Twelve women take part in the group interview in “The Gathering”

The group interview brought twelve women together to examine what they had found after deciding to speak about harassment or assault. Conducted over two days and recorded for the epilogue “The Gathering,” it placed very different lives alongside one another: some participants had already become public advocates, while Rowena Chiu had not yet told her story publicly. The gathering was both a journalistic interview and, for Chiu, a chance to hear how others had made their decisions.

Purpose and Setting

The women arrived having spent considerable time weighing whether to share their accounts; in many cases, Jodi Kantor or Megan Twohey had encouraged them through earlier phone conversations. The reporters asked them to consider one common question: what had they encountered on the other side of taking that risk? Rather than treating the gathering as a simple collection of previously published stories, the interview focused on the consequences of speaking and the reasons women might choose to do so.

The group began with introductions and each participant’s account of how she had decided to speak. The women sat around a long table over a meal, and the discussion gradually warmed. The intended format was egalitarian, with each account treated as equally important, but the circumstances surrounding the women could not be made equal. Kim Lawson was earning $10 an hour at McDonald’s after having been homeless six months earlier. The house of Gwyneth Paltrow, by contrast, contained comforts that made the participants’ material differences visible. The setting brought those inequalities into the interview without making them a reason to dismiss the solidarity forming among the women.

Different Routes to Speaking

The conversation showed how public testimony could create new forms of authority. Zelda Perkins described giving testimony about confidentiality agreements to members of the UK Parliament. Lawson recounted 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 marched behind the women in support. Lawson also described the solidarity she found there and her subsequent role advising other McDonald’s employees involved in organizing through a text chain. Customers recognized her from television coverage of sexual harassment. Perkins and Lawson came from sharply different circumstances, yet both described activism as giving them greater authority and respect after harassment.

Their accounts also made the costs and conditions of speaking distinct. Chiu said she was the only woman at the table who had not yet gone public and had little practice telling her story. Apart from her husband, her family knew nothing of it. She described the limited visibility of Asian women’s accounts and connected that absence to pressure associated with the model-minority expectation to avoid making trouble. Speaking publicly, she said, might shock friends and alter her life; listening to the other women helped her consider that possibility. When Jodi Kantor offered her the option to pass, Chiu chose to take a turn. The interview thus became more than an occasion to recount earlier reporting: for Chiu, it could help inform a consequential personal decision.

Solidarity and the Aftermath

The participants’ differences did not prevent connection. Lawson, twenty-six, lived more than four thousand miles from Perkins, a producer two decades older; their work and social positions were far apart, but their accounts of turning experience into activism echoed one another. The group’s exchange suggested that speaking could lead not only to exposure but also to renewed confidence, public recognition, and practical support for others. It did not erase the participants’ unequal resources or risks; instead, their close attention to one another made those differences part of the conversation.

The gathering followed a much larger change in the climate around disclosure. After The New York Times published its investigation of Harvey Weinstein, tips and accounts poured into news organizations, and women posted #MeToo stories without the prolonged trust-building that had marked the Weinstein investigation. The interview preserved another, more deliberate form of coming forward: women describing the choices, pressures, and consequences behind public accounts, face to face. Its significance lies in holding both movements together—the expanding public solidarity and the individual deliberation that speaking still required.