This article has been published to coincide with an episode of Mashable's new podcast,blanc noir sex video History Becomes Her. Listen here.
Season 1 of History Becomes Herkicks off with two very special guests: Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, the New York Timesreporters behind the Harvey Weinstein investigation.
Kantor and Twohey changed the world with a single story. Within days of the investigation's publication, the #MeToo hashtag — a movement started a decade earlier by civil rights activist Tarana Burke — went viral.
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Episode 1 of History Becomes Herreveals the dramatic events that took place behind the scenes of the investigation, the obstacles they overcame, and their thoughts on the extraordinary response their investigation garnered. In the episode, Kantor and Twohey discuss their book She Said, published by Bloomsbury, which tells the dramatic story of the events that led up to — and followed on from — the sexual harassment investigation that ignited a global movement.
You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Acast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
This episode contains discussion of rape and sexual assault. The interview was conducted prior to Harvey Weinstein's trial, during which he was convicted of rape and sentenced to 23 years in prison.
Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey at the Brilliant Minds Initiative dinner at Gramercy Park Hotel Rooftop on May 1, 2018. Credit: Noam Galai/Getty Images Read the full transcript of Episode 1 below:
Rachel Thompson (RT): So, this is a podcast about women who are making history now, but it also reflects on the women of the past who paved the way and the women who inspired them. I consider you both women who've helped change the world, and who are the women who inspire you? Is there a particular activist or journalist from history, or even from the present day who's had an effect on your life?
Jodi Kantor (JK): Our book, She Said,is a kind of invitation into the Harvey Weinstein investigation because people think they know this story. And there was a lot of drama that played out on the pages of newspapers when we broke it. However, there is so much drama behind the story. And you know, we're trying to take you along the journey because the events of #MeToo have come to mean so much to so many people, you know, to take you into those first hushed conversations with actresses into the final confrontations with Weinstein in our offices at the New York Times. And I think one thing people will discover is that even though there's this sort of perception that two women broke the Harvey Weinstein story, it was really three women.
Megan Twohey (MT): Yep, Rebecca Corbett is our editor at the New York Times, she's in charge of the investigations department. She's sort of been a silent hero of newspaper journalism in the United States for decades. And it's been a pleasure to pull the curtain back on just what a tremendous woman and tremendous editor she is, whether it was pushing us to go beyond, to make sure that every step of the way and in our investigation that we were kind of going beyond trying to find evidence of you know, the alleged predation of Harvey Weinstein and considering larger questions of the sort of systemic failures and the other types of machinery that were in place to allow somebody like Harvey Weinstein to get away with his decades of alleged predation, to basically working through the night on deadline as we were preparing to publish. There's a scene in which Rebecca Corbett basically works through the night taking only a 45-minute nap at her desk to make sure that every single word in our story was absolutely right. Which is really something that she just does, can be found doing, you know, week in and week out at the New York Timesas she keeps vigil over the most important investigations coming out of the newspaper.
JK:You know, I think there are people in the media whose names appear in bold face or more who appear on TV a lot, but they don't necessarily move the culture. Rebecca Corbett is almost completely unknown until the Weinstein story, I don't think her name even surfaced much in Google search results, but over and over again behind the scenes at newspapers, by championing and driving these key stories, and by showing a particular kind of ambition — not ambition for herself, but journalistic ambition — she has had more impact than almost any woman in journalism I can think of.
RT:Jodi, in the early stages of the investigation, you spoke to former employees of Harvey Weinstein, who told you his behavior was an open secret in Hollywood, and that no one would care even if you did get the story. Was there an attitude, do you think, that this was a man of such immense power that people would just look the other way and that nothing could possibly change in the culture?
"Early in the reporting, they would say, 'Oh, Jodi. Oh, Megan. You're never gonna get your little story.'"
JK: Yes, and also this behavior was completely accepted. I will try to recreate for you some of the condescending lectures we got from Hollywood executives. Early in the reporting, they would say, ‘Oh, Jodi. Oh, Megan. You're never gonna get your little story.’ They treated us as if we were very naive. And they said, ‘But even if you do, let me explain our industry to you. You guys, you're not entertainment reporters, you don't really know much about this.' They'd say, ‘The casting couch is just part of Hollywood. It has been from the beginning. You know, it's an unfortunate part of our industry, but it's really intertwined with what we do, because there are all these beautiful young actresses and all of these older male producers.’ And look, they had some evidence, there was an actual casting couch sculpture in Hollywood, this famous Chinese theater where they have the movie premieres, there was a real sculpture of a casting couch, which I think sort of showed how normalized it was in the industry. And they would just end the conversation by saying, ‘Look, everybody knows he does this. It's an open secret. And even if you get the story, nobody's gonna care and nothing will change.’
RT: During a recent interview you mentioned that a few nights before the story was published, you'd both been working till midnight, and you'd asked each other is anybody going to care? And is anybody going to read? Did you have any inkling that the story would have such a huge impact and that it would help spark a global movement?
MT: Well, you're absolutely right there were about two nights before we published the story. Jodi and I shared a taxi back from the New York Times headquarters in Midtown Manhattan to our apartments in Brooklyn. We live about 10 blocks from each other. And as we were kind of rushing through the city streets in the hush of the cab, we actually turned to each other and said, ‘Do you think anybody's gonna read this story?’
We'd been working so hard for so many months to basically get to the point where we did have a story that we could publish. We had been scaling all these various hurdles that we had encountered along the way. And in those final days, we were working obsessively to make sure that everything in the story was airtight and to make sure that our sources and everybody else was protected as Harvey Weinstein was coming at us with all of these underhanded tactics and high-price lawyers to try to kill the story in those final hours. We were so focused on that we really didn't take much time to contemplate what would happen afterwards. But it was really within days of that first story being published, that we could feel that something really significant was starting to happen. First of all, our emails and phones were flooded with women who were reaching out to tell us their own stories of harassment and abuse, not just about Harvey Weinstein. These were women who were coming to us with other stories of harassment and abuse — and we weren't the only ones. Those calls were starting to flood news organizations across the United States, and ultimately, around the world.
RT:And you weren't entirely convinced at the outset. I read in the book that you say, 'A prime mission of journalism was to give voice to the voiceless, to those who were often ignored. Movie stars, with their fame and fortune, were far from that.' I wanted to know what changed your mind?
MT: Well, Jodi had started the Harvey Weinstein investigation while I was on maternity leave from the newspaper. So, we’d had a pretty important phone call while I was on maternity leave. Jodi had just called to explain that she had was working on this investigation, and because I had done reporting on victims of sex crimes, and actually some of the women who had come forward with allegations of sexual misconduct against then-candidate Donald Trump in 2016, I had experience making phone calls and knocking on the doors of victims and and some experience in talking to them. So, she was just asking some advice on what to say in those first 30 seconds if you get somebody on the phone.
I was certainly intrigued by what she was doing. But when I came back, our editor, Rebecca Corbett, presented me with options. She said, ‘You can go back to covering Donald Trump or you can join Jodi on the Harvey Weinstein investigation.’ And I said, ‘Can I take a day to think about it?’ Because I had colleagues who were saying, 'Listen, Donald Trump's the story of a lifetime, you'd be crazy to go cover some sleazy Hollywood producer,' but I'd also watched as investigative journalism seem to actually not be making a much of a difference when it came to covering Trump. But I also did have some reservations about the Harvey Weinstein investigation at that point. I did have a hard time conceiving of people like Gwyneth Paltrow as victims in need of help of the New York Times. But Jodi actually convinced me, you know, she said, 'Listen, if women like Gwyneth Paltrow and Ashley Judd have been victims of sexual harassment, it really suggests that nobody is immune. And if we can help bring this to light, we might actually be able to help make a difference.'
RT:In the book, you say that during your first phone call together, you talked about what to say in the very first few seconds of a phone call with a victim and that sentence is: 'I can't change what happened to you in the past, but together we may be able to use your experience to help protect other people.' Why do you think that sentence in particular is so effective in convincing survivors to speak out?
JK:Well, first of all, we should acknowledge that it definitely did not work every time. I know, looking back at this, the headline is how many women did come forward. But we have to tell you it was hard. It was hard. So many people wouldn't return our calls, would speak to us for a moment and then hang up. There are women who have still not come forward about Weinstein. But that argument is the best argument that we know. And I think it's because it's about something that's bigger than yourself and about helping other people. We acknowledge that there are so many reasons not to come forward. It's really unfair, that women have to do this work of coming forward because the women we wrote about did nothing to get harassed or assaulted. They were trying to go to work. Rachel Crooks, who Megan reported a story about. She has a story of being forcibly kissed by Donald Trump. She was waiting by an elevator in her office when it happened. It's really unfair, in some ways, that women have to go through this painful, messy process of potentially coming forward.
JK: But what we always believe is that it can have impact on other people and we try to…. A lot of people think that talking to a journalist is a bad thing to do, that it's tattletale-y or that it's traitorous or that you sound like a complainer. And part of what we're trying to do with that argument is redefine it as something good to do, something noble to do, a kind of act of public service, and we were saying to people, look, when you've been through a painful experience like this, it's so hard to cope with. But one thing you can do that can be very empowering, is you can sort of take your pain and donate it to the public good. And it may be that on the other side of the process, it becomes something that you can feel proud of.
RT:That's beautifully put. During your reporting women share their accounts and knowledge with you at immense personal and professional risk. How central were these women to your investigation. And do you think we as a society, owe them a debt of gratitude for effectively speaking up on behalf of women?
MT:First of all, you know, there's so many surprising figures in this book, the people who help bring that some of the people who help bring the truth to light like Gwyneth Paltrow for example, who had been one of our most important secret sources and extremely helpful in the course of the investigation, even though she didn't ultimately go on the record and the first story — nobody's known that until now, we’re able to show readers all of the various things that she did. But we also get to show the kind of gut-wrenching decisions and the backstories of some of the women who did ultimately go on the record, like Ashley Judd, who really put her career on the line to be the first actress to go on the record. People are very familiar with the movies that she's been in over the years, but we'll learn that she actually, even prior to the Harvey Weinstein investigation had cultivated a real interest in commitment to gender inequality that played into this factor and ultimately hers was somewhat of a serene decision.
There were two categories of alleged victims — the actresses, and then also young women who had gone to work for Harvey Weinstein at his company, sometimes their first jobs, oftentimes their first jobs out of college with all of these ambitions to work behind the scenes in the entertainment industry, only to see Harvey Weinstein prey on those ambitions with his predatory behavior.
In fact, the very first woman to go on the record is Laura Madden, who lives in Wales. She was somebody who is a mother, at the time was a stay-at-home mother, who was actually going through a really rocky time. She was in the process of separating from her husband. She had suffered breast cancer. And yet she went where no other woman was prepared to go in the course of the investigation in terms of deciding to go on the record. She has teenage daughters and she gathered them and for the very first time told them about her experience with Weinstein and that she was preparing, that she had been working with the New York Timeson this story. And as she tells it, it was actually an extremely motivating experience. That these teenage daughters of hers actually started opening up about their own experiences and the experiences of their friends. And we're extremely proud of her and felt like this was something that was really important for her. Right before we were within days of publishing our first story, she sent us an email in which she basically said, 'I feel compelled to speak out. And I don't want my daughters to be living in a world of this type of bullying behavior. I'm prepared to go on the record for your story.'
RT: That's incredible. And I think I read that she was due to have surgery, post-cancer surgery. And the date of that surgery was basically going to collide with your publication date as well.
JK:It was a terrible situation. Laura, for a while before Ashley Judd went on the record, was really our one woman on the record. We had other forms of on-the-record evidence, so it was a very strong story built of documents, and the legal and financial trail, and company memos, and whatnot. But in terms of interviews, I mean, getting victims to give on the record interviews was really, really hard. So, Laura was alone and she was wavering a little bit. She was nervous, understandably so. And then we realized with horror that she had this kind of looming surgery coming up on the calendar. She had had breast cancer already. And she needed a second mastectomy and she needed reconstructive surgery. And we realized to our mutual horror that that surgery date was basically going to collide with the publication of the story. And Megan, and I felt terrible. We thought, how can we ask her to do this? This is too much. I mean, asking her to be the lone woman on the record to begin with is such a heavy request. And then as she's going under the knife for this really serious, very personal surgery, you know, we felt terrible, but we couldn't afford to lose her because we really didn't have anybody else at that time.
And so in the intervening time, Ashley Judd did go on the record, but as Megan just said, Laura stayed true. She had that conversation with her daughters. It was very motivating for her and one thing we did in this book is we included a lot of the original texts and emails and documents and exchanges and transcripts, because we want you to see this material for yourself — we want you to feel like you were there. I would urge everybody to go back and read that note that Laura composed that actually landed in our inboxes just a few hours before the story was published. I think it says something like, 'I've been through life-changing health issues. I know that time is precious. And confronting bullies is important. I'm happy to go on record.'
RT: One of the crucial pieces of evidence was a memo written by Lauren O'Connor, who previously worked for Weinstein's Miramax film production company. In that memo, which she sent to HR, she wrote, ‘I am a 28-year-old woman trying to make a living and a career. Harvey Weinstein is a 64-year-old world famous man. And this is his company. The balance of power is me: zero, Harvey Weinstein: 10. Can you tell me about what this piece of evidence showed?
MT: You're referring to a memo that was actually given to us by another one of our secret sources, who might come as a surprise to listeners. Irwin Reiter was a longtime accountant within Harvey Weinstein's companies, first Miramax and then The Weinstein Company. He actually agreed to become a secret source and ultimately slipped us an internal company record, this, that had been written by Lauren O'Connor. She had been a junior executive in the company in 2015 when she wrote this really blistering memo in which she spelled out all of the alleged sexual harassment and other abusive behavior that she was witnessing by Harvey Weinstein. She was brave enough to do what so few other people who had gotten glimpses of the problem ever did. When we obtained that memo and started reading through it, we were... it was extremely significant. This was somebody at that point we had been documenting decades of alleged predation and here with somebody basically describing it from the inside of the company, as recently as 2015. So once we obtained that, we realized that basically the stakes of the Weinstein investigation increased substantially. I mean, we thought that we were kind of documenting things that had happened long ago. And what we realized was that if we didn't publish the truth that Weinstein could very likely go on to, you know, hurt other women, other employees within his own company.
RT: And during the latter stages of your investigation, Weinstein used a number of intimidation tactics to attempt to prevent the story's publication and ultimately silence his accusers. Can you tell me a little bit about what he did to prevent you from running or to try and prevent you from running the story?
JK:One day in the summer of 2017, I got this email from this woman who said her name is Diana Philip, and she claimed to be a British women's rights advocate. She wanted to meet with me to get me to participate in some conference. She seemed to be offering to pay money. And I just didn't have time to meet with her. I mean, Megan and I were working on the Harvey Weinstein investigation and we had very young children at home, we still do and, you know, we kind of had this attitude of like, we've got to get the story and then we've got to get home to the kids. So I blew her off. Little did I know that she was actually an agent of Black Cube. Black Cube is an Israeli intelligence agency. It consists of sort of ex government spies. And they now work for hire for businesses. And what they were trying to do was dupe and manipulate us and our sources on Weinstein's behalf. There was actually a bounty out on our story, which we didn't know at the time. They had signed a contract that said that if they could stop the publication of our story, Weinstein would pay them $300,000. And so there was this sort of, you know, massive, manipulative, underhanded effort to stop our story, but that was only part of it. There was a whole team of high priced PR people, lawyers, including two really prominent feminist attorneys Lisa Bloom who, you know, is sort of a familiar TV face and America. She was a really famous victims rights attorney, Gloria Allred's daughter, you know, always talking about protecting women. She crossed lines to work for Harvey Weinstein. And in fact, for the book, Megan was able to obtain and we were able to reprint her job audition memo for Harvey Weinstein. And it's a really chilling document because she's saying, I'm going to use my credibility as a women's rights advocate instead to help you and I'm willing to smear on your behalf and I'm willing to manipulate on your behalf.
RT:I mean, he even showed up at the New York Timesoffice. Like I think it was a day before publication. How did that feel?
MT:Well, we had been really precise in how we dealt with Weinstein as we were reporting on him. And as we were preparing to publish our story, we suspected that he was using a variety of tactics to try to stop us. We didn't, at the time, realize that he had employed these former Israeli private intelligence officials to sort of seek to manipulate, to seek to manipulate us and our sources, but we knew that he was capable of and likely to be employing a variety of underhanded tactics. So we had in the course of our investigation, refused to talk to him off the record and, at the end, had basically provided him with 48 hours to respond to our findings. We went to him two days before we were preparing to publish and said, 'This is everything that we're intending to write.' This is what you do, this is part of the final stage of the due diligence you do with these types of investigations to make sure that the subject has adequate time to respond and offer comment. You do that in the name of fairness, you also do that in the name of accuracy. And that really set off a wild ride of a 48 hours where Weinstein was coming at us with everything he had to try to stop us, including the day before we published, we got a call from one of his PR people saying Harvey Weinstein's on his way to the New York Timesright now. And we turned to each other and said, like what, ‘Excuse me, sorry, excuse us. Can you repeat that?’ He's on his way to the New York Timesuninvited and are we going to let him in? Sure enough, he barged into the New York Timeswith some of these high price lawyers by his side. You know, we ended up taking the meeting. We gave him, we said, ‘OK, you've got 15 minutes.’
MT:And what he what he did is he had come with these folders of information, photographs of some of the women that were going to be in the story with allegations against him, photos of them posed with Harvey Weinstein on red carpets and other public events in the years following their alleged incidents, as if that would be proof that they weren't telling the truth about what had happened; information from their backgrounds that he thought that he could use to smear them. And by his side, were some of these, you know, prominent feminist attorneys. That was one of the many things that had happened off the record, in the course of our investigation that we worked to bring on to the record so that readers could be there with us when we're kind of going toe to toe with him the day before the story runs, and getting glimpses of these, you know, so-called feminist attorneys who were willing to kind of smear on his behalf.
RT: I found that utterly jaw dropping when I think I listened to a New York Timespodcast, it was an interview with you both. And Gloria Allred has such a reputation, such a legacy of protecting women's rights. And that just, I mean, it completely is at odds with it.
JK: There's a smart writer named Sarah Weinman who read our book and tweeted about it. And she said something that's really stayed with me because sometimes other people see your work and your book in a way that doesn't even occur to you. And she said, you know, this book is about the public face and the private face of women and what choices people made when they faced Weinstein's behavior or rumors of that behavior. And I think it defies some of the conventional wisdom, you know, and scrambles some of our sort of stereotypes of how some of these people behave because, you know, as Megan mentioned, Gwyneth Paltrow was a huge help to our investigation. And, she I don't think is generally thought of as you know, an activist or a sort of civil rights champion type. She's thought much more as a, you know, glamorous figure, beauty entrepreneur. There's been some controversy about the products she sells on her website, but in our investigation, she showed a tremendous amount of concern for other women. And then yeah, you have these, you know, the Lisa Blooms and also Linda Fairstein — that name may not mean a lot here in London, but she was like, when Megan and I grew up, she was the pioneering sex crimes prosecutor who spoke up for women — that was her public image. So the idea that she also crossed lines to work for Harvey Weinstein, it was really shocking.
And also that the Deep Throat of the Weinstein investigation was a man. An unassuming 50-something-year-old man named Irwin Reiter, who had been Harvey Weinstein's corporate accountant for 30 years. And I thought, this is a middle aged man who's a gruff loyalist. But in fact, he turned out to be deeply concerned about what was happening. He had gone through a period of inaction and then he had tried to intervene in the behavior and had failed, which is why he wanted to help us.
RT: Just circling back to Gwyneth Paltrow as well. I mean, just on the topic of intimidation tactics, there's a section in the book where Weinstein had shown up at the home of Gwyneth Paltrow in the Hamptons and was essentially standing in her living room and I think she was hiding in the upstairs bathroom. Do you think he was trying to send a kind of I'm-watching-you message to her and to you as well?
JK:Yes, Harvey Weinstein was incredibly paranoid about whether Gwyneth Paltrow was speaking to us. And we have a better understanding now of why we think that is. But at the time, basically, he asked to be invited to a party she was throwing at her house. And then she came to us and said, you know, 'What do I do?' And one precept of journalism is that you try not to influence your sources' decisions. It's for us to record the action, not to get in the middle of it. So I couldn't give her a clear answer, but we talked it through and what she decided was, I'm going to let him come to the party because otherwise he's going to get suspicious that I am talking to you. So, on the day of the party, I discovered a stack of panicked texts and calls from her on my phone, because he had showed up early, and that's why she was hiding in the bathroom upstairs. And her fear was that he was trying to corner her and confront her, you know, are you talking to the New York Times? Are you ever going to tell this story? And actually over the course of the investigation, he became increasingly worried about whether she was speaking with us to the point where, in the book, we take readers through the final showdowns with Weinstein and this very tense period right before publication. And part of what was going on is that Weinstein kept trying to interrogate us about, ‘Are you talking to Gwyneth Paltrow? Are you talking to Gwyneth Paltrow? Is she in the story? Is she in the story?’ At that point, Gwyneth was still totally off the record. We hadn't said a word about her to Harvey. We had told him she wasn't in the story. We had gone to him for a response on all of these other allegations like Laura Madden's. Instead of addressing those he was still talking about Gwyneth, which made no sense.
Now, what happened after we broke the story is that in our reporting, and in other victims accounts, what we and Gwyneth learned is that apparently Harvey Weinstein had used her name pretty often in the course of trying to coerce other women. He had said things to them according to these women, like 'Everybody does it. How do you think Gwyneth Paltrow got her Oscar. Don't you want what she has?' Now, first of all, remember that Gwyneth Paltrow, she does have a story of sexual harassment from Harvey Weinstein, but she never succumbed to him. She never slept with him. So the idea that he was saying that was a) wrong and second of all, it was devastating to her because it was like he had taken her name and used it in the course of manipulating other women. I think it's a real story about the way women can sort of be used against one another. And also, when you look at, you know, it's interesting because a lot of people envy Gwyneth, you know, that sort of fame and wealth and seemingly perfect, carefree life. But it was almost like he drew on that to get other people to do what he wanted.
MT:The more that he came at us with his, you know, legal threats and his bullying behavior, and his attempts at intimidation, I mean, he would try to reach out to the publisher of the New York Times, he would try to reach out to the executive editor of the New York Timessaying like, 'Let's just have important man to important man conversation,' and ... just kept steering him back to us — the reporters — saying 'deal with the reporters, deal with the reporters.' This story really became an x-ray into abuse of power, how powerful people are able to kind of harness all of their resources. And honestly there was a whole machine in place here to silence women and allow Weinstein to evade scrutiny. And the more that that came into focus for us, just the more motivated we felt to expose it. There were times where we were kind of getting more and more glimpses of what Weinstein and his enablers were made of, and it was sort of more motivation for us to show him what we were made of and what the New York Timesstood for, and what you know, all of our brave sources stood for.
RT: And in the aftermath of the publication of your investigation, you continued reporting on Weinstein, but something else started happening, millions of people around the world started sharing their experiences of sexual violence. How did it feel to witness the #MeToo movement unfolding in the wake of your investigation?
JK: Astonishing. You know, the #MeToo movement was founded by Tarana Burke, years before and we're not activists, you know, we always want stories to have impact, but we don't seek a particular outcome. As we discussed a few minutes ago, we weren't sure what kind of impact the story would have. As one of our editors pointed out many times in the course of the investigation, Harvey Weinstein wasn't that famous — and he wasn't saying that to pooh-pooh our story, he was saying it to strengthen it, to say you have to show people why to care about this. So the first indications were actually before publication, Varietyand The Hollywood Reporter, kind of Hollywood trade publications, had found out about our story. It may have been a Weinstein leak, we don't know. And they ran the story saying, ‘Oh, you know, the New York Timesis about to publish a big Harvey Weinstein investigation.’ And that's when we first started hearing from women we hadn't contacted ourselves.
All summer, really, for six months, Megan and I had been trying so hard to reach women, trying so hard to get them to talk. And the idea that they were now coming to us, it was extraordinary. Then it only continued. Oh, and by the way, we couldn't even get those women into the first story because the process of checking and corroboration and making sure everything is airtight, it takes a while. We said, OK, these women have to wait for the second story. So then, as soon as the second story was published, we began hearing from women who had Weinstein stories, but also women who had stories about other men. And the torrent has really continued to this day, we're still getting tips all the time.
The response we saw, it was staggering. I think Megan and I really just feel like everybody else on this count, which has the display of sort of mass accountability with the firing or resignation of all of these men. The feeling that this was truly global with protests and hard conversations all over the world. This feeling that journalism and readers were so linked to, because we had done the investigative reporting, and we had evidence in the Weinstein case. But then women all over the world stood up and said, 'Actually, I can confirm that in a different way. Because the same thing happened to me in a completely different context. I have my own version.' That feeling of being able to suddenly see patterns that we had never seen. It was just beyond anything we had ever dreamed. And to be honest, we found it hard to sort of grasp the scope of it, because it started out with us just doing our jobs.
RT: Where do you think the #MeToo movement needs to go next? What has changed and what else needs to change in your opinion?
MT: One of the things that we do in our book, we don't stop with the moment that we publish the Weinstein investigation and we report into the year that followed as the #MeToo movement took off in earnest. And honestly as things got more kind of complicated and confusing.
There was this unprecedented flood of victims coming forward and going public with their stories. But there was also — at least in the United States — a backlash that emerged of male grievance and people saying that the #MeToo movement had gone too far. And we realized that actually, we think it really comes down to kind of three pressing but unanswered questions. You know, there is still not agreement on the scope of behaviors that are under scrutiny. Are we just talking about the most severe allegations of rape and sexual harassment? Are we talking about more nuanced interactions, uncomfortable interactions, like the uncomfortable hand on a back, supervisor’s hand on the back of a young female employee in the workplace, or you know, the bra snapping in the hallways of high schools. And how far back are we going? Are we talking about allegations that date back to the '80s or before?
The second question is, what is the process for vetting these allegations? I mean, we walk readers through the very specific process that we have as investigative journalists, for publishing these allegations, corroboration, other types of due diligence, making sure we seek comment from the person who's been accused, that type of due diligence, but you know, HR departments, and more broadly, I think public opinion, there's not consensus on how to vet these types of allegations and determine what's actually happened.
And then the third question is accountability. I mean, it's very easy for people to insist on accountability in these #MeToo cases, it's another thing to assign it, it becomes much more complicated when it comes time to assign accountability. Oftentimes these questions get scrambled, people are getting ousted from their positions of power before it's been determined exactly what happened in the first place. And so we think that moving forward, society is going to have to kind of grapple with and hopefully reach consensus on these questions. That's not our job as journalists, we can't necessarily answer those questions. We can't, you know, we don't lobby for legal reforms. You’ll never see us marching in the streets, or playing an activist role in any way. I think as reporters we really feel like our job is to help expose, to continue to unearth the facts and the secrets that have remained hidden for so long because what's certain is that you can't solve a problem that you can't see.
RT: Thank you both so much.
MT: Thank you so much for having us. It's been a pleasure.
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