The 2019 gathering of women who spoke out about abuse

The 2019 gathering of women who spoke out about abuse was a joint interview held at Gwyneth Paltrow’s home in Los Angeles on January 16, 2019. Convened by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, it brought twelve women connected to their reporting together to consider what followed the decision to speak publicly. The meeting revisited an idea the reporters had first considered during their investigation of Harvey Weinstein, when assembling sources in one room had seemed too risky for the confidentiality of their work. Now the purpose had changed: to ask what women had encountered after speaking, and what they understood about the consequences.

From secrecy to a shared interview

The gathering grew out of two questions that remained after the Weinstein investigation: what happened to women who came forward, and how did they make sense of what followed? During the investigation, the reporters had wondered whether women might benefit from talking together in person, but the possibility appeared incompatible with protecting a confidential reporting process. By the final months of 2018, the circumstances were different. After the Weinstein story helped prompt a worldwide outpouring of accounts, the reporters wanted to understand the aftermath as well as the disclosures themselves.

The gathering was explicitly arranged as journalism, not group therapy. Its central question asked what the women had found on the other side of the leap of faith involved in sharing their accounts. The reporters wanted each participant’s contribution to matter equally, while recognizing that an interview could not erase the very different positions from which the women spoke. The meeting therefore served both as a collective conversation and as a way to examine how public disclosure could alter a person’s life.

Arrangements and setting

The women lived in three countries, and arranging the meeting required repeated calls and messages to explain its purpose and find a time that worked. A hotel conference room proved inadequate because none seemed private enough. Paltrow, who planned to attend, offered her home in Brentwood. To avoid accepting a substantial benefit from a source, the reporters paid for the meals; because travel costs would have prevented some women from attending, they also covered a few plane tickets and hotel rooms.

The group arrived at six o’clock on a rainy evening. The den became the main meeting room for that night and part of the following day. The women settled on wide sofas near a fireplace, then later gathered around a long table for Japanese food. The house was familiar territory to the reporters: it recalled the Hamptons home where they had conducted their first in-person interview with Paltrow months earlier. In this later meeting, however, the house also made differences among the participants tangible. Its quiet comforts stood in contrast to the economic insecurity some women had experienced.

Participants and unequal circumstances

The women brought sharply different experiences of public attention, work, and risk. Rachel Crooks had traveled from Ohio. She had told Megan Twohey that Donald Trump forcibly kissed her near an elevator at Trump Tower; after sharing her account, she was still dealing with consequences that had brought both opportunities and problems. Christine Blasey Ford attended three months after the Kavanaugh hearing, seated beside her lawyers, Debra Katz and Lisa Banks. She was still receiving death threats, had avoided ordinary local shopping for fear of being approached, and had not returned to the teaching work she loved. Coming to Los Angeles, she told Megan, reflected a new determination to venture out.

Kim Lawson, a McDonald’s worker who had come from Kansas City, had become a leader in a campaign pressing the company to address workplace harassment. She arrived with labor organizer Allynn Umel and was already at ease among the other participants. Her circumstances differed markedly from Paltrow’s: Lawson was earning ten dollars an hour, and six months earlier she had been homeless. Zelda Perkins, a former producer, was two decades older than Lawson and had traveled more than four thousand miles to attend. Their differences in age, occupation, income, and public standing did not disappear in the room; the conversation made it possible to see how women facing the same broad problem could have very different resources and costs.

Rowena Chiu occupied another distinctive position. She had remained publicly unidentified since the Weinstein story broke and had communicated with Jodi Kantor through her lawyer. She joined on the condition that the group preserve her anonymity if she chose not to come forward, and her lawyer, Nancy Erika Smith, attended. Chiu had left film, earned a law degree, worked as a management consultant, and moved to the United States; at the time of the gathering, she wrote research papers for the World Bank and was raising four children. Though she had never told her story aloud to a group, she came prepared to decide whether she could speak.

Accounts, solidarity, and a change in perspective

The interview began with introductions and accounts of how each woman had decided to speak. Paltrow raised a toast to Ashley Judd, recognizing that Judd had been the first actress to speak on the record in the initial Weinstein story and had helped make it possible for others to follow. That exchange placed the gathering in the sequence of disclosures: the women were not simply recounting separate experiences but reflecting on how one person’s willingness to go first could change the conditions for those who came later.

Perkins and Lawson described different forms of authority gained through activism. Perkins recalled testifying to members of Parliament about confidentiality agreements and feeling that political power was something she could claim as an individual. Lawson described filing a complaint against McDonald’s with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and joining a September strike. She had delivered a speech, given interviews, and pushed her daughter in a stroller along the march; men had also come out to support the women, marching behind them. The complaint, public appearances, and organizing had brought her a sense of power and a new role as a coach to other McDonald’s employees, including through a text chain. Customers recognized her from television coverage. For both women, speaking and organizing had helped turn an experience of harassment into a source of public authority and connection.

Chiu listened for much of the discussion, occasionally taking photographs, and no one pressed her to decide whether she would go public. Ford’s account nevertheless became important to her. Chiu had imagined the criticism and disruption she might face if she identified herself; seeing Ford endure intense public scrutiny made that prospect concrete. At the same time, watching the support Ford received from friends and neighbors, and meeting her in person, strengthened Chiu’s inclination to speak. The group’s willingness to support her made the gathering more than an occasion to record what had happened to the participants: it became a place where a still-unmade decision could be considered alongside the experiences of women who had already taken that step.

Chiu’s decision and the gathering’s significance

A few weeks after the meeting, Chiu called the reporters and said she was ready to go on the record and have her name shared publicly. She knew that more than eighty women had already come forward about Weinstein and was unsure whether the public would still care about her account. She chose to speak nonetheless. The women who had come forward in Los Angeles and elsewhere had helped make the decision possible; Chiu also feared that the legal cases against Weinstein might not succeed and wanted to help shape the historical record and continue pressing for change.

The gathering thus recorded an outcome that was not settled when it began. Chiu entered as someone who had not disclosed her story to a group and was uncertain whether she would ever identify herself. Listening to the others, particularly Ford, helped move her toward a public decision; weeks later, she made that decision. More broadly, the meeting set the costs and consequences of speaking beside one another: death threats and fear of exposure, economic vulnerability, activism, new opportunities, and the possibility of solidarity. Its significance lies not in suggesting that disclosure produced the same result for every woman, but in showing how one woman’s account and another’s support could affect the choice still facing someone else.