Jodi Kantor—Megan Twohey's Investigative Partnership

Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s investigative partnership joined patient reporting to shared responsibility for what publication might set in motion. As they investigated Harvey Weinstein, they confronted the gap between what they had learned and what they could substantiate publicly, sought evidence that could establish a pattern without exposing sources, and carried the emotional and professional stakes of the work together. Their collaboration became visible not only in the article they were building, but in how they tested evidence, managed risk, and later brought women with sharply different circumstances into conversation.

Building a report from a thin public record

In August and September 2017, Kantor and Twohey had a problem that reporting alone could not quickly solve: they had learned a great deal about Weinstein’s alleged mistreatment of women, but little of it could yet be said in print. At a quiet Midtown Manhattan bar, Rebecca Corbett asked them to lay out what they had. They described stories from stars and former employees, as well as settlements. Corbett’s questions made the shortfall concrete: how many women would speak on the record, and how many settlements could be confirmed? Of the women with firsthand accounts, Laura Madden was the only one who had said yes, and even her decision was not final. The evidence of payoffs remained incomplete.

The difficulty shaped the pair’s method. Rather than treating the accumulation of troubling accounts as enough, they continued seeking material that could support a publishable, verifiable account. On September 28, five days after Twohey’s article about the amfAR transactions appeared, Kantor met Irwin Reiter at the bar behind Little Park. Reiter had been texting her about employees’ reactions to the article; he and others inside The Weinstein Company were absorbed by the prospect of seeing their boss held to account. Kantor and Twohey, meanwhile, wanted documentation of what had happened within the company over the preceding two tumultuous years—evidence they could publish without identifying the person who supplied it.

Reiter told Kantor about a memo by Lauren O’Connor, a respected junior executive who, he said, had left because of Weinstein’s treatment of women. Kantor also brought Reiter a carefully stripped-down account from an actress: it named Weinstein but withheld the woman’s name, the place, and the time. It described a hotel meeting that unexpectedly moved upstairs, Weinstein in a bathrobe asking for a massage, pressure for sex linked to career help, and the woman’s flight. Kantor told him this was not an isolated kind of story; she and Twohey had heard variations repeatedly, including accounts that echoed what employees had described. The exchange connected allegations from hotel rooms with workplace accounts, without pretending they yet knew how many women had similar experiences.

Evidence changes the stakes

When Kantor and Twohey read O’Connor’s memo in full with Corbett, the investigation’s purpose widened. The work had begun as a historical corrective; now it appeared urgent because, as the reporters understood it, Weinstein might continue harming someone if their findings did not reach the public. The memo’s significance lay not simply in adding another account. It described how the company’s internal environment and Weinstein’s alleged conduct toward women could be connected, making the reporting about institutional conditions as well as individual encounters.

That shift did not remove the evidentiary burden. At the final planning stage, Kantor and Twohey sat with Corbett, Dean Baquet, Matt Purdy, and Times attorney David McCraw to determine when to take the findings to Weinstein and how long to allow for a response. The reporters had gathered the information, cultivated relationships with sources, and would write the story under their bylines; they would also bear much of the credit or blame for its consequences. Their task was to present every allegation they intended to publish, including names, dates, and anecdotes, then incorporate Weinstein’s answers. A claim he could refute would have to be omitted.

The practical danger was that a fair opportunity to respond could also give Weinstein time to pressure women to recant, encourage others to contradict their accounts, leak information elsewhere, or preempt the article with a statement. Kantor and Twohey therefore had to weigh two obligations at once: the ordinary journalistic duty to put findings to the subject, and the need to protect sources and preserve the reporting. Their partnership operated inside that tension. The decision was not simply how to write a strong story, but how to make it both fair and safe enough to publish.

Shared pressure and release

After a call with Weinstein and his representatives, Twohey laughed aloud. Weinstein remarked on the laughter to Lisa Bloom, interpreting the moment as a sign that the reporters had laughed for the first time. The account does not settle what he meant by it; it records his attention to a moment of control amid his own threatened position. For Kantor and Twohey, the call ended differently: they hung up and fell together, laughing and crying with relief, shared purpose, and sisterhood. Their reaction registers the strain of the confrontation and the closeness formed by carrying it together.

The work did not pause for that release. When the reporters left the glass conference room, Corbett and the other editors had already been editing during the call, selecting material from the Weinstein team’s statements and placing it into the article. The scene makes the partnership’s limits and supports visible: Kantor and Twohey led the reporting and source relationships, while the story’s passage into print depended on editors and legal review. Their responsibility was personal and public, but not solitary.

A partnership that makes room for different voices

Later, Kantor and Twohey’s work brought together women whose accounts had emerged through very different routes. At a gathering planned as a group interview, the women were mostly strangers, and many had agonized over sharing their stories, sometimes with one of the reporters encouraging them by phone. The organizers intended the conversation to be as egalitarian as possible, while recognizing that the participants’ material circumstances were unequal. Kim Lawson, then earning ten dollars an hour at McDonald’s and homeless six months earlier, sat within a setting marked by the comforts of Gwyneth Paltrow’s home. The contrast did not erase the shared subject; it showed how differently the risks and resources around speaking could be distributed.

The reporters opened with introductions about each participant’s role in their journalism, then the women took turns explaining how they had decided to speak. Paltrow toasted Ashley Judd as the first actress to go on the record in the initial Weinstein story, recognizing that Judd had taken a step she had not yet taken herself. In this setting, Kantor and Twohey’s partnership was no longer only the labor of gathering evidence for an article. It also involved arranging a space where participants could hear how another woman’s decision had unfolded and what speaking had changed.

Kantor made that space less coercive when the turn came to Rowena Chiu, asking whether she wanted to pass. Chiu chose to speak, explaining that she had not yet gone public, had little practice telling her story, and had told almost no one in her family. She also described the scarcity of Asian voices speaking about such experiences and connected it to the pressure of a model-minority expectation to avoid making a fuss. For Chiu, the gathering was not merely an interview: hearing the others might help her decide whether to make a life-altering disclosure. Kantor and Twohey’s reporting had brought her to the table, but the moment depended on preserving her choice about whether to speak.

The conversation also placed Lawson and Zelda Perkins side by side despite their distance in age, work, and geography. Perkins described testifying to members of Parliament about confidentiality agreements and the authority she felt entering the Palace of Westminster. Lawson spoke of filing a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and of the September strike: the chanting, the men marching behind the women, and her own speech and interviews as she pushed her daughter in a stroller. She had become a source of support for other McDonald’s employees through a text chain, while customers recognized her from television coverage of sexual harassment. Their experiences suggested a reversal: women who had endured harassment could acquire new authority by opposing it. By placing these voices together without making their circumstances interchangeable, Kantor and Twohey extended the collaborative logic of their investigation from documenting a pattern to showing the varied forms of risk, solidarity, and agency involved in speaking out.