Megan Twohey

Megan Twohey’s role in the book is both investigative and connective: she helps trace allegations across powerful institutions, then returns to the people whose accounts give those findings meaning. Her reporting forms part of a three-year inquiry, from spring 2016 through spring 2019, into Donald Trump’s treatment of women, Harvey Weinstein’s decades of alleged sexual harassment and abuse, and Christine Blasey Ford’s path to publicly accusing Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault.

Reporting work and scope

Megan Twohey is an investigative reporter at The New York Times. Much of her work has focused on the treatment of women and children; before joining the reporting chronicled here, she worked for Reuters News, where she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting in 2014. With Jodi Kantor, she helped break the Harvey Weinstein story. Their work, recognized with numerous honors including a George Polk Award and, with colleagues, the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, is presented not as a single revelation but as sustained reporting across different settings and sources. The book’s scope follows that method: it places allegations concerning political power alongside accounts of workplace conduct and the difficult path from private disclosure to public testimony.

Testing claims and confronting pressure

Megan Twohey’s approach to a difficult allegation was shaped by the question of what could be verified. In 2016, she declined to cover a lawsuit accusing Donald Trump of assaulting a thirteen-year-old at a party hosted by Jeffrey Epstein in the 1990s because the accuser was anonymous and her claims could not be adequately vetted. When Lisa Bloom announced, a week before Election Day, that she represented the Jane Doe plaintiff, Megan—who had never spoken with Bloom—sent her an email. The episode later informed Megan’s suspicions about Bloom’s role in Weinstein’s response to scrutiny: the question was not simply whether an allegation attracted attention, but how its evidence and representation could be assessed.

On September 19, Megan encountered the pressure surrounding the Weinstein reporting directly. She called Lance Maerov, a board member of The Weinstein Company, as he entered his Park Avenue office building with coffee. She explained that The New York Times was preparing a story about allegations spanning decades, read him an excerpt from Lauren O’Connor’s memo, and asked what he had done about it. Maerov’s surprise at Megan’s access to the records—and his dropped cup—made visible the gap between the company’s internal documents and the assumption that they would remain beyond reporters’ reach.

The following day’s call with Harvey Weinstein and his team threatened to weaken a central finding: that Weinstein had reached settlements with as many as twelve women over the years. Yet Megan saw another possible consequence of the call. Once other executives at The Weinstein Company knew publication was approaching, they might resent the risk Weinstein had created for the company, and that anger might give them reason to speak. The obstacle to reporting thus became, potentially, a source of further information.

At 1:43 p.m., an emailed letter from Charles Harder arrived, marked confidential and off the record. The reporters did not accept those restrictions because they had not agreed to them. Eighteen pages long, the letter threatened legal action against The New York Times if the story went forward. The contrast between the imposed label and the journalists’ refusal to treat it as binding captures a recurring contest in Megan’s work: powerful subjects could try to control not only what was reported, but the terms on which reporting itself proceeded.

From investigation to collective account

The reporting’s consequences became visible immediately after publication. On Friday, October 6, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey began hearing from so many women with accounts of Harvey Weinstein that Rebecca Corbett recruited colleagues to help return their calls. The stories differed in time and circumstance: Tomi-Ann Roberts described an encounter in 1984, when she was twenty; Hope Exiner d’Amore recounted an allegation dating to the 1970s; and Cynthia Burr described another alleged episode from that period. For Megan, the influx of accounts was not simply an aftereffect of a published story. It showed how reporting could alter the conditions under which people decided to speak, while making the work of listening and checking each account more urgent.

The broader debate that followed made that responsibility harder, not simpler. The book distinguishes between the carefully investigated allegations and the expanding use of #MeToo for complaints ranging from verbal abuse to troubling private encounters, some of which did not clearly fit workplace or criminal standards. A story based on one anonymous account could prompt others to come forward and provide further evidence; it could also seem thin or one-sided and raise questions about fairness to the accused. Megan’s earlier insistence on vetting an anonymous claim thus sits within a larger tension: a high evidentiary bar can protect accuracy, but public attention and the opportunity to report may also determine whether additional information emerges.

That tension surfaced in the competing public framing of Weinstein and the movement around him. His attorney Benjamin Brafman described the charges as part of a witch hunt and invoked exaggerated claims to argue that #MeToo was losing credibility. The book notes that this criticism shifted attention from the overall body of allegations toward the weakest or most contested examples. In parallel, Donald Trump moved from denials to attacking his accusers as dishonest, fame-seeking, politically motivated, or implausible, and threatening to sue them. These responses supplied Megan’s work with a recurring subject beyond any individual allegation: the struggle over which accounts would be heard, what evidence would count, and whether scrutiny itself could be recast as misconduct by the press or a campaign against the accused.

By the final months of 2018, Megan and her colleagues returned to an idea they had considered during the Weinstein investigation: bringing women who had spoken with reporters together in person. At first, they had thought such a meeting might endanger the secrecy of the reporting. On January 16, 2019, twelve women who had been part of the investigation gathered in Los Angeles at the journalists’ request. The interview began that evening and continued into the next day; the reporters aimed to give each participant equal importance, while recognizing that equality of attention could not erase differences in circumstance.

Those differences were present in the room itself. The gathering took place at Gwyneth Paltrow’s home, whose quiet, comfortable rooms and small luxuries made economic distance tangible. Kim Lawson, then working at McDonald’s for ten dollars an hour, had been homeless six months earlier. Zelda Perkins, a British producer twenty years older than Lawson, arrived with a different professional history and cultural background. The account does not flatten these women into interchangeable representatives of a single experience: it places their shared activism alongside the unequal resources, work, and public standing that shaped how each could speak and what speaking might cost.

Rowena Chiu’s decision to take a turn was significant because she had not yet told her story publicly. Apart from her husband, she said, her family still knew nothing; she also connected her silence to the shortage of Asian women’s voices in such accounts and to the pressure of a model-minority expectation not to make trouble. Her words made the gathering more than a reunion of sources: it became a setting in which the conditions of silence could themselves be described. Lawson, by contrast, spoke from recent collective action. She told the group about filing a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and described the September McDonald’s strike, where chanting, solidarity, and the presence of supportive men had given the march a sense of shared force. She had delivered a speech, given interviews, and pushed her daughter in a stroller along the march. The contrast between Chiu’s first public telling and Lawson’s account of organized protest showed distinct routes from private experience to public voice.

The gathering also clarified Megan’s role in the book’s final movement. She had helped assemble evidence through repeated interviews and documents, but the women’s conversation allowed their accounts to meet without making their circumstances identical. The book’s acknowledgments recognize that sources faced personal risks, answered repeated and sometimes uncomfortable questions, and shared emails, texts, and other records. Megan’s reporting therefore ends not with a claim that one method or one public story resolves the problem, but with the continuing labor of listening, verification, and attention to who has the safety and opportunity to speak.

The machinery of silence

The book places Megan Twohey’s insistence on verifiable evidence within a wider account of how private settlements could restrict what the public—and even future investigators—would learn. In the agreements involving Bill O’Reilly, women had to surrender evidence including recordings, diaries, emails, and backup files. They, and in one case their attorneys, were barred from assisting other women with similar claims. If subpoenaed, they had to notify O’Reilly and his legal team, who could contest their testimony. The terms did not merely settle individual disputes; they could obstruct the accumulation of information across cases.

The financial stakes reinforced that silence. One woman received about nine million dollars and another $3.25 million, but either could lose the money by violating the restrictions. The book describes the result as a system in which allegations and supporting material could disappear from public view. That context sharpens the significance of the reporting pursued by Megan and her colleagues: investigating patterns required not only locating people willing to speak, but understanding the agreements and institutional pressures that could prevent accounts from meeting or corroborating one another.