Jodi Kantor—Irwin Reiter's Journalist and Source Relationship

Jodi Kantor’s relationship with Irwin Reiter became a pivotal source relationship in the investigation of Harvey Weinstein: a cautious, stop-start exchange that joined an insider’s fragmented knowledge to the reporters’ independent verification. Reiter did not offer a finished account or a simple path into the company’s past. Instead, he provided guarded leads, returned repeatedly to the danger facing young women at The Weinstein Company, and ultimately made it possible for Kantor to obtain Lauren O’Connor’s memo. The relationship’s significance lay as much in its method—patient contact, corroboration, and carefully judged trust—as in the document it yielded.

Finding a Way In

Kantor had been trying to persuade former Weinstein employees to speak, but reaching people from the producer’s inner circle was especially difficult. Their professional advancement might appear entangled with a powerful boss’s conduct, and speaking could expose that history without an obvious benefit to them. The reporters hoped that participating in the investigation might offer a way to address behavior that had troubled employees. Against this backdrop, an executive gave Kantor a striking assessment: Irwin Reiter hated Harvey Weinstein.

Reiter was not an outside observer. He was The Weinstein Company’s executive vice president for accounting and financial reporting, and former colleagues described him as the company’s institutional memory. He had done the brothers’ books since 1989. Others characterized him as loyal and gruff, and as someone unlikely to be concerned about Weinstein’s treatment of women. The report that he hated his boss sharply complicated that picture, giving Kantor a reason to approach him without assuming either that he would cooperate or that his years at the company made him an uncomplicated ally.

Kantor had kept Reiter’s telephone number while waiting for a better understanding of him. When she called, he said he did not want to talk. Before ending the call, however, he gave her his private email address. That small opening mattered: rather than begin with a full interview, the reporters could continue through written contact. Kantor wrote to him, and Megan Twohey followed the exchange closely, reading his responses and advising Kantor on how to reply. Their joint handling of the correspondence helped sustain contact while the first conversation remained uncertain.

Meetings Under Weinstein’s Nose

Reiter eventually proposed a meeting at 9:30 at the bar behind Little Park in Tribeca. He set the terms: he would ask the questions, could leave after five minutes, and would pay. The choice of location surprised Kantor. Tribeca was closely tied to Weinstein’s professional world: Miramax’s move there had helped transform the neighborhood, and The Weinstein Company’s office was six blocks from the restaurant. Kantor did not challenge the venue. If Reiter was willing to meet in that setting, she would go there.

On the evening of September 18, she walked through the busy restaurant, wary of encountering an acquaintance who might interrupt, then found the quieter bar at the back. Reiter appeared nervous, looking over his shoulder and joking darkly about the men he imagined Weinstein might employ to follow him. The setting was discreet, but the source was not yet at ease. Their first conversation produced hints rather than a complete account. Reiter mentioned recent offenses and referred elliptically to young women who had worked at the company, using initials rather than names. What he said he cared about was preventing Weinstein from continuing his recent treatment of young female employees.

For the next two weeks, Kantor and Reiter met every few nights, usually late and almost always at the same bar. He repeatedly insisted that each meeting would be the last; his job was at risk. He disclosed some things and withheld others, sometimes declined to attach names, and moved between episodes that seemed central and details that were difficult to establish. He did not claim to know everything that had happened at the company, and his account did not arrive in chronological order. In their emails and texts to one another, Kantor and Twohey called him only the source or Jodi’s guy, and they told no one beyond the editors.

Leads, Limits, and Corroboration

Reiter’s disclosures were starting points, not publishable conclusions. Between meetings, Kantor and Twohey tried to identify the people he alluded to, speak with other former employees, obtain records, and test what he had said. Their central questions remained concrete: what had Weinstein done to the young women, and what evidence could establish it? The source’s uneven recollections demanded a reporting process that did not treat proximity to the company as proof. Kantor and Twohey had to separate what Reiter knew from what he suspected, and build support for each claim beyond his account.

His fragments nevertheless widened the investigation. They suggested that the problem inside the company had become increasingly visible among senior employees during 2014 and 2015, and that the concern was not confined to a single isolated episode. Reiter’s information also pointed toward a story that would take longer to report than the immediate article the editors wanted Kantor and Twohey to begin composing. The relationship therefore carried a tension: Reiter’s access made him valuable, but his fear, incomplete knowledge, and reluctance to name people meant the reporters could not simply follow his narrative.

From Account to Document

On September 28, five days after Twohey’s article about the amfAR transactions appeared, Kantor met Reiter again. He had been texting her about the response inside The Weinstein Company. Though he had not been involved in those transactions, employees were engrossed in the article and, according to Reiter, were watching someone hold Weinstein to account. The newsroom was already pressing the reporters to start drafting a first Weinstein story. Kantor and Twohey still wanted stronger documentation of what had happened inside the company, material they could publish without identifying Reiter as its source.

Reiter had told Kantor about a memo written by Lauren O’Connor, a junior executive who had left over Weinstein’s treatment of women. He had previously read Kantor some passages, but she wanted to understand the document itself. During the September meeting, she also showed him a deliberately spare printout: one paragraph recounting an actress’s experience, with no name other than Weinstein’s and no date or location. It described an unsuspecting woman arriving for a hotel meeting, being directed upstairs, finding Weinstein in a bathrobe, and being asked for a massage; he pressured her toward sex by invoking the help he could provide for her career, and she fled. Kantor explained that she and Twohey had heard variations on this account repeatedly. Reiter, who knew little about what had happened between Weinstein and actresses in hotel rooms, appeared aghast.

Kantor then asked again to see O’Connor’s memo. Reiter began reading it aloud from his phone, paused, and left for the restroom, tossing the phone to her with the email open. The gesture gave Kantor a brief opportunity to copy the document. Nearly two years earlier, Reiter had read the memo and saved a copy; by the time of this meeting, several colleagues had seen it, but O’Connor’s complaint had not led to a visible resolution. Kantor understood Reiter’s departure as permission to take the document without his having to say so directly. She copied the full memo quickly, without stopping to read it, and returned his phone to his chair before thanking him.

The Meaning of the Source Relationship

The transfer marked a change in what Reiter’s cooperation could provide. Until then, his value to the investigation had rested on partial recollections and leads that the reporters needed to pursue elsewhere. O’Connor’s memo offered documentary material associated with an employee’s concerns, while the careful circumstances of the copy protected the source from being named in the reporting process described here. The account does not make Reiter’s knowledge complete or his motives wholly transparent: he had guarded his position, repeatedly predicted that he would stop meeting, and supplied information in an irregular sequence. What it does show is a gradual movement from reluctance to consequential assistance.

That movement depended on a division of work. Reiter supplied an insider’s view and access to a document he had preserved; Kantor and Twohey checked his claims through other employees, records, and the women he had indicated. Kantor managed the direct relationship, while Twohey quietly advised on the email exchange and joined the broader reporting effort. Reiter’s private concern became useful to the investigation not as a substitute for verification but as a route toward evidence the reporters could test. The relationship thus joined institutional memory to independent reporting—and turned a source who feared for his job into the person whose guarded cooperation helped bring O’Connor’s memo into Kantor’s hands.