Jordan Strauss Jordan Strauss

MERYL STREEP IS winning praise after she delivered a scathing speech about President-Elect Donald Trump at last night’s Golden Globes.

The veteran actress, who was honoured with the Cecil B. DeMille Award, took time out of her speech to touch upon an incident last year in which Donald Trump mocked a New York Times reporter with a disability while on the campaign trail.

“There was one performance this year that stunned me,” Streep noted. “It sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good.  There was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job.”

It made its intended audience laugh and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter. Someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it. I still can’t get it out of my head because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life.

(If you can’t see the video, please click here.) 

Streep, who was a vocal supporter of Hillary Clinton, stated that such behaviour “filters down into everybody’s life” and emboldens others to act the same way.

And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, ’cause it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing.

Disrespect invites disrespect. Violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose. Okay. Go on with that thing.

She implored the “principled press” to hold Donald Trump to account and asked those in the room to join her in supporting the Committee to Protect Journalists, an organisation that promotes press freedom.

She concluded her remarks by quoting the late Carrie Fisher.

We should all be very proud of the work Hollywood honors here tonight. As my friend the dear departed Princess Leia said to me once, “Take your broken heart, make it into art.”

mean plastic / Twitter mean plastic / Twitter / Twitter

In a brief interview with the New York Times, Donald Trump dismissed Meryl Streep as a “Hillary lover” and said that he was “not surprised” to have been attacked by “liberal movie people”.

Trump also denied ever mocking the reporter’s disability.

I was never mocking anyone. I was calling into question a reporter who had gotten nervous because he had changed his story.

People keep saying I intended to mock the reporter’s disability, as if Meryl Streep and others could read my mind, and I did no such thing.

While Streep’s speech has been condemned by many on the right, she has also been praised by many of her Hollywood colleagues, including Bette Midler and Ellen DeGeneres.

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