The New Yorker’s 2002 investigation into the Weinstein settlements was an early attempt to examine what Harvey Weinstein had paid Zelda Perkins and Rowena Chiu, and why. Its failure to produce a publishable story exposed how confidentiality and evidentiary barriers could shield settlements from public scrutiny. Years later, as Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey investigated the same agreements, the episode also showed how long the women’s silence had helped keep the underlying events out of view.

The settlements and the reporting problem

In 2002, The New Yorker writer Ken Auletta heard from a source about settlements Weinstein had paid Perkins and Chiu. He hoped to report both the payoffs and the incident that had prompted them. But he could not persuade either woman to speak with him. The obstacle was not simply a lack of a lead: without their accounts, the magazine had difficulty establishing what had happened and what the payments signified.

The problem belonged to a broader landscape of sexual-harassment settlements. Federal law treated workplace sexual harassment as a civil-rights violation, not generally as a criminal offense unless rape or assault was involved. Meanwhile, settlement agreements could impose extensive restrictions on what claimants disclosed. In a separate investigation into Bill O’Reilly and Fox News, reporters learned that women could be required to surrender recordings, diaries, emails, and other evidence, and could be barred from assisting others with similar claims. Those agreements illustrate the machinery of silence surrounding harassment cases; they were not the Weinstein settlements at issue in Auletta’s 2002 reporting.

The confrontation at The New Yorker

Auletta, editor David Remnick, another editor, and the magazine’s lawyer met with Weinstein, his brother Bob, and their lawyer David Boies. Weinstein insisted he would seek an injunction against the magazine. Boies initially appeared to restrain him, reminding him that the First Amendment could not simply be evaded. He then turned to the journalists and warned that publishing the story would be a grave mistake.

Boies later told Megan Twohey that he had believed Weinstein’s account: that his encounter with Chiu had been a consensual extramarital affair. He had also considered it plausible that women might lie to obtain money, and emphasized that possibility in the meeting. His role thus shifted within the same confrontation: he first checked Weinstein’s proposed legal threat, then argued directly against publication.

The checks and the decision not to publish

At a follow-up meeting the next day, Bob Weinstein gave the journalists copies of personal checks he had written to pay the two women on his brother’s behalf. He presented them as evidence that no company money had been used for Weinstein’s personal affairs. The checks documented payments, but did not establish the circumstances that had led to them or resolve the women’s allegations.

Auletta and his editors concluded that, without an on-the-record allegation of assault or proof that company funds had been misused, he could not write about the settlements. The investigation therefore reached the parties, the payments, and a direct challenge from Weinstein’s legal team, but not the evidentiary threshold the editors believed publication required. The settlements remained largely beyond public examination.

What the later record makes visible

The restrictions surrounding the agreements became clearer when Perkins later showed Jodi Kantor fragments of her settlement paperwork. The provisions barred her from discussing her time at Miramax with media, required confidentiality from medical professionals she consulted, and constrained what she could say to her accountant. She had to provide an anonymous accounting of people already told about the events in Venice, and the agreement required her to assist in preventing or mitigating further disclosure. She had not even been allowed to keep a complete copy of the paperwork.

That later glimpse of the documents gives the 2002 reporting impasse a sharper context. Auletta had heard about the settlements but could not get Perkins and Chiu to speak; the agreements themselves restricted discussion, while the lack of public testimony and other proof left the magazine unable to proceed. The episode illustrates how a private resolution could compensate a claimant while also limiting the information available to journalists, future employees, and the public. When Kantor and Twohey later pieced together the same settlements, they were confronting not only old allegations but a system that had made those allegations unusually difficult to investigate.