California, United States

California, United States, figures in the book as more than a location on a map: it is where records of complaints against Miramax proved both revealing and inaccessible, where reformers tried and failed to loosen the secrecy surrounding harassment settlements, and where employees encountered the power of The Weinstein Company in their daily work. The state also offered Christine Blasey Ford a life centered on research rather than national politics. Across these threads, California connects private experience to the systems that determine what can be recorded, disclosed, and acted upon.

Government records and their limits

In mid-July, while Jodi Kantor concentrated on Hollywood, Megan Twohey pursued a basic question: whether public records documented Harvey Weinstein’s alleged abusive conduct. The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the corresponding New York agencies had no records for the reporters. A researcher, Grace Ashford, found a different trail in records from the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing: several workplace complaints associated with Miramax. The document offered dates, addresses, numerical codes, and abbreviated dispositions, but not the identities of complainants or the substance of their experiences.

One entry was especially difficult to interpret. On September 12, 2001, the agency received a sexual-harassment complaint against Miramax and closed it the same day. Its notation said that the complainant had elected court action, a disposition that usually indicated the agency had assessed the complaint and directed it toward civil proceedings. Yet the reporters found no corresponding California court case. The gap between an official notation and the missing public record became an investigative question in its own right: how could a complaint appear to vanish within hours?

Twohey repeatedly tried to reach the agency. When an official eventually responded by email, she learned that the complaint and related records had been destroyed under a policy that barred retention beyond three years. The official also could not disclose the complainant’s name. After further requests, Twohey obtained the name of the investigator assigned to the case. The investigator had retired, and the agency did not know where she lived. Twohey located her through online searches and reached her east of Los Angeles, but the former investigator, who had reviewed hundreds of cases, did not remember this one. California’s record had pointed toward a complaint, then toward the limits of what the state could preserve or disclose.

Workplaces, roles, and unequal power

The book places the Miramax records alongside accounts from workplaces across several industries, emphasizing that harassment took different forms in different settings. In restaurants, alcohol and managers’ reluctance to confront customers could shape the risks workers faced; in Silicon Valley, young men with sudden wealth could act as if they answered to no one. These comparisons make California part of a broader account of workplace conditions rather than an isolated case. The recurring issue is how ordinary structures—authority, job assignments, and dependence on employers—can leave workers exposed.

At The Weinstein Company’s Los Angeles office, twenty-five-year-old Emily Nestor was working temporarily as a receptionist during the holiday period. After an encounter with Weinstein at The Peninsula Beverly Hills, she told colleagues what had happened. She did not want to make a formal human-resources complaint, but Irwin Reiter and other executives asked employees who had heard her account directly to write down what they knew. One record described the persistence of the unwanted advance despite Nestor’s repeated refusals. The effort preserved an internal account, but it did not become an official complaint from Nestor.

Another account concerned Sandeep Rehal, Weinstein’s personal assistant. She told Reiter and other executives about duties that extended well beyond ordinary assistance: arranging a furnished apartment and its contents, maintaining a list of women identified around the office as his friends, and coordinating their movements. Rehal later described being too ashamed and afraid to disclose the most troubling duties at first. She also said Weinstein had linked her silence to her student loans and her younger sister’s schooling, and suggested that speaking could bring consequences. A company-paid bonus followed her work finding a supplier for a medication he used. Rehal eventually left the company. In this account, the Los Angeles workplace is not merely where an allegation arose; it is where the organization’s allocation of tasks made an employee responsible for managing a powerful executive’s private arrangements.

Settlement secrecy and a failed reform effort

California also became a site of debate over whether confidential settlements protected complainants or helped conceal repeated misconduct. Gloria Allred defended confidentiality agreements as a means of securing compensation and privacy for clients who feared professional repercussions and the uncertainty of litigation. She also acknowledged that secrecy could serve the powerful person on the other side of a settlement. Consumer lawyers in California drew a different conclusion: compensation mattered, but repeatedly concealing allegations could allow the same conduct to continue without warning others.

In January 2017, state legislator Connie Leyva considered sponsoring a proposal requested by those lawyers. It would have prohibited confidentiality clauses in sexual-harassment settlements and allowed future complainants to speak publicly and name alleged perpetrators. Allred told the lobbyists and a Leyva aide that, in her view, harassers would not pay without receiving silence in return, and she said she would travel to the state capitol to oppose the proposal. The consumer lawyers believed that Allred’s public standing could make the measure impossible to defend against attack. Leyva withdrew from sponsoring it; the reform effort died before a bill was introduced. California thus appears not only as a place where records had been erased, but also as a place where a proposed change to the conditions of silence was stopped before it entered the legislative process.

California as home and contrast

For Ford, California represented a deliberate departure from the Washington-centered social world she had shared with Brett Kavanaugh. She had grown up in similar privileged suburban circles, then left that world in her twenties for California and the study of the brain. By 2018, at fifty-one, she was a psychology professor and biostatistician working with a consortium of professors from Palo Alto and Stanford. National political debate was distant from her daily professional life; her research concerned trauma, depression, and resilience, while she had paid little attention to the #MeToo debate.

A 2012 counseling session with her husband brought a high-school experience into their conversation. During renovations to their Palo Alto house, Ford had insisted on a second front door because she said she would feel trapped without another exit. At a therapist’s urging, she explained that this need was connected to an experience in which she had been trapped in a room and physically restrained by a boy while another boy watched. Her husband later stated in a sworn affidavit that she named Kavanaugh as the attacker. The house’s additional door, initially a point of conflict during remodeling, thus had a personal significance rooted in Ford’s earlier experience. California, in this part of the narrative, is the setting for her adult life and professional identity, not the origin of the event she described.

A landscape of different routes to speaking

The book’s California settings sit alongside lives shaped by very different resources and risks. At a gathering hosted in Gwyneth Paltrow’s home, participants included women from entertainment, low-wage work, and other circumstances; the rooms’ comforts stood in contrast to Kim Lawson’s recent homelessness and her current $10-an-hour job at McDonald’s. Lawson described filing an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint and taking part in a September strike, where she spoke, gave interviews, and pushed her daughter in a stroller along the march. Her account shows one route from workplace grievance to public action, distinct from the legal and legislative battles described elsewhere in the state.

At the same gathering, Rowena Chiu said she was the only participant who had not yet made her story public. She spoke about the small number of Asian voices coming forward and about cultural expectations that could discourage making a fuss. Zelda Perkins, who had left Miramax years earlier, described the authority she felt when addressing members of Parliament about confidentiality agreements. These conversations do not make California the location of every woman’s experience; rather, they place the state’s workplace and reform stories within a wider comparison of who can speak, at what cost, and with what support. California’s significance lies in that intersection: it is a setting for institutional records and employment practices, a contested arena for reform, and a place where private lives were shaped far from the public hearings that later made them national news.