The New York Times

The New York Times is both the newsroom behind the investigation of Harvey Weinstein and one of the institutions whose choices shaped its course. The book traces how its reporters moved from an uncertain opening, with a promising source unwilling even to speak by phone, toward a carefully documented story, while Weinstein used tactics intended to disrupt their work. The paper’s role was not simply to publish the result: editors and reporters assembled evidence, weighed the limits of what could responsibly be said, protected the developing story, and faced a conflict involving a law firm that was simultaneously acting against the investigation and representing the newspaper.

Reporting and the institutional setting

The investigation began without the kind of access that makes a powerful subject’s conduct easy to document. The reporters knew little, and almost nobody was willing to talk. Over three years, the book’s authors conducted hundreds of interviews, from London to Palo Alto, and incorporated interviews, emails, transcripts, and other primary documents. Some material had originally been shared off the record; additional reporting, including renewed contact with the people involved, made it possible to present parts of it. The endnotes identify the sources and records behind the account, reflecting the paper’s emphasis on reconstructing conversations and events through evidence even when its reporters had not witnessed them.

The newsroom’s attention to harassment reporting developed in the wake of The New York Times’s reporting on Bill O’Reilly’s settlements. On July 14, the team assigned to work on harassment stories after that scoop gathered in the empty Page One conference room. Rebecca Corbett, Matt Purdy, Emily Steel, and other colleagues were there for an update. The room’s function lent the meeting significance: senior editors normally met there twice daily to decide which stories would lead the print and digital editions, while reporters almost never attended those meetings. The investigation was therefore being discussed in a space associated with the paper’s highest-level editorial decisions, rather than only within the reporting team.

One line of inquiry concerned the agreements used to settle harassment claims. Emily Steel’s reporting showed how their provisions could extend beyond compensation: women were required to hand over evidence such as recordings, diaries, emails, and backup files; restrictions could prevent them, and in one case their attorneys, from assisting others with similar claims; and a subpoena could trigger notice to O’Reilly’s side, which could try to oppose testimony. The settlements described in the evidence included payments of about $9 million and $3.25 million, with the possibility of losing the money if the terms were breached. The reporting brought into view the informational effect of these arrangements: a private resolution might offer an individual money and privacy while making evidence of alleged conduct harder for others to obtain.

The book also records why signing such agreements could appear to be the most workable choice for the women involved. They might need the money, want privacy, lack a better option, or simply wish to move on without risking the labels attached to public complainants. In the account, the alternative of litigation was constrained by federal law that excluded some workers, allowed a filing period as short as 180 days, and capped federal damages at $300,000. Against those pressures, a settlement could be more predictable for an individual even as secrecy prevented wider scrutiny. The newsroom’s reporting connected the private terms of individual agreements to a broader system that, as Jodi Kantor argued in the meeting, could mute claims and leave alleged harassers able to move on to other women.

Building and protecting the Weinstein investigation

By August and into September 2017, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey had learned a great deal about allegations concerning Weinstein, but the evidence still did not readily translate into what could be stated in print. This gap between what reporters had learned and what they could substantiate in a publishable account was a central practical problem. The investigation depended on eliciting accounts, pinning down information, and bringing evidence into a form that could withstand scrutiny, rather than treating the accumulated allegations as self-proving.

As a draft took shape, the newsroom also limited who could identify it. Rebecca Corbett created a restricted file in the Times editing system, accessible only to the reporters and relevant editors. Rather than use a descriptive slug, she labeled the story 00INQUIRY, a generic name that would not reveal its subject to colleagues who happened to see it in the system. The choice gives a concrete measure of the effort to preserve the investigation’s confidentiality inside a large newsroom while it remained unfinished.

The paper’s pursuit of the story also intersected with a serious institutional conflict. David Boies said he believed Weinstein could best answer critical reporting by supplying facts in support of his defense, and that he thought Black Cube would gather such information. Boies said he had not known of the firm’s tactics against journalists and regretted not paying closer attention. Yet his firm had helped carry out a contract to undermine the Times investigation while also representing the newspaper in legal matters. Boies maintained that this was not a conflict of interest; the paper rejected that position and dismissed his firm, describing its actions as reprehensible. The episode placed the newspaper’s reporting and its own legal representation in direct tension, making the conflict part of the story’s institutional history rather than a matter outside it.

Publication and editorial response

The investigation’s eventual headline stated its central finding: Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades. In the final prepublication sequence, Weinstein sent statements to the newsroom, and the team read every line together. The account describes a silent, collective review; when the reading ended, no one had corrections or suggestions. At 2:05 p.m., twenty-four minutes after the statements arrived, an editor pressed the publication button. The compressed interval does not erase the prolonged work that preceded it. Instead, it marks the final response process as a moment when the reporting, the subject’s reply, and the newsroom’s review converged.

The paper’s work was also tested against reporting by The New Yorker. When Rebecca Corbett, working from Baltimore, learned that the magazine’s story was imminent, she initially thought it had established the account and asked reporters to prepare a follow, a summary of the other publication’s findings. That was described as standard competitive practice: newspapers attempted to match one another’s reporting on significant stories, both to inform their own readers and to seek independent confirmation. In this case, the Times and The New Yorker accounts largely matched. The overlap served as confirmation that separate reporting teams had arrived at substantially similar findings, not as a substitute for the Times’s own reporting.

The wider newsroom and the book’s account

The New York Times’s role in the book extends beyond Kantor and Twohey. The reporting drew on contributions from journalists including Rachel Abrams, Ellen Gabler, Susan Dominus, Steve Eder, Jim Rutenberg, William Rashbaum, Barry Meier, Al Baker, and Jim McKinley, as well as the audio team at The Daily. The account also credits support from Arthur Sulzberger Jr., A. G. Sulzberger, Sam Dolnick, colleagues on the newspaper’s business side, and subscribers. Dean Baquet, Matt Purdy, David McCraw, Sheryl Stolberg, Emily Steel, Carolyn Ryan, and Michael Barbaro provided feedback on the manuscript. These acknowledgments describe an investigation and its later reconstruction as work supported across reporting, editing, business operations, and the paper’s readership.

The newspaper’s reporting on Weinstein is situated alongside its subsequent participation in other stories and public events in the book, including Jodi Kantor’s presence with the attorneys representing Christine Blasey Ford as they watched coverage of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s deliberations. That scene does not make the Weinstein investigation and Ford’s case interchangeable; it shows the book following the journalists and their work into a later moment when allegations, testimony, and institutional decisions again met in public view. Across these episodes, The New York Times appears as a reporting organization whose investigations depend on the movement of information from private records and guarded conversations into public scrutiny, while its own editorial, legal, and organizational decisions remain part of the account.