The New York Times’ Harvey Weinstein investigation

The New York Times’ Harvey Weinstein investigation, published by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey on October 5, 2017, examined payments to women who had accused Weinstein of sexual harassment. The reporting did not end with publication: follow-up stories widened the record, while the women who had contributed to the investigation continued to reckon with what speaking publicly had changed—and what it had not.

Reporting and Its Aftermath

The investigation’s title described its central finding: Weinstein had paid off sexual-harassment accusers for decades. In the weeks after the October 5 report, The New York Times published further accounts, including stories involving Katherine Kendall, Tomi-Ann Roberts, Dawn Dunning, and Judith Godrèche, followed by accounts from Hope d’Amore and Cynthia Burr. The sequence extended the investigation beyond its first publication, adding women’s experiences to a record that had previously been difficult to assemble.

The problem of silence had shaped the reporting from the beginning. During the investigation, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey had considered bringing women together in person, but feared that a gathering could threaten the confidentiality of their reporting. In the final months of 2018, they returned to the idea for a different reason: to ask what had happened to women who spoke up, and how they understood the consequences. The question shifted the focus from how a story could be published to what followed for the people whose accounts made it possible.

The Los Angeles Gathering

On January 16, 2019, twelve women who had been part of the reporting met in Los Angeles at the journalists’ request. Most were strangers to one another. The common ground was unusual: each had spent considerable time deciding whether to share an account of harassment or assault, sometimes after conversations with Kantor or Twohey encouraged her to do so. The gathering was designed as an interview, beginning that evening and continuing the next day, with each woman’s contribution treated as equally important.

Yet the room also made differences in circumstance impossible to ignore. Kim Lawson, a McDonald’s worker, was earning $10 an hour; six months earlier, she had been homeless. The meeting took place in Gwyneth Paltrow’s home, whose quiet rooms and small luxuries made the distance between the participants materially visible. Around a long table over Japanese food, the women introduced themselves and described how they had decided to speak. Paltrow raised a glass to Ashley Judd, recognizing that Judd had been the first actress to go on the record in the first Weinstein story and had helped make it easier for others to come forward.

Speaking, Silence, and Unequal Stakes

The gathering did not make disclosure equally possible for everyone. When the conversation reached Rowena Chiu, Kantor offered her the option to pass. Chiu chose to speak, but explained that she had not yet made her story public and had little practice telling it; apart from her husband, her family still knew nothing. She was considering whether to break her silence, while anticipating that disclosure could shock friends and change her life. Hearing how the others had come forward helped her think through that decision. For the journalists, the meeting was material to share with readers; for Chiu, it was also a possible source of support at a consequential personal threshold.

Chiu connected her hesitation to the limited visibility of Asian women who speak about such experiences in the United States. She described a model-minority expectation that Asian people should not make a fuss, should keep their heads down, and should work hard without causing waves. Her account made clear that the pressure to remain silent was not experienced in identical ways: social expectations, economic security, occupation, and public standing shaped both the risks of disclosure and the resources available afterward.

What Speaking Out Changed

As the women listened, their different worlds became a source of curiosity rather than a division. Zelda Perkins, a British producer two decades older than Lawson, recalled giving testimony about confidentiality agreements to members of Parliament. Lawson described filing a complaint against McDonald’s with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and joining a September strike. She had delivered a speech, given interviews, and pushed her daughter in a stroller along the march; men had deliberately marched behind the women in support. The complaint and protest had given her a sense of power and solidarity she had not previously felt.

Lawson’s public advocacy had also grown beyond a single appearance: she advised other female McDonald’s employees involved in the union effort through a text chain, and customers recognized her from television coverage of sexual harassment. Perkins, in turn, said that speaking had helped her become the person she had been growing into when she left Miramax at twenty-four. Their experiences supplied a counterpoint to the costs of disclosure: women who had faced harassment could gain authority, connection, and a public role by challenging it. The investigation’s aftermath therefore remained open-ended. It documented not only accounts that had reached the public, but also the uneven, ongoing process by which women decided what to say, whom to tell, and what speaking might make possible.