Jodi Kantor

Jodi Kantor is an investigative reporter at The New York Times whose work on Harvey Weinstein joined careful source development to a widening account of institutional and personal harm. She persisted with reluctant insiders, defended the need to report actresses’ accounts as well as employees’ experiences, and helped make room for women to consider what speaking publicly had changed in their lives. Her trajectory in the book is not simply the uncovering of allegations: it follows the difficult passage from private accounts to a reportable pattern, and then to a collective conversation about its consequences.

Identity and Reporting Approach

Kantor’s reporting background centered on workplaces and, particularly, the treatment of women. She had covered two presidential campaigns and written The Obamas; Megan Twohey had focused much of her reporting on women and children. Together, the two reporters shared honors for breaking the Weinstein story, including a George Polk Award and, with colleagues, the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. This professional history places Kantor’s work within sustained reporting on power and working life rather than as an isolated assignment.

The investigation required her to approach people whose positions inside The Weinstein Company made speaking potentially costly. Former employees in Weinstein’s executive circle had little apparent incentive to disclose that their careers had advanced while they enabled a powerful producer. Kantor and Twohey’s approach was to present the investigation as a possible way to address conduct that insiders might already regret. In this context, the reporting depended not only on finding sources, but on making a credible case that speaking could serve a purpose beyond the reporters’ immediate needs.

Building an Insider Source

A conversation with an executive gave Kantor a new lead about Irwin Reiter, The Weinstein Company’s executive vice president for accounting and financial reporting. Reiter had kept the brothers’ books since 1989 and was known as a company institutional memory, a loyalist, and a gruff figure not expected to be especially concerned about Weinstein’s treatment of women. The executive’s striking account that Reiter hated Weinstein altered Kantor’s understanding of a source she had not yet approached.

Kantor had kept Reiter’s phone number while waiting to find an insight that might make a call worthwhile. When she finally rang him, he initially said he did not want to speak, but gave her his private email address before ending the call. That small opening began a relationship that became important to the investigation. Reiter later relayed employees’ reactions from inside the company and identified a memo by Lauren O’Connor, a junior executive respected by colleagues, who he said had left because of Weinstein’s treatment of women.

At a meeting with Reiter behind Little Park, Kantor brought a short, anonymized account from an actress. It described a hotel meeting that had taken an unexpected turn, an unwanted advance connected to the woman’s career, and her departure. Kantor explained that the account was not isolated: she and Twohey had heard similar accounts, and the emerging number of women might be high. The document helped Reiter connect the employees’ concerns he knew about with conduct toward actresses that he had not known in comparable detail. Kantor’s intervention joined two strands of reporting without exposing the woman’s identity in the material she showed him.

Scope, Verification, and Editorial Conflict

As the first story took shape, Kantor and Twohey disagreed with the advice of Dean Baquet and Matt Purdy to avoid getting caught up in actresses’ accounts and publish the documented employee story first. The reporters considered the actresses’ experiences essential to a complete account: Weinstein’s alleged conduct affected both generations of employees and actresses seeking roles. The internal workplace strand was already well documented, but leaving out the accounts of actresses, including prominent performers, would distort the pattern the reporting was uncovering.

Kantor’s persistence helped bring Ashley Judd into the reporting. At midday on a Monday, she texted Judd to ask whether they could speak; Judd replied promptly that she was in a dentist’s waiting room and available. The exchange came at a point when senior editors still expected the actresses’ accounts could be pursued after publication. Kantor and Twohey instead treated those accounts as part of the story that needed to be published, not as a later addition.

The legal challenge sharpened the need to distinguish denial from evidence. Weinstein’s lawyer, Charles Harder, warned that the reporters’ sources were unreliable and threatened a defamation claim, while asserting that the account of Laura Madden could be refuted with documents and witnesses that would take time to locate. Kantor immediately thought of Madden, who was in Wales, and considered whether Weinstein had a genuine rebuttal or was relying on denial against a source with little power and limited proof. The threat also tried to cast former employees as embittered and self-interested. Kantor’s concern was therefore both factual and practical: the reporting had to test the claim while recognizing how the public framing of sources could affect their credibility.

After the story appeared, the scale of incoming testimony quickly exceeded the reporters’ expectations. On October 6, 2017, women began contacting Kantor and Twohey in such numbers that Rebecca Corbett recruited colleagues to return their calls. The accounts came from different decades, occupations, and settings; together they widened the reporting beyond the first set of sources. Kantor and Twohey faced a new editorial problem: not whether further accounts existed, but how many women they could responsibly include in the coverage.

Convening the Sources

In the final months of 2018, Kantor and Twohey returned to an idea they had considered during the Weinstein investigation: bringing some of the women together in person. The original idea had seemed too risky for confidential reporting. Later, the reporters saw a different purpose in a group interview: asking what had happened to women who spoke up and how they understood the events that followed. On January 16, 2019, twelve women whose accounts had figured in the reporting gathered in Los Angeles at the reporters’ request.

The gathering was designed as journalism, not group therapy. Because no hotel conference room seemed private enough, Gwyneth Paltrow offered her Brentwood home. The reporters paid for meals and covered some travel and lodging costs for participants who could not otherwise afford to attend. Kantor and Twohey introduced the women’s roles in their reporting and asked them to reflect on what they had found after deciding to speak. The location made material differences visible as well: Kim Lawson was earning ten dollars an hour at McDonald’s after a period of homelessness, while Paltrow’s comfortable home offered a clear contrast in economic circumstances. The reporters sought an egalitarian interview without pretending the women arrived with equal resources or public standing.

Kantor also gave the conversation room to hold different degrees of readiness. When Rowena Chiu’s turn came, Kantor offered her the option to pass. Chiu chose to speak, explaining that she had not yet made her account public and that, apart from her husband, her family did not know it. She described the scarcity of Asian women’s public voices in this area and the pressure of a model-minority expectation to avoid making trouble. The meeting did not resolve her decision, but it gave her access to the other women’s experiences as she considered whether to disclose her own story.

The participants’ accounts also showed how speaking could lead to authority as well as difficulty. Zelda Perkins described giving evidence about confidentiality agreements to members of Parliament and the power she felt in entering the Palace of Westminster as an individual. Lawson recounted filing a complaint against McDonald’s with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and taking part in a September strike. She had spoken publicly, marched while pushing her daughter in a stroller, and become a source of advice for other women involved in the organizing effort. Kantor’s role in convening these accounts was to let the differences remain visible while tracing a shared change: women who had experienced harassment could acquire new public influence through resisting it.

Narrative Role and Significance

Kantor’s reporting arc is defined by repeated acts of connection: she approaches a guarded insider with a reasoned opening, uses an anonymized account to clarify the scope of a pattern, presses for the inclusion of actresses’ testimony, and later creates a setting in which sources can consider the aftermath of speaking. These actions are linked by a method of listening that does not treat one account as sufficient to establish the wider story. The investigation’s force comes from the convergence of records, insiders’ knowledge, and women’s separate experiences.

The later gathering extends that method beyond verification. It preserves the unequal consequences of disclosure—the differing financial positions, public recognition, cultural pressures, and personal risks—rather than smoothing them into a single narrative of liberation. For Kantor, the reporting’s significance lies both in exposing a pattern and in documenting what followed when women crossed from private testimony into public speech. The book presents that transition as consequential but unfinished: some participants had gained recognition and new roles, while Chiu was still weighing a disclosure that could reshape her life.