She Said
9/20/19- An update on #MeToo from Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, the New York Times reporters who broke the Harvey Weinstein story. They share behind-the-scenes details of how they urged survivors to speak out, the institutions and individuals that protect abusers, and some points of hope.
Transcript below.
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CREDITS
Producer: Gina Delvac
Hosts: Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman
Theme song: Call Your Girlfriend by Robyn
Composer: Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.
Associate Producer: Jordan Bailey
Visual Creative Director: Kenesha Sneed
Merch Director: Caroline Knowles
Editorial Assistant: Laura Bertocci
Design Assistant: Brijae Morris
Ad sales: Midroll
LINKS
She Said by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey is out now.
More than 3 million women experienced rape as their first sexual encounter.
Are you boiling with rage? If you haven’t already, check out our episode A Woman’s Anger with Rebecca Traister for more on the political impacts of women’s anger throughout history.
TRANSCRIPT: SHE SAID
[Ads]
(0:52)
Aminatou: Welcome to Call Your Girlfriend.
Ann: A podcast for long-distance besties everywhere.
Aminatou: I'm Aminatou Sow.
Ann: And I'm Ann Friedman. Today's agenda is a heavy one, I'll be honest, an important one. We are talking about She Said which is the new book by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey who are reporters, Pulitzer prize winning reports at the New York Times, and about some other things that have been in the news lately related to men behaving badly.
[Theme Song]
(1:45)
Aminatou: Hi Ann Friedman.
Ann: How're you doing over there?
Aminatou: I'm doing pretty good. I've started packing for tour so I'm, you know, the house is a mess.
Ann: I love the advance packing game and also because I don't want to call you out here but last tour do you remember how many things you had with you? [Laughs]
Aminatou: I don't want to talk about it Ann, okay?
Ann: I have this photo.
Aminatou: I was not feeling well, okay? Don't put me on the spot.
Ann: You weren't feeling well? But that doesn't explain . . .
Aminatou: I feel attacked.
Ann: That does not explain -- okay, like I cannot . . . I did not share this photo on the Internet because I did not want to shame you but you had this tote bag which is bigger than any tote bag I've ever seen and it was all full of products. It was full of toiletries. [Laughs]
Aminatou: Listen! My skin is very important but also you're right, it was a classic overpack. But the thing you're not telling the people Ann is that I'm a notorious underpacker and so that's why it also seemed very dramatic.
Ann: That's true. You weren't feeling well at the beginning of last year's tour and that only confirmed it, and the fact that you are meticulously planning what you are packing for this tour makes me feel that all is right with the world.
Aminatou: Yes, all is right in the world. I won't show up with my entire bathroom in a suitcase. [Laughs]
Ann: Oh my god. If you would like to come see us on tour which we highly encourage we still have tickets available in a couple of cities. In Toronto, Detroit, and Denver there are still some seats open. You can go to callyourgirlfriend.com/tour to get tickets and come hang out. It's a great time. Today's agenda is a heavy one, I'll be honest. An important one. We are talking about She Said which is the new book by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey who are reporters -- Pulitzer Prize winning reporters at the New York Times -- and about some other things that have been in the news lately related to men behaving badly.
Aminatou: I was really excited that Jodi and Megan made time to speak to me this week on CYG. Their book is very good. If you haven't read She Said yet I hope that by the end of this you will feel compelled to look into it. The book really is just an exhaustive account of how Jodi and Megan reported out all of the groundbreaking 2017 story about how Harvey Weinstein had allegedly paid off women who accused him of sexual misconduct for decades, like truly, truly, truly decades. And the book is like meticulously reported. The amount of just evidence and work is staggering. You will hear from many, many people, some of them famous, some of them not. And realizing reading this book something that I already know but I think that seeing it laid bare over hundreds of pages is just how much infrastructure is necessary to silence people and to really help people who are accused of sexual misconduct keep thriving in society. You know, and to really keep their misconduct out of the news, like how much work and money that takes.
And a lot of these people have that. Harvey Weinstein had that, Bill O'Reilly had that, Roger Ailes had that. And I think that this book is really important in this moment because we are -- you know, it's been like two or three years now since we've been talking about these explosive allegations and as Jodi says a lot has changed and nothing has changed. I'm really looking forward to hearing a lot more of the reaction come out from this book that they've written because sexual harassment is so pervasive. It's everywhere around us and as a society we are grappling with the kind of moral quandary that it is. And today more than ever it's very urgent.
(5:38)
Ann: Yeah. And I really, speaking of prevalence, did you see there was a new study that just came out published in the Journal of the American Medical Association's Internal Medicine which says that more than three million women in the United States experienced assault as their -- and I'm air quoting here -- first sexual encounter. That's just women ages 18 to 34 who were surveyed.
So the author of the study told NPR that that number would be many millions higher, absolutely, if they had asked women of all ages in the United States. So it's not just -- yes, this book is focused on this one sort of very prominent case or a few very prominent cases and sort of how very powerful men have setup these systems to get away with truly abhorrent behavior, but also the fact that assault and abuse of this nature are so commonplace and often people do not need wealth or a big apparatus of power in order to get away with it is something that is not lost on me. And one reason why I think this reporting is so important even though it is about kind of a relatively narrow group of people.
Aminatou: So here's my interview with Jodi and Megan.
[Interview Starts]
Jodi: I am Jodi Kantor. I'm an investigative reporter at the New York Times and I'm co-author of She Said.
Megan: I'm Megan Twohey. I'm an investigative reporter at the New York Times and co-author of She Said.
Aminatou: Jodi and Megan thank you so much for being on Call Your Girlfriend today.
Jodi: We're thrilled to be here.
Megan: Thanks for having us.
Aminatou: Like I told you already I read your book in one sitting which is not an everyday occasion for me because nothing is usually this exciting or juicy or urgent and I -- you know, there's so many things I feel like as . . . because you are reporters people are familiar with your work. There are also a lot of assumptions that I had made and I think the first thing that I was really struck by in reading the book is how you had to do so much work to get access into a world that you are not a part of. Like you're fancy New York Times reporters but getting Hollywood actresses' phone numbers and getting access and talking to people, that's also its own kind of -- that's its own kind of investigation. And so Megan I'm just curious if you could talk about how that process was in infiltrating this Hollywood world.
(8:00)
Megan: Well you're absolutely right. We sit in the investigations unit of the New York Times where we have no sort of direct lines into Hollywood. In fact I knew who Harvey Weinstein was, I mean I knew the name, but when I started the investigation I couldn't tell you exactly what he had done and the companies he ran. So we were really coming into this without any kind of built-in Rolodex of numbers we could call or people we could reach out to and trying to get the numbers for for example some of these famous actresses from Ashley Judd to Gwyneth Paltrow. We didn't want to go through their agents or managers. We didn't want to take such sensitive questions through these kind of gatekeepers. Trying to get the numbers and the contact information for those first phone calls were actually sort of many investigations unto themselves.
Aminatou: At the beginning of the story at least there's not a lot of compassion for some of these actresses because they're seen as very powerful people. And the feeling that I walked away with was predominantly if Gwyneth Paltrow is scared to talk, if Ashley Judd has hesitations about talking, what does this mean for people who are less powerful? Jodi I would love if you could talk a little bit more about how those negotiations went with really talking to women who have so much -- who have more power than other women who are being harassed essentially and how tough it was to convince them to go on the record.
Jodi: Well part of why we wrote this book is to really take you behind the scenes into that process because #MeToo has come to mean so much to so many of us. And so we wanted to kind of bring you to ground zero and say this is how it initially went down. I mean first of all let's stipulate the #MeToo was really founded by Tarana Burke many, many years before we did our story but our story helped spark this kind of worldwide explosion of it. And I think there's kind of a paradox here because #MeToo is all about speaking out and sharing your truth and being vocal about these things that happened a long time ago. But in the original investigation it was really, really hard to get people to speak sort of in two stages. First just to get on the phone with us or to meet us in person, and then much harder to get people on the record.
(10:24)
I think it's really unfair in a lot of ways that women have to do this work. Women generally don't do anything to get assaulted or get harassed so why should they have to go through the really difficult process of going on the record? And basically everybody we talked to was scared. Everybody had a concern. For the famous actresses they would say things like, you know, "I'm tabloid fodder. Everything I do is written up. I don't have a lot of privacy." One of Gwyneth Paltrow's concerns early on was she said "Jodi, this is going to turn into a trashy celebrity sex scandal and there are going to be weeks of tabloid headlines about me and Harvey Weinstein and sex and I'm really scared of that."
Then on the other hand women who had essentially been written out of history, these women who had been silenced through secret settlements, some of the former Weinstein assistants, they weren't famous. They weren't rich. Nobody knew their name. And they would say "Jodi and Megan, if I go on the record this is going to be the first Google search result for my name."
And also I think a really important thing to remember is that it isn't inevitable that this played out the way it did. If you go back to the summer and fall of 2017 we had no idea what the reaction to the story would be, and the history was of women really getting smeared and attacked for coming forward.
(11:50)
Aminatou: Yeah. I mean I think that one of the most powerful moments is when you kind of reveal how you are -- basically what you're telling people to convince them to come forward, and the sentiment that I think is so powerful of we can't change what happened to you but we can help other people, you know? And we can stop it from happening to someone else. And I think that that is such a -- it's such a powerful way to draw in anybody who wants to help because who doesn't want to do that?
Megan: Yeah. Well that was actually the first conversation that Jodi and I had. She started the investigation a couple months before me. I was actually on maternity leave. I had been reporting -- I had started at the New York Times in 2016 doing coverage of Donald Trump and working with some of the women who came forward with allegations against him and that sort of covered other work that I had done covering sex crimes back in Chicago and working with victims. I was having a pretty rough maternity leave so I think I was out trying to soothe my crying baby and I got a call from Jodi and she said "I'm starting this investigation. Is there anything you'd suggest I could say when I first make these phone calls or knock on these doors?" Something I said I found that had worked and inspired a lot of women to be brave enough to go on the record with these sensitive stories was once again we can't change what happened to you in the past but if you work with us and we're able to publish the truth we might be able to protect other people.
I think especially maybe women have a hard time going out on a limb and doing something just for themselves but if they think they are going to do something that is in fact going to protect other women they're able to kind of reach down and find an inspiration that wouldn't exist otherwise. And that really I think, especially when we were in the course of our reporting, we started to see this had been a pattern of alleged predation going back decades. You know, we found a woman who had been allegedly sexually assaulted by him in 1990 and we were able to trace allegations going up through 2015 and beyond. And at that point you're really thinking if we can't reveal the truth more women are going to get hurt by this guy.
(14:00)
Aminatou: Yeah. I mean I think that one of the greatest services of the book honestly is exposing the entire machinery that powerful people have at their disposal to dismiss and to bury all these kinds of allegations. I think that for a lot of us we have a sense that the scales are not tipped in our favor, but just seeing the sheer amount of effort and money that is really behind protecting all these people is something that was really shocking to me. And the fact that you were both able to just lay that in a way that is -- it's not a comfort but it helps you understand a little bit more what you're up against.
Jodi: Absolutely. Part of the reason why we wanted to write this book is that it gave us an extra year to investigate Weinstein because we don't know what's going to happen with this case. There's a criminal case against him obviously. The trial we think is going to start in January. We can't tell you whether he's going to be convicted or not. There are also a series of lawsuits against him, civil claims by women who say they've been harassed or assaulted by him. The status of those is really unclear. We don't know whether those women are going to get restitution, how much, whether Harvey Weinstein is going to have to reach into his own pocket, etc., etc. That deal is not resolved and it's been lingering for months.
So what can we do in our role as journalists? We can continue to investigate. And the Harvey Weinstein story is kind of a moral disaster. We were able to push further into these questions of who helped him and why? How does an entire company become complicit? I mean the Weinstein company was so prestigious. It was pumping out these films like The King's Speech. It's where Malia Obama went to do her internship when she wanted to be in film. And so there's a chapter of this book that's about two years in the life of this company taking you inside and saying who was aware of these problems? And it turns out a lot of people were aware of them. And did they try to fix them? They at least tried to address them to some degree but those efforts failed. And why did they fail? We had to leave readers and the world with some lasting answers to those questions.
(16:12)
Aminatou: Another part of this for me is obviously there are heroes and villains in the story but some of the villains are very surprising. Finding out that Lisa Bloom is a villain all along is something that was really depressing to find out, but also seeing how even her mother Gloria Allred who is someone who is a lawyer who has paraded her clients on TV, said that she's been a victims advocate her whole life, and finding out that she is a lawyer that has taken settlements from Weinstein and has setup her clients to do this kind of stuff. I understand the reason that a lot of lawyers give is this is the best that their clients can get but at scale it really becomes a problem because it means they're part of this machinery that is silencing victims. So Megan I would love for you to talk a little bit more about that aspect of the book.
Megan: You're right. We were so surprised and it was so -- we were so glad that in the course of reporting for the book we were able to really pull back the curtain on the machinery that was in place to silence the accusers and push back against any media attention. And the role of Lisa Bloom, I mean she's one of the most prominent feminist attorneys in the country and one of the most vocal victim rights advocates. And in 2016 she crossed sides and went to go work for Weinstein. And she has said that she did so because she was only aware of him making inappropriate comments to women and that she wanted to work with him to help him apologize. And we were able to obtain these confidential records in the course of reporting for the book that showed she had much deeper knowledge of these serious allegations including of rape against him and that she played a much darker role. That she in fact in a memo in which she was basically seeking to go work for him in 2016 spelled out all of the underhanded tactics that she was prepared to use to help him undermine one of his accusers, Rose McGowan. And she's basically promising -- and it's bullet point after bullet point after bullet point including let's plant stories about her becoming unglued so if she does go public people won't think she's credible.
(18:25)
So it was really one of the most jaw-dropping moments in the course of our reporting. This was someone who was basically saying I'm going to take all of my experience working with victims, harness that experience on your behalf so we can use it against them. And so she really ended up kind of emerging as one of the more surprising figures in this machinery that was in place to try to cover up Weinstein's tracks.
On the other hand her mother Gloria Allred we realized had become a sort of surprising figure in another way for the role she played. There was a moment in the course of our reporting when we realized that her firm had basically worked on a settlement that had silenced one of Weinstein's victims all the way back in 2004. And these secret settlements have -- oftentimes women when they become, not just in the case of Weinstein but across the country, victims of sexual harassment and sexual assault will go to an attorney because they want to do something about it. They want to try to hold that person accountable and stop him. And oftentimes the advice is they get steered into these -- they're told that the best if not only option is to accept a settlement, basically accept cash money in exchange for silence. Beyond that these restrictive clauses that they have to sign up for are outrageous.
(19:45)
I mean you can't tell your partner. You can't tell your other people in your workplace who might be victimized as well. You can't tell -- if you want to talk to a therapist about it that therapist has to sign a confidentiality clause. And some of these attorneys that have been involved in these secret settlements including Gloria Allred have done this. In the case of Gloria Allred she and her firm worked not just on a settlement that helped silence a victim of Weinstein but also of Larry Nassar, or Bill O'Reilly. And so we really wanted to also illuminate a lot of the really tough questions that people need to grapple with when it comes to these settlements.
Aminatou: Right. And I mean I think that we are just now starting to understand that but my fear is that nothing is really moving in that direction. There are still people today who are taking those settlements. I really wonder how does this all end?
Jodi: Well here is the confusing thing: everything has changed and nothing has changed. We've spent a lot of time in our reporting trying to reconcile that because on the one hand we really did live through a seismic shift and it is now much more recognized that sexual harassment is not okay. In high school snapping a girl's bra or patting her butt while she walks down the hallway, that's not okay. These secret settlements are now under question in a much more serious way.
On the other hand if you look at our laws and our systems and our processes they haven't changed. It's not really easier to report a claim now than it was two or three years ago. People might be a little more sympathetic. I think there might be more compassion in certain arenas. But the basic process hasn't changed at all.
Our concern is also when you look at low-income women, and we did some reporting on this for the book, we focused on a McDonald's worker named Kim Lawson who's very involved in the fight against -- essentially the fight to improve the company's sexual harassment policies. McDonald's as it turns out is actually going through some efforts on this. We'll see whether they're going far enough and whether it will work. But I think if you look at women in America who are serving burgers for ten bucks an hour who are getting groped by their male managers, has anything really changed for those women since we broke this story? No. I mean it's really hard to make the argument that it has.
(22:15)
Aminatou: Well that's depressing.
Jodi: It's depressing but, you know, I hope people read the book and come to the conclusion that facts really can lead to social change. I hope the lesson is that journalism can win and women can win and especially when there's clear overwhelming evidence it can cause people to take action.
Aminatou: Megan I'm wondering if you can walk us through the story of Lauren O'Connor because that is a story that I was very compelled by and I think as someone who is a very young person in a big company her story is one that was really necessary to tell.
Megan: Yeah, so Lauren O'Connor is one of the most remarkable figures in the Weinstein story. She was a junior executive at the Weinstein company working with Harvey on a variety of projects. And in 2015 she did something that so few other employees ever did. She typed up an extensive memo that she submitted to HR outlining all of the alleged sort of sexual harassment and abusive behavior that she had witnessed Harvey engage in -- Weinstein engage in during her time at the company. And she submitted that and pretty quickly and in pretty short order David Boies, one of the most powerful litigators in the country who has been probably Weinstein's strongest defender for over 15 years, was among the lawyers who swooped in and basically silenced her through a settlement. Basically arranged for her to exit the company and to put her in a position in which she was legally prohibited from every speaking about this memo again.
(24:08)
And we also in the course of trying to pull back the curtain on what had happened at this company show that while they had been able to silence her through a settlement there were people at the company who were made aware of that memo from Harvey Weinstein's brother, Bob Weinstein, his business partner and the entire board of the company was shown that memo. And they did nothing about it.
Aminatou: We're going to take a break and I'll be right back with Jodi and Megan.
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(28:45)
Aminatou: We talk a lot about people who are complicit but I'm wondering were you surprised at some of the people who stepped up to help you?
Jodi: So surprised. So surprised. I think it's really true in journalism that at the outset of a story when you're kind of looking at all the people you may call you can never predict who's going to end up being helpful and who isn't. But this case was a pretty dramatic one. For one thing there is a kind of Deep Throat of the Weinstein investigation and it's a man. His name is Irwin Reiter. He had been an accountant for Weinstein's companies for 30 years, a lifer. We had been told initially that he was a real loyal soldier. He was still working for the company when he started meeting with me late at night in September of 2017 and what very few people knew about Irwin is that Irwin had become really alarmed about Weinstein's behavior towards women. Not initially.
(29:45)
At the beginning of Irwin's tenure at the company he had kind of caught glimpses of some bad things and like a lot of other employees he hadn't really given them attention. He hadn't really acted. But it was in 2014, and just to show you how all of these cases affect one another it was partially the Cosby news that really alarmed him because he saw everything that was pouring out about Bill Cosby and he was beginning to hear more chatter about problems with Weinstein around the office. And he put two and two together and he said "Are we going to have a Cosby problem at this company?"
And initially his concern was not actually for the women; it was for the company. He said this could really destroy this business. And so for the next two years Irwin tried basically without any success to do something about it. And so when I contacted him in that fall of 2017 it turned out that I was contacting somebody who had really tried every other avenue to try to do something and turned out willing to help us.
Another real surprise to us was that Gwyneth Paltrow was willing to be so helpful to us. We barely thought we should call her at the start of this investigation. She was Weinstein's biggest star. We thought she was like the golden girl of Miramax. That was her reputation. But lo and behold at a time when very few people in Hollywood were willing to talk to us she really was. She told us her story and also what we've never really been able to share until now is that she spent a lot of the summer of 2017 very quietly contacting other women in Hollywood to see if they would speak with us.
And at the same time Weinstein was really kind of obsessed with the question of whether she was speaking to us. And so at one point we actually got a panicked series of phone calls and texts from her because she was hiding in the bathroom of her Hamptons home. Weinstein had shown up at a party in her house early and she was very scared that he was going to corner her and interrogate her about whether or not she was speaking to us.
(31:50)
Aminatou: Right. And the thing that you end up exposing is part of why he is so obsessed with her is because for years he had held her up to other women that he was trying to harass as an example of the kind of career path that they could have. And it wasn't true and it was frankly very -- you know, it's a very disgusting pattern.
Megan: It was something that came out. I mean one of the last pieces of reporting that we did for this book in the epilogue was a group interview in which we brought together women who had been part of our reporting. You know, this fall marks the three year anniversary of the Access Hollywood tape, the second anniversary of the Weinstein story, and the first anniversary of Christine Blasey Ford testifying about her alleged sexual assault by Kavanaugh.
And so we brought together women who had been central figures in all three of those stories who had helped kind of spur this social change and we conducted a group interview in which we asked them about what the experience of coming forward had meant for them. So there was Christine Blasey Ford. There was some of the first women who participated in our Weinstein investigation and went on the record from Laura Madden to like Gwyneth Paltrow for example. And there was Rachel Crooks who had been one of the first women to go on the record with her allegation of sexual misconduct against Donald Trump in 2016.
And it was really interesting to hear them sort of swap stories about what that process had meant for them, what it was like on the other side, and Gwyneth did in fact tell this story about how what had been so -- about the sort of surprising difficulty that she had had after going forward and going public with her allegation against Weinstein which is that she had started to receive -- after that she had started to get phone calls from other women who Weinstein had preyed on over the years and learned that she had actually been part of his . . . that he had invoked her in his predation. That he had basically held her up saying basically if you kind of submit to me you're going to get what Gwyneth Paltrow had. Look what I did for her. Look what I did for her career.
(34:10)
And so she had actually -- things had actually become in some ways more painful for her on the other side of coming forward and at this point in this group interview there was a moment when she broke down in tears saying I feel like I've been a tool in his predation. And so it was just one of the many kind of surprising revelations in this final group interview. You know, an example that nobody could be quite sure what was going to happen once they made this decision to come forward.
Aminatou: Right. Because I think that part of that group interview and so much of the work that you do in talking to so many women who are victims of Weinstein and victims of other harassers is really challenging the assertion that so much of society has that women are looking for attention. All you hear is the fear that they have, the trepidation that they have, and really realizing that oh, #MeToo and a lot of these revelations are just women whispering to each other. It's not actually the witch hunt that we were told is coming. I'm just curious about your own personal thoughts about that, about the predominant idea that we have of women who come out for all of these stories, or they're fame-seeking or they're gold-digging or they're, you know . . . and those are very generous terms. And the truth of what has actually happened is they are just trying to tell the story of what happened to them and they're doing it in service of helping other people.
Jodi: It's funny. Listening to you I think about our sources across the whole span of this reporting starting with Megan wrote some of the first articles documenting problems with Trump's treatment of women in 2016. After the Weinstein story I broke the Louis C.K. story with two colleagues. We worked on the Epstein story this summer. I think it's a real tension in our work, Amina, because on the one hand we do try to persuade women to go on the record. We make the case that this is in the public service, that we are going to handle this with as much dignity as possible. We do a lot of work to verify these allegations and to give context to what happened so we make sure we're on really solid factual ground before the stories are published.
(36:25)
But I think we don't make easy promises about what will happen when they come forward because we have seen all kinds of outcomes. I mean just in the group that Megan was just talking about at that gathering you do have someone like Ashley Judd who has basically been given a hero's welcome since she came forward. Then there are other women who had much more difficult experiences.
I think also coming forward it doesn't resolve everything. We're writing about a lot of cases in which women's careers were damaged or even lost entirely. And so I think for some of our sources they're glad they've come forward but there's still a sense of loss and even grief about the years that are lost. People have said things to us like "Look, I can never be 23 again. I can never be starting in the workforce again." And no amount of journalism or public recognition can ever change that.
Aminatou: I'm glad that you mentioned Christine Blasey Ford because I was surprised to see her included. I was like great. I was like new avenues for this story. But that story is so much more complicated I think than anybody knew that was following the Kavanaugh hearings. I would love to hear you talk a little bit more about that.
(37:42)
Megan: We didn't want to stop with the Weinstein story. We wanted to push through into the year that followed as the #MeToo movement really took off in earnest. And honestly as things became more kind of complicated and confusing. And we realized that once we were able to start piecing together the behind-the-scene story of Christine Blasey Ford, her private path to testifying in Washington, that it was in fact so much more complicated than either side knew. Starting with the moment that it was announced that Kavanaugh was on Trump's short list of nominees to the Supreme Court Christine was in the beach in California talking to friends. This was not somebody who was looking to inject herself into the spotlight. In fact that that moment she contemplated reaching out to Kavanaugh directly and saying "You know, listen, I want to do something with this information about what you did to me these many years ago but I'd like to spare us and our families public embarrassment or pain."
And she didn't decide that but it was just one of the many kind of surprising things that we learned. Critics have said that she was basically part of a political ploy to take down Kavanaugh in the eleventh hour. Well we sort of describe the moment when she and her team of, yes, feminist attorneys and a Democratic strategist decided that she wasn't going to come forward. And the night when she basically kind of crawled up in her son's bed and started crying because she felt like all she wanted to do was get this information into the hands of the people who were going to be making a decision about one of the highest positions in the land and she -- they had decided actually this is going to be too difficult for you and you're going to come under attack. And so it went on and on in terms of the surprises that we encountered in the course of that reporting.
Aminatou: It's interesting because we talk about all these different industries that are being roiled by #MeToo but it's also happening in the world of media. And I feel like that is a much more complicated conversation because the actual people who are making our news are also people who are sometimes behaving badly. I'm curious about what your thoughts are about that and the tension that you feel in doing your work in an institution and an industry that also is not necessarily cleaning up its own house.
(40:00)
Jodi: You know what really struck me in the fall of 2017 as we began to see this display of mass accountability and these figures we kind of took for granted like Matt Lauer who is such like a regular fixture on the media landscape lost his job I just thought about how many of these people were our cultural storytellers. Bill O'Reilly, Harvey Weinstein, Roger Ailes, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Garrison Keillor, Louis C.K., the list goes on and on. I mean these were people who they told us the stories of ourselves, of our politics, of our news, of our history, of our lives. They were the narrators of our culture and especially as a female journalist who has been in this business for 20 years I felt so acutely the question of what does it mean that the people who dictated these stories had stories of their own that we never knew?
Aminatou: I know that you are both still reporting out so much. [Laughs] And there's still so much that is in the dark that needs to be brought to light. I would love to hear about anything that you are reading about or people that you are talking to that are making you feel a little bit more hopeful about this moment and really about how we move forward.
Jodi: We're journalists, not activists. We can't tell anybody what to do. But in our reporting this is what we see. We see that there are basically three big questions about #MeToo that are all unresolved. Number one, what is the scope of behaviors under scrutiny? Are we talking about bad dates per Aziz Ansari or are we only talking about really serious accusations of sexual assault, workplace harassment, etc.? Number two, how do we get to the bottom of what happened? What are the tools we're using to find out what information is actually correct? Number three, what should the consequences be? What should accountability and punishment look like?
(42:15)
What Megan and I have seen is that in a lot of these #MeToo stories those three questions get entangled and intertwined. Like if you look at the Al Franken story, you know, there's a lot of debate about whether or not he should've resigned from the Senate but there's also some debate about what he even did in the first place. And without answering that question it's really hard to know what the consequences should be.
So we just feel like -- I guess the thing that we feel we can do and the thing that makes us feel hopeful when other people do it because there's a huge group project across journalism that's doing this right now is just trying to get to the bottom of what happened. These stories are really, really painful but there's also a lot of empowerment in finally figuring out the truth.
There can be a sense of solidarity, a sense of satisfaction in finally knowing what happened. The kind of accountability of just having the stuff out in the open, I feel like that's a source of hope. I just feel like you can't solve a problem that you can't see and for a long time none of us saw this problem as clearly as we should have. And Megan and I are just going to do everything we can to make sure the problem keeps getting seen.
Megan: And I think that another one of the reasons that we wanted to write this book is we do think that it's ultimately a hopeful book. What we show is when brave individuals and sources come together and institution is willing to stand up to a bully and intimidation that the facts can win. That the truth does matter.
(43:55)
Aminatou: I would love to hear you both talk about the role that you think friendship plays in your work and particularly in writing this book.
Jodi: Well the funny thing is we did not know each other at the outset of this project. I had met Megan. She was new at the time. She was really busy. I mean I think I felt like basically empathy for you because I had had two kids at the Times and in 2016 when you came I -- you know, I saw you doing this intensely difficult Trump reporting not only about the sexual abuse allegations but also about things like his taxes. And then I saw your growing belly and that you were having a kid and I just -- you know, I had lived enough of that life to know this is really, really hard.
But we didn't know each other and when Rebecca Corbett suggested that I reach out -- that's our editor -- when she suggested that I reach out to Megan in those early weeks of the Weinstein investigation when Megan was still out in maternity leave I was like I had thought of Megan as somebody pretty different than me, of sort of just a different personality. But it turns out that we had some life experiences in common that were so similar and we kind of formed our own little pattern of two. And I think that really speaks to a bigger theme in this material and the reason the book is called She Said which is that women don't always see the patterns that govern all of our lives. We put each other into these sort of separate little boxes and don't always see those commonalities.
And then the obvious thing is that working together, whether it's Megan and I as journalists or sort of our sources coming together to collectively speak out about somebody like Harvey Weinstein, it is so much more powerful than anything in isolation. But when I started this investigation I did not -- I mean I had no idea what it would be like working with Megan and I certainly did not expect that I would end up with someone who basically feels like a sister to me now.
(46:05)
Megan: Yeah, I think that there's . . . I think we see in kind of pop culture and movies and TV shows a lot of depictions of like male partners, like work partners. The sort of cops who team up, the detectives who are teamed up. And it was actually I think another thing that we were glad to be able to do in this book was to show what two female partners look like in action, and especially as they start to kind of work with more of a widening group of other -- of other sources and women who participated in this investigation.
And so when it comes to write a book, you know, I think there's no substitute for partnership. It can be such an isolating experience but I think that it really makes a big difference when you have a partner and a friend by your side.
Aminatou: Well thank you both so much for joining us today. She Said is available wherever you buy books. Pick one up for someone you love. Megan, Jodi, thank you so much for joining us.
Jodi: Thank you.
Megan: Thanks for having us.
[Interview Ends]
Aminatou: Are you boiling with rage? If you haven't already check out our episode A Woman's Anger with Rebecca Traister on more on the political impacts of women's anger throughout history.
Ann: Wow. I am -- I was already very, very compelled to read this book and now I am like . . . I'm racing. I'm racing to get it.
Aminatou: Yeah. You know, a thing that's really interesting too is that as we discuss in the interview they also tell the story of Christine Blasey Ford who eventually came out to testify in front of Congress about her experience with now Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh. I can't believe we have a Supreme Court justice named Brett. Everything about it feels wrong.
(48:00)
Ann: I can't believe we have several sexual predators on the Supreme Court. Like that's one thing I can't believe.
Aminatou: Right, right. And I'm still, you know, as we talk about in the interview that story is -- it's so complicated and they go through the entire behind-the-scenes of how that decision came about. And with everything that is going on in the news I keep thinking back to Christine Blasey Ford and the risk that she took speaking out. You know, how I 100% believe her and how frustrated I am for her that this has been the outcome and how frustrated I am that it's been the outcome for all of us, right? But it's been so interesting reading this book and being reminded of her story and then we're sitting with the news that there are more very convincing accusers who never got to tell their stories.
Ann: Right. And also the way that this is really bringing up -- I mean I know we talked about it at the time -- about how difficult it was for people who are survivors to be living in a news environment where this stuff is in every headline. Particularly when it's people saying that this is no big deal or it's just some childish prank or something like that. You know, the kind of diminishing language that I think has accompanied a lot of the discussion of the kind of behavior that Kavanaugh was accused of. That's all happening all over again as we continue to revisit this. So it's also on my mind that I am just once more thinking about everyone who is a survivor and how they are continuing to go about their lives while this stuff is once again everywhere. And I just, you know, want to do our classic hello, we're here for you and we believe you and the world is awful and terrible. Like I really just want to -- I cannot have a discussion of this without us saying that.
Aminatou: Absolutely. So take care of yourself and our inbox is always open if there is anything that you want to talk about and we hope everyone has a great weekend.
Ann: Yes. See you on the Internet.
Aminatou: See you on the Internet boo-boo. You can find us many places on the Internet: callyourgirlfriend.com, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, we're on all your favorite platforms. Subscribe, rate, review, you know the drill. You can call us back. You can leave a voicemail at 714-681-2943. That's 714-681-CYGF. You can email us at callyrgf@gmail.com. Our theme song is by Robyn, original music composed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. Our logos are by Kenesha Sneed. We're on Instagram and Twitter at @callyrgf where Sophie Carter-Kahn does all of our social. Our associate producer is Jordan Baley and this podcast is produced by Gina Delvac.