Jodi Kantor’s acquisition of the O’Connor memo

Jodi Kantor’s acquisition of the O’Connor memo was a turning point in the investigation of Harvey Weinstein: a source gave her access to a document that described misconduct inside The Weinstein Company and the ways company practices implicated other employees. Its importance lay not only in what it alleged, but in what it could establish. The memo supplied a detailed internal account, while its passage from a company executive’s complaint to a reporter’s possession made the investigation’s stakes newly urgent.

The memo behind the investigation

In September 2017, Irwin Reiter told Kantor about a memo written by Lauren O’Connor, a junior executive respected within the company, who had left after raising concerns about Weinstein’s treatment of women. Kantor and Megan Twohey were already seeking documentation of events inside The Weinstein Company that they could publish without identifying their source. Their reporting had gathered accounts from actresses, but they wanted evidence that could show how the company itself had encountered Weinstein’s conduct.

The memo had a history of being seen, then apparently disappearing from view. In November 2015, colleagues gathered to examine O’Connor’s detailed complaint. Unlike the account of Emily Nestor, a temporary receptionist who had reported a single episode in 2014, O’Connor’s document went beyond one incident. It described offensive conduct directed at her and presented a broader indictment of the workplace and Weinstein’s treatment of women. Reiter and other executives informed Bob Weinstein, who agreed that the board should know. Rather than circulate the complaint, Bob invited board members to read it at the office. Lance Maerov later looked at it and photographed its first and last pages, including witness names and other details; he recalled finding it credible.

The complaint soon seemed to have vanished, and O’Connor was leaving the company without much explanation. Reiter had kept a copy. When he later described the document to Kantor, he had already read her some passages, but she wanted to see the memo again and understand it as a whole. That request led to the meeting at which access became possible.

A source makes access possible

Late on September 28, 2017, Kantor met Reiter at the bar behind Little Park. The reporters’ editors were already urging them to begin composing an article about Weinstein, but Kantor and Twohey wanted further documentation of what had happened inside the company. Kantor also wanted Reiter to see that the allegations from actresses were not isolated from the accounts that had troubled him at work.

She handed him a short, anonymous account based on an actress’s experience at a hotel. It described a career-related meeting that turned into pressure for sex, followed by the woman’s departure. Kantor explained that she and Twohey had heard similar accounts from other women. Reiter, who had known much more about the company’s internal problems than about Weinstein’s encounters with actresses, reacted with alarm. The exchange connected two bodies of reporting: the company’s workplace complaints and the recurring accounts the reporters were hearing from women in the film industry.

Kantor then asked Reiter to bring up O’Connor’s memo on his phone. He began reading it aloud, paused, and said he was going to the restroom. He left his phone with Kantor, open to the email containing the document. The narrative presents the gesture as deliberate: after years of frustration and unsuccessful efforts to intervene, Reiter was enabling her to copy evidence that could not safely be handed over as a file or discussed openly.

Copying and securing the document

Kantor did not stop to read the memo. She worked quickly, taking care not to make a mistake, and copied the full document from Reiter’s phone. When he returned, the phone was back on his chair; she thanked him without drawing attention to what she had done. A few minutes later, after leaving the meeting, she went to the restroom and sent screenshots to Twohey and Rebecca Corbett. She did not want to remain the sole person with electronic possession of the material for even a moment longer than necessary. The email’s subject line was simply Memo.

That sequence matters because the acquisition was not presented as a casual transfer. The memo had already been withheld from ordinary circulation inside the company, and Reiter had previously kept a copy for himself. At the meeting, he did not openly pass Kantor a document; his pause and the phone left in her hands created a brief, carefully managed opportunity. Kantor’s rapid copying and immediate distribution to her colleagues turned that opportunity into secured reporting material.

What the memo changed

O’Connor had sent the memo in November 2015 under an unremarkable subject line, but its contents were a direct account of her experience and her understanding of the workplace. She identified her role as a literary scout and production executive, hired to find books for adaptation and later assigned production responsibilities. She also described female employees being placed between Weinstein and aspiring actresses after private hotel appointments, helping with introductions to representatives and possible casting opportunities. In her account, such duties were not part of the work she had expected to do; they made employees part of a system organized around Weinstein’s access to vulnerable women seeking career opportunities.

When Kantor, Twohey, and Corbett read the complete memo that night, the purpose of the investigation changed in scale. What had seemed partly like a historical account of past conduct became an urgent inquiry into continuing risk: the reporters feared that, without publication, Weinstein could continue to harm others. The document tied personal allegations to company structures, internal knowledge, and the roles assigned to employees. Its acquisition therefore did more than add another source. It gave the reporters a detailed account from within The Weinstein Company and sharpened the reason they believed the story had to be published.