Jodi Kantor–Megan Twohey investigative partnership

Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s investigative partnership is portrayed as a sustained collaboration built on patient source work and shared journalistic inquiry. During the Weinstein investigation, they encouraged women to break their silence; later, they brought twelve women together to consider what speaking out had brought and cost. Their partnership made individual accounts part of a broader investigation without erasing the differences among the people who shared them.

A partnership grounded in source work

The book describes women being coaxed and encouraged by Kantor or Twohey during difficult decisions about whether to speak. That work depended on repeated conversations and trust rather than a single request for an account. The notes describe hundreds of interviews across the book’s reporting, which ran from spring 2016 to spring 2019 and addressed Donald Trump’s treatment of women, Harvey Weinstein’s alleged misconduct, and Christine Blasey Ford’s path to publicly accusing Brett Kavanaugh. Kantor and Twohey interviewed people depicted in the book, including Ford, whose experience she detailed to Twohey over dozens of hours.

The partnership also involved returning to sources and other parties as reporting developed. Some material had first been shared off the record, including Kantor’s early conversations with Irwin Reiter and Weinstein’s surprise visit to The New York Times on October 4, 2017. The authors say that further reporting, including going back to the people involved, enabled them to include such material. Their method thus joined confidential beginnings to subsequent verification and requests for comment; the notes say they sought Weinstein’s response multiple times, most recently in spring 2019.

From investigation to a shared interview

In the final months of 2018, Kantor and Twohey returned to an idea they had considered while reporting on Weinstein: bringing women who had spoken with them together in person. They had initially set it aside because a group meeting seemed to threaten the secrecy of the reporting. Later, they saw a different purpose in it: asking what happened to women after they spoke and how they understood what had followed.

At their request, twelve women who had been part of the reporting met in Los Angeles on January 16, 2019. Kantor and Twohey arranged the gathering across three countries, explaining that it would be a journalistic interview, not group therapy. After deciding that hotel conference rooms offered insufficient privacy, they accepted Gwyneth Paltrow’s offer to host at her Brentwood home. They paid for meals and covered some travel and hotel costs for participants who faced financial barriers. The care involved in arranging the meeting reflects the partnership’s attention to both reporting purpose and the practical conditions that could determine who was able to take part.

Shared method, distinct voices

Kantor and Twohey aimed to make the interview egalitarian, treating each woman’s contribution as equally important. The setting nevertheless made economic differences visible: Kim Lawson was earning ten dollars an hour at McDonald’s after being homeless six months earlier, while the home’s comforts and luxuries marked a very different material position. The reporters did not present equality of attention as equality of circumstance.

Their questioning created room for participants to tell not only what had happened but what followed. When the conversation reached Rowena Chiu, Kantor offered her the option to pass. Chiu chose to speak, explaining that she had not yet gone public and that, apart from her husband, her family still knew nothing. She described the particular pressure she felt as an Asian woman in a culture that, in her view, expected people to keep their heads down and avoid making waves. For Chiu, the meeting was more than an interview: hearing the others’ perspectives helped her consider a decision that might reshape her life.

Collaboration beyond the two reporters

The partnership operated within a wider reporting effort. The acknowledgments credit numerous journalists who joined the Weinstein story, along with colleagues who supported the work, and identify Rebecca Corbett as an editor who guided the investigation and commented on chapters. The notes likewise describe contributions from other journalists and extensive documentary research. These details place Kantor and Twohey’s collaboration at the center of a larger newsroom process rather than presenting it as isolated work by two reporters.

The gathering shows what their partnership could produce beyond collecting separate accounts: a structured encounter in which women from different circumstances could hear one another and reconsider the meaning of speaking publicly. Its journalistic purpose remained explicit, but its form allowed consequences that a series of individual interviews could not show as directly. The collaboration’s significance lies both in the reporting that made the meeting possible and in its effort to understand what happened on the other side of disclosure.