My guest tonight is an investigative reporter
for The New York Times who broke the story
exposing decades of alleged sexual misconduct
by Harvey Weinstein.
Please welcome Jodi Cantor.
-♪ ♪ -(cheering, applause)
-Welcome to the show. -Thank you.
Thank you for coming out in the snow,
and thank you for reporting a story
which is probably one of the most impactful stories
our society has ever, ever seen.
When you were working on the Harvey Weinstein story--
this took you months-- did you think it would have
the impact that it's had?
No. My partner, Megan Twohey, and I really were not sure.
And as one of our editors pointed out,
Harvey Weinstein was really not that famous.
A lot of people outside of New York and L.A.,
and even in those cities, had never even heard of him.
So when you... when you were reporting this story,
you think to yourself: This is Harvey Weinstein,
people maybe on the coasts know him, people in New York,
people in Hollywood,
but you don't think this will blow up as a story.
Why do you think it got so big, then?
We've talked about that a lot at the newspaper,
because, like everybody else, we're somewhat staggered
to see what happened.
One of our editors has a theory.
This was the rare sexual harassment story
in which the accusers were actually more famous
and had more cultural capital than the accused.
I struggle with that a little bit as a reporter,
because I really believe that every woman's story counts.
Every woman who came forward was so courageous
-Right. -and so brave, and I don't love the fact
that it seemed to kind of take a kind of celebrity
to move the needle.
But interestingly, that was part of our conversation
with some of the stars who did come forward.
People like Ashley Judd kind of knew that she had an ability
to have a kind of outsized effect,
because people felt that they knew her.
People knew her, but at the same time
it feels like that would be a reason
that people wouldn't want to come out, you know?
In the reporting, you speak about how difficult it was
for so many people to speak about their experiences.
Was it hard to get, uh...
Ashley Judd in particular, let's say, to speak on the record?
Absolutely. It's a really painful topic.
One thing that helped is that The New York Times
made a huge commitment to sexual harassment reporting this year.
When you take out a subscription to The New York Times,
one of the things is... that you're buying
is essentially you're buying me and my colleagues' time
to do this really difficult work.
So my colleagues, Emily Steel and Michael Schmidt,
spent eight months investigating Bill O'Reilly,
-Right. -and it was hard, slow, painful work.
But that story had enormous impact.
And then, when we started the Harvey Weinstein story
a few months later,
we were able to, essentially, say to our sources,
"Look at the way the Bill O'Reilly story went down."
He lost his job, people really listened to the women.
Uh, you know, if this is a kind of surgery
that you're performing when you're doing these stories,
-no women died on the operating table. -Right.
The kind of classic fear is that you're gonna face humiliation,
or career consequences if you're honest about what happened,
did not come to pass,
so that story gave us a kind of playbook
and model to go forward with.
And it helped make us and our sources
feel like it was possible.
Like we could, we could finally do this and people would listen.
It's interesting, though, because many people said
that Harvey Weinstein was an open secret in Hollywood.
Uh, people said that about,
I think it was Batali, as well.
You hear so many stories where people said
it was an open secret.
Sometimes it was even reported on in some way, shape or form.
What-What changed? I mean, you reported a story
that some people had whispered about,
and then, all of a sudden, the story became
what has become the catalyst for change
in many, uh, many parts of our society.
What do you think was the change?
Look, this is why we get up in the morning,
and this is why we work so hard to do what we do.
We want to find the documents.
We want to show the history.
We want to capture the full extent.
The first story we published
had 30 year's worth of allegations.
It had secret memos from inside the Weinstein Company
that showed just how bad the problem was.
It had women going on the record about their experiences.
And from the beginning, Megan and I felt like we were writing,
not just about these alleged abuses,
but also about the cover-up.
Part of what was upsetting to people, I think,
about the Weinstein story, was the revelation
that there was an entire system in place
to protect a guy like Weinstein.
We found out that he had eight to 12 settlements
with women over the years.
So something like this would happen,
and then a fancy lawyer would step in,
and kind of conveniently make it all go away.
The Hollywood agencies continued to send actresses
to his hotel rooms, even though agents at those agencies
basically knew what was going on.
So I think-- I don't think it's a surprise to people
that sexual harassment and worse exists,
but I think seeing the full pattern
and the extent of the system is part of what's so galling.
When you look at a story like Harvey Weinstein's,
you look at a story like Bill O'Reilly's,
and then you contrast it to stories about Roy Moore,
or senators that have come out since then...
You know, Al Franken, the, uh, John Conyers--
Why do you think the reaction is different?
Because it feels like when it's about the politicians,
people aren't as quick to accept it,
or there seems to be a fight.
And yet, with Harvey and Bill O'Reilly,
it seemed like people were,
were quick to jump into the fray.
Is there a difference because of politics?
Well, I think that part of what was important
about the stories we've seen in the last couple of months
is that many of them didn't feel particularly political.
Or, if they did, they were on both the right and the left.
If you look at O'Reilly and Weinstein,
it really carries the lesson of this is everywhere, right?
I mean, it... it's-it's been revealed as a problem
-everywhere on the political spectrum. -Right.
And then if you look at somebody like Louis CK,
who I also wrote about,
he's not a particularly political figure.
And so that discussion is not really a partisan fight,
it's about this behavior.
When you're doing the reporting on these stories,
and you're looking at the behavior of these men,
is this something that you find
that is particularly tied to power
or is it just a problem that we have
with men in society, full stop?
If you listen to the full array of women's stories
and all of the women who have come forward,
both in sort of journalistic outlets
over the last couple of months and then women
who have come forward on their own on the Internet,
I think what you see
is the pervasiveness of the pattern.
And I think what is troubling but also constructive
about the last couple of months is that
we're able to draw connections that we never were before.
We're able to say there are generations of women
-whose careers were cut off -Right.
because of harassment at particular stages.
There are big questions about how effective HR departments
actually are in dealing with this.
There are huge questions about this settlement system.
Why do we, essentially,
let powerful men pay money--
in Bill O'Reilly's case,
it was tens of millions of dollars over the years--
to essentially make the problem disappear and go away?
And I feel like now that we're in 2018, a lot of the questions
are about what is the path forward on this?
It's not just about looking at these individual cases,
it's about saying can our sys... can our society finally
come up with an effective system for dealing with this?
Did you find that many men
didn't know what was happening?
I mean, there are the enablers.
There are those who are actively
doing the harassing and the assaulting.
And then there are men who said,
"I did not know that this was happening right in front of me."
Was that something you discovered in your reporting?
And-and, I guess, in... in the world of The New York Times?
There were both women and men who didn't know,
and I think that's because some of the information
was confined to what we call whisper networks.
It turns out that in all sorts of fields
women had these kind of quiet networks
in which they shared information with each other
about what their experiences were.
But there were the... My colleague Julie Creswell
did a great story about that.
But that information was always a little underground.
It was almost always beneath the surface.
So, where to from here?
This is a... a story that takes you months to work on.
This has only been 12 weeks,
which is mind-blowing when you think about it.
It feels like the Harvey Weinstein thing
has been going on for a year, but it's only been 12 weeks.
Is this the beginning,
the middle, or the end?
That's a great question.
I think it-it's definitely not the end.
And the reason why is because we have all of these questions
that we haven't resolved.
-How do you have an office romance in 2018 -Right.
without fear of doing the wrong thing?
Um, if a man has been accused
of, uh, sexual harassment,
what does "due process" even kind of mean
in that kind of case?
Um, I don't think we've settled any of those questions.
I... We... Our society doesn't even really have a common,
-agreed-upon definition of sexual harassment. -Right.
So I think all of us are, kind of,
to some extent, just puzzling this through
at the water cooler and at the dinner table.
Well, I can't wait to read
what the next story's gonna be, though. Thank you so much.
-Thank you so much. -Thank you for being on the show.
Jodi Kantor, everybody.