Los Angeles is more than a backdrop in the book’s account of Hollywood power: it is where private consequences of Harvey Weinstein’s conduct reached women at home, where Ashley Judd entered a meeting she expected to be professional, and where twelve women later gathered to consider what followed when they spoke publicly. The city holds these episodes together while exposing how different their risks, resources, and routes to visibility remained.

An industry setting and private aftermath

The book places Los Angeles within the world of entertainment in which Weinstein’s name carried exceptional weight. His influence rested not only on making films but on the power to launch and advance careers. By 2017, his movies were less successful than they had been, yet his reputation remained outsized. Against that imbalance, accounts of his treatment of women had circulated for years, while public documentation remained scarce and earlier reporting efforts had failed. Los Angeles belongs to this wider Hollywood setting: a place where professional opportunity could bring women into contact with a powerful producer, while the surrounding industry made speaking about that contact consequential.

The city also figures in a quieter, more personal aftermath. After the encounter she described, Rose McGowan said Weinstein left a message on her home phone in Los Angeles. She complained to her managers, hired a lawyer, and received a $100,000 settlement without an admission of wrongdoing. She said she donated the money to a rape crisis center, and that she never received a copy of the settlement records. The episode connects Los Angeles not only to the film business but to the mechanisms by which a dispute could be handled privately, leaving the public record thin even as the consequences persisted.

Professional invitations and guarded expectations

In 1996, Ashley Judd was becoming a film star when she met Weinstein at a Los Angeles event. She understood his subsequent invitation as a possible business conversation and expected to meet at the Beverly Hills Hotel’s Polo Lounge. Her father was on the trip; she had introduced the two older men at the event, and she later recalled that he had not anticipated what would follow. At the hotel, however, she was directed to a suite where Weinstein had champagne. Judd drank only a little, made small talk, and left quickly, already suspicious of the purpose of the meeting.

The geography of this episode is precise but telling: the invitation began in Los Angeles, while the meeting Judd expected to have in a public restaurant became a private encounter in a hotel suite. The contrast between her assumption of a work discussion and the actual setting underscores how an apparently ordinary professional invitation could leave a rising actor navigating uncertainty. The account makes no claim that every Los Angeles meeting carried the same meaning; rather, it shows how the city’s entertainment business could bring career-making authority into intimate spaces where the balance of power was uneven.

A house becomes a meeting place

On January 16, 2019, Los Angeles became the site of a different kind of encounter. Twelve women connected to the reporting came together at Gwyneth Paltrow’s home in Brentwood, at the journalists’ request, for a joint interview. The organizers had considered a hotel conference room but found none private enough. Paltrow offered her home, while the journalists paid for meals and covered some travel costs for participants who could not otherwise afford to attend. Women lived in three countries, so arranging the gathering required repeated calls and messages; the purpose was journalistic, not group therapy.

The setting recalled an earlier moment in the investigation: the reporters had first interviewed Paltrow in her Hamptons home. Now, in Los Angeles, her house provided shelter for a roomful of women whose lives and public positions differed sharply. Rain fell as the group arrived. They settled in the den, and the conversation continued into the following day. The home’s quiet, carefully appointed rooms and expansive kitchen were not neutral scenery: they made differences in material circumstances visible. Kim Lawson was earning ten dollars an hour at McDonald’s and had been homeless six months earlier; other participants occupied very different professional and economic positions.

A city holding different routes to speech

The Los Angeles gathering brought together women from distinct places and struggles. Rachel Crooks had traveled from Ohio and was still dealing with the consequences of sharing her account. Lawson had come from Kansas City, accompanied by labor organizer Allynn Umel. Christine Blasey Ford sat with her lawyers, Debra Katz and Lisa Banks. Three months after the Kavanaugh hearing, she remained mostly out of public view, faced death threats, and had not resumed ordinary local shopping for fear of being recognized or approached. She told Megan Twohey that coming to Los Angeles reflected a new determination to venture out.

Rowena Chiu’s presence made the gathering’s relationship to silence especially clear. She had never been publicly identified and had kept in contact with Jodi Kantor through her lawyer. She agreed to attend only on the condition that her name remain confidential if she did not later choose to come forward, and that her lawyer attend too. At the table, she said she had not yet gone public and that, apart from her husband, her family still knew nothing. She described the pressure she felt as an Asian woman in the United States, where a model-minority expectation could discourage making a fuss or speaking up. The gathering did not resolve her decision; it gave her a place to hear how others had made theirs.

Los Angeles thus functions as a meeting point, not a promise of equal safety or outcome. Paltrow toasted Judd for having spoken on the record in the first Weinstein story, recognizing that her earlier disclosure had helped open a path for others. Lawson described filing a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and joining a strike; she had spoken publicly, marched with her daughter in a stroller, and become a source of support for other fast-food workers. Zelda Perkins, separated from Lawson by distance, age, and professional circumstance, described finding authority in testimony before members of Parliament. Their accounts converged without becoming identical. In the book’s geography, Los Angeles holds both the secrecy surrounding private encounters and the later collective work of telling, listening, and deciding what can be said next.