Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey's Investigative Reporting Partnership

Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s investigative reporting partnership brought two reporters focused on the treatment of women into a shared body of work, including the reporting that broke the Harvey Weinstein story. Its significance appears both in the honors they received and in the collaborative practice described in the book: encouraging women to speak, listening to accounts from very different lives, and treating those accounts as part of a common inquiry without pretending the women faced equal circumstances.

Reporters and Shared Work

Kantor and Twohey were investigative reporters at The New York Times. Kantor had focused on workplace issues, particularly the treatment of women, had covered two presidential campaigns, and had written The Obamas. Twohey had devoted much of her reporting to the treatment of women and children; in 2014, while reporting for Reuters, she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. Their biographies establish overlapping interests, but the book’s account of their partnership is more concrete in the joint reporting and interviewing they undertook.

They shared numerous honors for breaking the Harvey Weinstein story, including a George Polk Award and, with colleagues, the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. The recognition placed their work in a collective newsroom achievement, rather than presenting it as the product of either reporter alone.

Encouraging Accounts and Listening Together

The book describes women who had agonized over whether to disclose harassment or assault, in many cases after Kantor or Twohey encouraged them in phone conversations. That contact formed part of the partnership’s reporting method: the reporters sought out accounts, helped sources approach the decision to speak, and later brought some of the women together for an interview that began in the evening and continued into the next day.

At that gathering, the reporters aimed to make the conversation as egalitarian as possible, giving each woman’s account equal importance. They also recognized that the participants’ circumstances were not equal. Kim Lawson was earning $10 an hour at McDonald’s and had been homeless six months earlier; Gwyneth Paltrow’s house, with its spacious kitchen and small luxuries, made the economic contrast visible. The interview thus held two commitments in tension: equal attention to what each woman had to say, and an acknowledgment that money, work, and public position shaped their lives differently.

The women introduced themselves by explaining how they had decided to speak publicly, revisiting stories the reporters had written. During Paltrow’s turn, she toasted Ashley Judd as the first actress to break the silence about Weinstein. Judd’s decision to speak on the record in the first Weinstein story had made her, in Paltrow’s account, a pathbreaker whose example helped others come forward. The exchange showed how the reporters’ earlier reporting had become part of the participants’ own understanding of who had made public speech possible.

Different Risks, Shared Questions

The gathering also brought together accounts from worlds the book describes as far apart: the Midwest, show business, and the Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Kim Lawson, a twenty-six-year-old fast-food worker, lived more than four thousand miles from Zelda Perkins, a producer two decades older. Their occupations, ages, and circumstances differed, but both had turned from experiences of harassment toward activism.

Perkins described giving testimony about confidentiality agreements to members of Parliament and the authority she felt on entering the Palace of Westminster as an individual. Lawson described filing a complaint against McDonald’s with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and joining a September strike. She recounted chanting, solidarity, new acquaintances, and men marching behind the women in support. She had delivered a speech, given interviews, and pushed her daughter in a stroller along the march. The reporters’ shared interview brought these distinct forms of action into the same conversation without reducing them to identical experiences.

The consequences of speaking also differed. Lawson became a kind of team coach to female McDonald’s employees involved in the union push, counseling them through a text chain; customers recognized her from television coverage of sexual harassment. Perkins said that speaking had helped her grow into the person she had been becoming at twenty-four, when she left Miramax. In juxtaposition, their accounts showed a reversal: women who had experienced harassment gained new authority and recognition through resisting it.

Making Room for an Unfinished Decision

The interview also exposed the limits of what public reporting could settle for every participant. When the conversation reached Rowena Chiu, Kantor offered her the option to pass. Chiu chose to take a turn, explaining that she was the only person at the table who had not yet gone public with her story and had little practice telling it. Apart from her husband, her family still knew nothing.

Chiu described the scarcity of Asian voices coming forward with such accounts and connected that silence to a model-minority culture that expected people not to make a fuss, speak up, or cause waves. She was considering whether to break her silence, but said that doing so could shock her friends and change her life. For the reporters, the gathering was an interview for readers; for Chiu, it was also a chance to hear how others had decided to speak. Kantor and Twohey’s partnership therefore appears not only in the stories already published, but in the careful creation of a setting where a source could weigh a consequential decision without being made to take it.