Nondisclosure agreements

Nondisclosure agreements are contracts that restrict disclosure of information, and in the book’s account of sexual-harassment claims they become more than a private settlement term: they can determine who is allowed to know what happened, what evidence survives, and whether later complaints can be connected. Their central tension is that an agreement may give an individual money, privacy, or a way to move on while keeping information about a potentially recurring pattern from coworkers, regulators, and the public.

How the Agreements Operate

The agreements examined in the reporting could require a claimant to surrender evidence, including recordings, diaries, emails, and backup files. They could also bar claimants, and sometimes their lawyers, from assisting other people with similar claims. If a subpoena required testimony, an agreement could oblige the claimant to alert the other side, giving it an opportunity to contest the testimony. Other provisions barred disparaging statements, restricted responses to journalists, or required a claimant to confirm that no complaint had been filed with a government agency. The combined effect was to regulate not just public disclosure but the movement of evidence between people and institutions.

The financial consequences gave these restrictions force. In agreements involving Bill O'Reilly and Fox News, one alleged victim received about $9 million and another $3.25 million; violating the clauses could put the money at risk. The settlement therefore did not simply compensate a claimant. It made continued silence a condition of retaining compensation, while evidence about the underlying claims was removed from view. The book presents this as a system in which the terms of a private contract could make it harder for another person to recognize a similar experience or establish that a complaint was part of a larger pattern.

The restrictions could reach into ordinary professional and personal life as well. Zelda Perkins described an agreement that prevented her from discussing her time at Miramax, limited whom she could tell about what had happened, and required her to help address further disclosure if information became public. She was not allowed to keep a complete copy; she had only excerpts and could consult the full document at her lawyer’s office. Her agreement with Rowena Chiu also carried confidentiality terms. These details show how an agreement could shape not only what a claimant said publicly but what she could retain, review, or discuss in private.

Why Claimants and Lawyers Accepted Them

The book does not present settlements as choices made in a vacuum. Attorneys told Jodi Kantor that claimants might need the money, want privacy, see no better option, or simply want to continue with their lives. Speaking publicly or going to court could bring further costs, while a settlement could offer a more certain payment and distance from the stigma claimants feared: being labeled a liar, a flirt, a tattletale, or a habitual litigant.

The legal framework narrowed the alternatives. Federal protections did not cover every worker; freelancers and employees of workplaces with fewer than fifteen employees were among those left outside the described coverage. The filing period could be as short as 180 days, and federal damages were capped at $300,000, an amount that might not cover lost earnings or make a strong case attractive to a lawyer. Attorneys working on contingency could receive at least one-third of a client’s award, but might receive nothing after a loss in court. Those incentives helped settlements become a cottage industry: some lawyers challenged especially restrictive provisions, while others accepted them or gave ground in pursuit of a larger award.

Even the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency responsible for enforcing harassment laws, often kept settlements confidential. The agency had limited enforcement authority and was required to settle when possible. It could know which employers attracted the most charges without being able to make that information public; prospective employees could not use that record to assess a workplace before taking a job. The result was an information gap: public resources could gather evidence about workplace complaints, yet the information often remained inaccessible to the people who might need it.

The Systemic Cost of Silence

Jodi Kantor’s conclusion was that the United States had a system for muting harassment claims, one that could enable the conduct it was supposed to address. Women routinely surrendered the right to speak about their own experiences, while an accused person could continue into workplaces where future employees had no access to the earlier claims. Because agreements and settlements were rarely examined in law-school classrooms or open court, their cumulative effect stayed obscure even to people who had long covered gender issues.

The cost therefore extended beyond any single claimant or payment. A settlement could resolve one dispute between two parties, but secrecy could prevent colleagues from comparing accounts, future workers from learning about an employer’s history, and outside observers from seeing recurrence. The people who bore that continuing risk were often not parties to the original contract and had no way to negotiate its terms. In this sense, confidentiality shifted information—and some of the consequences of not having it—from the parties to people outside the settlement.

Negotiation, Enforcement, and Resistance

Perkins and Chiu’s experience illustrates both the pressures leading to settlement and an attempt to make a settlement serve a public purpose. After leaving Miramax, they found a lawyer and initially expected criminal proceedings. Their lawyers instead advised that they lacked physical evidence, had not contacted police in Venice, and were facing Harvey Weinstein and a company then owned by Disney. They were told settlement was the usual route and that Weinstein’s attorneys were unlikely to negotiate without a financial demand. Perkins and Chiu had wanted any money donated to charity, hoping to create a public signal; they were told that was not how such negotiations worked.

Perkins then sought terms aimed at changing workplace practice, not only securing a payment. Her proposals included therapy for Weinstein, a sexual-harassment policy and training at Miramax, a group to evaluate complaints, and consequences if another similar allegation emerged within two years. The negotiation ran late into the night. In the eventual agreement, each woman received £125,000, but both accepted extensive restrictions. The contrast is significant: the proposed provisions tied settlement to oversight and possible consequences, while the confidentiality terms limited the possibility of discussing the matter afterward.

After the Weinstein reporting appeared, Perkins became one of the women who publicly broke her settlement’s nondisclosure terms. She spoke to the press while withholding the specific experience and identity of Rowena Chiu, whom she had been trying to protect. Weinstein did not pursue her legally, and Perkins went on to challenge confidential settlements in the media and the UK Parliament. Her public action made the agreement itself part of the story: what had once been a private instrument restricting speech became an object of scrutiny and debate.

Reach and Significance

The book situates confidentiality clauses in sexual-harassment cases involving more than one organization and industry. Its references include reporting on nondisclosure agreements used with former employees of Donald Trump, alongside its central accounts of settlements involving Bill O'Reilly and Fox News and of the agreements faced by former Miramax employees. These examples do not establish that every agreement has identical terms; they show why the reporting asks how common such restrictions are and what their consequences may be.

Nondisclosure agreements remain double-edged in this account. They can provide a claimant with compensation and privacy in a legal system that may offer weak protections, short deadlines, and uncertain remedies. At the same time, when silence extends to evidence, assistance to other claimants, or information about workplace complaints, the agreement can conceal risks from people who were never involved in negotiating it. The book’s decisive point is not that every confidential settlement has the same effect, but that secrecy can turn a private resolution into a barrier against recognizing and addressing repeated misconduct.