On 15 August, columnist Sina Koloğlu broke the news on Twitter that actor Ahmet Kural would be appearing in a new “family comedy” this autumn, “after a year filled with health problems”.
The series is the first new project the Turkish TV star has signed up for since his conviction for domestic violence was upheld by an appeal court in January 2022. In 2019, Kural was given a 16-month suspended sentence for the violent abuse of his former partner, the pop singer Sıla.
Kural’s return to the screen might be expected to raise eyebrows, but to some observers it’s a symptom of a wider culture in Turkey’s entertainment industry. Nearly six years after the global #metoo movement kicked off, male stars accused of violence, misogyny and harassment still face a lack of accountability, according to industry insiders and experts.
Other tales of abuse include Turkey’s first recipient of the Cannes Palme D’Or award, Yılmaz Güney, alleged to have drunkenly run over his wife with a car. (Güney has never responded to allegations of repeated abuse of his now ex-wife.) Or there’s the “emperor” of arabesque music, İbrahim Tatlıses, who has generated headlines with statements like, “I have a lot of respect for women, but I also beat them if they are disrespectful.”
According to a 2021 study by Turkey’s Dissensus Research, only 12.47 per cent of women in the country’s entertainment industry say they have never experienced sexual harassment at work during searching for a job or training.
“It’s always the same response to the problem: ‘this man was a murderer and that man ran their girlfriend over with a car but what can you do, their work is beautiful. Should we separate the artist from their work, and how do we move forward if we don’t?’” feminist entertainment columnist and scriptwriter Zehra Çelenk told Inside Turkey.
Çelenk said that there was no simple answer to the question, adding that we need to “somehow distance ourselves” from male celebrities and “learn to recreate our stories again and again”.
Actor Yasemin Kır told Inside Turkey that harassment, in her view, was the result of Turkish social attitudes that “a real man will both love and beat”.
“Mistakes by people who are visible to a large portion of society will be overlooked because of this stoic way of thinking,” she said. “It’s one of the best examples of our society’s hypocrisy.”
The history of violence in Turkey’s entertainment industry is partly a case of life imitating art, Kır said. People’s worldviews are shaped by the media they consume, and the example set by the entertainment industry is communicated to all parts of society.
If violence was represented in entertainment in a way that normalised it, rather than treating it critically, Kır said, “that will in turn create space for normalising violence in all areas of society”.
Çelenk agreed that the continued fame of known or alleged assailants in the industry was an “open wound”. She attributed it to the widespread tendency among the public to forgive male violence and second-guess the woman.
Many people struggle to distance themselves from male celebrities they love or admire, Çelenk continued – partly as a result of male-oriented gender norms.
“This support and a lack of collective memory makes it easier for these sorts of incidents to be swept under the rug,” she said.
The lack of accountability in the entertainment industry is also a by-product of Turkey’s “highly and intrinsically patriarchal” judicial system, entertainment reporter and columnist Alara Demirel told Inside Turkey.
“This enables men in positions of power to disregard the whole process,” she said. The election of several smaller radical Islamist parties to parliament in May would encourage men to feel their behaviour was legitimised further, Demirel continued.
Kır said that gender inequality in the entertainment industry was highly visible, pointing to the fact that decision-making roles were dominated by men. Women who assented themselves also faced resistance.
“A female singer’s costume, or a joke she makes will be used to trash her for days, even weeks. But a male actor whose violence against their partner is evident can continue to act on one of Turkey’s biggest stages,” Kır said.
Dissensus Research’s data showed that 89 per cent of respondents believe the entertainment industry “enables the abuse of power through its unique hierarchical structure and culture”. More than two thirds of reported incidents of harassment were committed by men, according to the research, and over half by people who held positions of seniority over the survivors.
Some male entertainers whose misogynistic behaviour was exposed have used legal threats to silence critics, according to Demirel. “[They] scare feminist activists who are vocal on social media by sending them court letters. I even got one of them, even though I had only retweeted the news of their abuse,” she says.
Kır says that many women were scared to report their experiences, because they fear “being completely wiped from the industry” in retaliation. “Also, they’re usually so oppressed that they have issues with self-confidence, wondering ‘Am I making too big of a deal?’ or thinking ‘Let’s not rock the boat at work,’ which can be discouraging,” she said.
Dissensus Research data also showed that one third of respondents said that they experienced negative professional consequences upon reporting an assault – and 64 per cent of sexual harassment survivors in the industry never reported the incident at all.
“There were legal proceedings launched against some names in the industry, but not against others, because there is still a disbelief that it will be effective,” Kır said.
Adopting survivors’ testimony as a basis for opening investigations into sexual harassment was the only way to encourage them to speak up, Çelenk said, adding that this approach was usually misrepresented as “a woman is in the right regardless of her statement”.
In the absence of other routes, many people turn to social media to expose abusers, as happened in many countries after the 2017 exposé of Hollywood tycoon Harvey Weinstein during the peak of the #metoo movement.
In Turkey, digital and physical activism have fused since the former has become the sole option for some “due to the increasing levels of violence,” Demirel said. She added that women’s rights groups actively partake in survivors’ protests on social media to increase pressure on the judicial system.
“We’ve seen many cases in which the state didn’t act on gender-based discrimination, but when people made a noise on social media, some actions were taken,” Demirel continued. This kind of action was helping create a “bottom-up approach towards an equal future”.
Kır said that she also believed that the #metoo movement empowered some – though not all – women to take legal action against their assailants.
Çelenk added that despite greater discussion of violence now, social gains took time.
“It’s a long and arduous process. But in the end, women are talking. New idols are knocked down each day,” she said. “In a time of such manipulation and corruption of the truth, we benefit from the truth’s habit of coming out sooner or later.”
Çelenk added that professional organisations, artists, producers and the media need to set clear standards and comply with them.
“We’re no longer in the times when women can be silenced, when [harassment] won’t leave the room it happened in. The effects will be more visible in the medium to long term, despite everything,” she concluded.