******, and a cad” in his relationships, adding, “Does it make me a d***? Absolutely. Like, I have no problem admitting that: I was a d***.”

“But that’s not illegal,” he said.

The entertainers were part of a reckoning sparked by the #MeToo movement that rocked Hollywood and a host of other industries, beginning in 2017, when sexual misconduct allegations against Harvey Weinstein were revealed in Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting by The New York Times and The New Yorker.

The onetime movie mogul was subsequently convicted of raping a hairstylist and actor in 2013 and of forcing oral sex on a production assistant in 2006 by a New York jury in 2020. Two years later, jurors in Los Angeles also found him guilty of raping a model and actor in 2013.

Weinstein, who’s imprisoned on sentences that initially totalled 39 years, denies any wrongdoing and has mounted a series of appeals that resulted in two retrials in New York that eliminated his rape conviction there, with resentencing scheduled for September 30. His California conviction was upheld last month but he won a resentencing that has yet to be scheduled.

But other major Hollywood figures who faced #MeToo allegations, including actors Kevin Spacey and James Franco and comedian Aziz Ansari, are now also attempting mainstream comebacks.

Spacey was accused of multiple instances of sexual misconduct and predatory behavior, beginning with actor Anthony Rapp’s 2017 allegation that Spacey made a sexual advance toward him in 1986, when Rapp was 14 and Spacey was 26.

The accusations led to Spacey’s firing from Netflix’s hit show House of Cards, which had to be put on hold and rewritten with Robin Wright as the star of its sixth and final season, and was also erased from the Ridley Scott thriller All the Money in the World, in which his scenes as oil tycoon J. Paul Getty were reshot with Christopher Plummer in the role.

Spacey was later acquitted of criminal charges in England and found not liable for civil allegations in the U.S., before striking a confidential settlement in March with three British men who accused him of sexual assault. Last month, he told talk show host Bill Maher that he now feels “much more welcomed” in Hollywood after years of working in Europe.

In May, Franco told Deadline that he’d scored his first role in a “big studio movie” since striking a $2.2 million settlement with former female students at his since-shuttered acting school.

Days later, Variety reported that Franco would play a supporting character in John Rambo, a prequel to the five bloody Rambo action movies which starred Sylvester Stallone from 1982 to 2019.

Franco has since posted a series of bizarre videos on social media in which he appears unhinged and on Monday, he displayed a montage of black-and-white clips that appeared to show an alien-like figure peering into a window.

Kwatakye-Atiko, the New York City publicist, speculated that the videos might be a “gimmick,” “something he’s doing to build up anticipation for his next project” or a sign of a genuine mental health issue.

A Franco representative didn’t return an inquiry from The Independent.

Ansari faced calls for cancellation after a woman with whom he went on a date in 2017 later told a reporter that she “felt really pressured” to perform oral sex on him, which she did, after he performed oral sex on her.

The 2018 report prompted debate over the issue of “affirmative consent,” with CBS News chief Bari Weiss, then a staff editor and opinion writer for The New York Times, calling the incident “arguably the worst thing that has happened to the #MeToo movement” in a piece titled “Aziz Ansari Is Guilty. Of Not Being a Mind Reader.”

Ansari released a statement in which he said he believed the encounter was “completely consensual” and he retreated from public life for several months before returning to stand-up comedy and two Netflix specials in 2019 and 2022.

Last year, he made his directorial debut with Good Fortune, a comedy in which he appeared alongside A-list stars Keanu Reeves and Seth Rogen, as well as Sandra Oh and Keke Palmer. The movie reportedly grossed more than $26 million worldwide and Ansari has been on a global stand-up comedy “Hypothetical Tour” since last year.

For advocates of women’s rights, the efforts of male entertainers to come back from misconduct scandals are irrelevant to the goals of the #MeToo movement.

Kim Villanueva, president of the National Organization for Women, told The Independent that the #MeToo movement wasn’t “about permanently banning people from public life. It was about challenging systems that protected abuse, silenced survivors and allowed powerful individuals to avoid consequences.”

“The legacy of #MeToo is much bigger than Hollywood,” she said. “There’s a lot of focus on celebrities but most of the people who are affected by sexual assault or sexual harassment work in schools and offices and restaurants.”

Villanueva also said that “the lesson from #MeToo is that every workplace should be safer.”

“There’s much more conversation about sexual harassment and what needs to be done than there was 20 years ago, when #MeToo was started,” she said. “Now, people expect institutions to take allegations more seriously.”

Jennifer Mondino, senior director of the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund at the National Women’s Law Center, likewise told The Independent: “The measure of the #MeToo movement does not rest on the fates of certain high-profile individuals.”

“We continue to hear from survivors every day, from industries ranging from the entertainment industry to fast food and farm work, who have been inspired to speak out, a whole decade after the movement’s initial calling,” she said. “Not only do we continue to see this consistent bravery and fortitude, but we also see the way these voices have sparked change in law, policy, and culture.”

The legal consequences of the #MeToo movement include new anti-sexual harassment laws in 27 states and the District of Columbia, according to the National Women’s Law Center, as well as several temporary and permanent reforms to statutes of limitations laws for cases of sexual harassment and assault.

In addition to Weinstein, other abusers who once had high-profile careers have also been convicted and sent to prison.

Comedy legend Bill Cosby was found guilty of drugging and groping an employee at Temple University, his alma mater, in 2004, but was freed in 2021 when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned his 2018 conviction on grounds that his prosecution was barred by an agreement with a prior district attorney who declined to bring charges against him.

Cosby had previously settled a civil lawsuit filed by accuser Andrea Constand for $3.4 million in 2006, and in 2022 a California jury ordered him to pay $500,000 in civil damages to Judy Huth, who accused him of sexually abusing her in 1975, when she was 16, at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles.

In March, another jury ordered Cosby to pay more than $59 million to Donna Motsinger, who said he drugged and raped her in 1972.

Former USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar is now serving an effective life sentence for sexually abusing more than 150 women and girls, in addition to possessing child pornography.

And for celebrities seeking to come back from sexual misconduct scandals, a return to the limelight is far from guaranteed.

Krista Hill Cummings, an associate professor of marketing at Babson College who’s researched cancel culture, said cancellations targeting individuals were more challenging to overcome than those that target companies or brands.

“When I want to cancel a major retailer, for example, it’s a lot harder for me to say, ‘Yes, I can forever cancel it,” she said. “For most people, that is the brand that they have to buy from, that is the only one available to them in the country, or is really the only one that they can afford.”

But with individuals, Hill Cummings said, “I can decide not to come to your comedy shows. I can decide to unfollow you on all of social media, and so the cancellations of individuals tend to stick a little bit more.”

Hill Cummings, lead author of a 2025 research study titled #Canceled! Exploring the phenomenon of canceling, also said companies “have it a little bit easier in terms of being able to kind of cut off the problem” by changing their policies, mandating employee training or firing workers whose actions caused the cancellation.

Sam Gauchier, a New York City-based brand and communications consultant, said that among celebrities, music artists were more resistant to cancellation than actors because they have “more of a direct relationship with fans” who routinely listen to their songs.

“It’s easy to be won over when you’re constantly involved,” she said. “An actor, an actress — I see you on red carpets, I see you on TV, I see you in movies…but there’s still that distance.”

As an example, she cited R&B singer Chris Brown, whose career survived his guilty plea to felony assault for beating his girlfriend, the superstar singer Rihanna, in 2009.

Brown’s two No. 1 albums, 2011’s F.A.M.E. and 2012’s Fortune, were both released after the incident and he boasts a total of 125 “Hot 100” songs, four of which dropped this year, according to Billboard.

His legal troubles have continued, however, including a $12.9 million verdict against him last month over the 2020 mauling of his then-housekeeper by Brown’s 200-pound Caucasian shepherd dog, named Hades, and a scheduled October trial in London over an alleged 2023 nightclub assault on a music producer.

Hardart, the former film executive, also said “it’s a little harder” for actors — who have to get past studio “gatekeepers” to land plum roles — than for comedians like C.K., who self-released material for years before landing his latest Netflix special.

“All he really needs is a mic, and he can work,” he said.

Before getting canceled, C.K. had a Netflix deal that paid him an “eight-figure check” per special, Forbes reported in 2017, when it estimated his net worth at $52 million.

“It’s probably relatively inexpensive to get Louis C.K. at this point, “ Hardart said, adding that Netflix “can fill some time and maybe retain or draw a new audience in, which is ultimately their goal.”

Representatives for Netflix and C.K. didn’t respond to inquiries from The Independent.