Journalists Who Broke Harvey Weinstein Story | Full Discussion at The Oxford Union

[Music] [Applause] meagan Jodi and Rowena thank you so much for joining us here today I'd like to start off by talking about the investigation you described in your book that the investigation started off with the first phone call that Jodi had with Rose McGowan could you describe to us how this phone call came about and how Harvey Weinstein and these potential allegations appeared on your radar in general certainly first of all I I want to say that we really are deeply honored to be here tonight for two reasons in particular one is that Megan and I have done a lot of speaking over the last two years and there's no audience that is more important to us than students so thank you for bringing us to your University if anybody here is thinking of becoming a journalist or an investigative journalist you are our people we want you so thank you so much for coming tonight and we're also just incredibly moved to be here with Rowena the three of us have come a very very very long way together from our first meeting or should I say non meeting which we will tell the story of tonight and to be here at Rowena's place of Education and to be able to now talk about your experiences and our experiences reporting on you so openly is is really a precious opportunity so to answer your question the first page of our book she said is about the frustrating fact that Rose McGowan refused to talk to me initially at the start of the Weinstein investigation she said your newspaper is sexist I don't you know essentially I don't believe in you and it's about that puzzle that every journalist faces when someone declines to speak to you how can you possibly open them up not in a manipulative way but by truly making the case that they should contribute in some way to your story and that particular story came about really not because of Megan and I initially it came about because of a huge commitment from the New York Times to sexual harassment reporting this was never just about Harvey Weinstein in the spring of 2017 our colleagues Emily Steele and Michael Schmidt published an extraordinary story about how Bill O'Reilly the American TV host had paid off sexual harassment accusers for decades I know that seems like it was a hundred sexual harassment stories ago but that story was a game-changer for two reasons one it showed that this trail of settlements instead of sort of precluding the possibility of a story could actually become the story could become the financial and legal trail that we wrote about and the second thing is that Bill O'Reilly was fired I know his name may not mean as much in the UK but think about an incredibly loud pugnacious influential conservative host who set so much of the political discourse in the u.s. an immensely powerful figure a sort of key figure in the Murdoch Empire if that translates a little better the idea that he could lose this job because the New York Times had reported this kind of story was a game changer and it it caused the editors to ask what is now I guess a very quaint question they said are there other powerful men in American life who have abused women and covered it up and that's what led us into looking into Harvey Weinstein so leading on from that if you look and read into your investigation people will notice that there are two main channels from which your sources and one sees Weinstein's victims came from there was Hollywood actresses and there was Weinstein's employees at Miramax and the weinstein company such as marina so could you talk a bit about this first category and how how it was that you reached name such as Ashley Turner and Gwyneth Paltrow and how is it that you encouraged them and eventually led them to go on the record well it was it certainly there were these two categories of alleged victims the famous actresses and those are the first women that we had the first set of secret hushed conversations with and one of the reasons we wrote the book is because so much of investigations of this kind take place off the record in and we really worked hard in the course of reporting the book to bring all of those secret meetings on to the record so that readers could be with us the first time that we met with Gwyneth Paltrow in her home and she was describing her experience when she you know she had been basically the first lady of Miramax at Harvey Weinstein's first company and sort of seen as completely untouchable and one of the most sort of famous and and prized stars to come out of his movie Empire and so that was a real jaw-dropping moment for us when she started to open up and tell us that in fact she had been one of his victims and she was she like so many other of the actresses that we were starting to have these secret conversations with was willing to tell us her story but was really scared of going on the record Harvey Weinstein's power and influence was so massive that even women like Gwyneth Paltrow who seemingly have all this celebrity in power were scared to go on the record and so we quickly realized that we weren't going to be able to break the story if we waited around for these four the famous actresses to go on the record that we had to set out on other reporting paths and so slowly but surely we started to see these other category of victims women who had gone to work for Harvey Weinstein at first at Miramax in heart and then at The Weinstein Company often it was their first job College out of you their first job out of university they had ambitions and working behind the scenes in the entertainment industry and you know if we were able to ultimately trap trace allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault against those employees stretching from 1990 to 2015 there was a really memorable moment for me in the summer of 2017 where there was a woman who had been who had worked for Harvey Weinstein in 1990 sort of fresh out of college and she had disappeared from it from from the workplace following an alleged sexual assault and so I was able to track her down in a home outside of New York City and she she sort of opened the door and said you know I have actually been waiting for somebody to knock on my door I've been waiting for this this knock on my door for 20 five years and but like a lot of the women that we encountered along the way she had been silenced through a secret settlement and so we also realized as this other category of alleged victims came into view that we were also running up against a huge challenge and that so many of these women had been legally silenced through financial payoffs that they had been advised were their best if only course of action so I'll come to these financial payoffs and settlements in a second but I wanted to talk about some of the other obstacles put in the way to silence your investigation and these women so in your book you talk about the role that black cube the private investigative agency played in silencing individuals such as Rose McGowan could you explain exactly how weinstein used these institutions and resources to protect himself sure but you know he did so many different things in so many different ways but we'll give you a couple of examples by the way one thing I think we should also add that has to do with wine students methods but also the kinds of women we spoke to is that coming to the UK is very meaningful for us because I think what not that many people realize is that British women were at ground zero of this investigation the typical image of a Weinstein victim is of you know a famous blonde actress in a ball gown but that's not the case I mean well we'll talk some about Rowena story and there are also two women Zelda Perkins and Laura Madden who were absolutely critical Zelda was the first woman with a non-disclosure agreement to speak with us she couldn't go on the record for the first story but she allowed us to write about her which was essential and then she broke her NDA afterwards and Laura Madden lives in Wales she lives in Swansea and along with Ashley judge she was she was one of the first two women on the right in the world brave enough to go on the record about Weinstein so so so your question reminds me of a come in the first conversation I had with Laura she said you know normally I wouldn't talk to you but I'm talking to you because of a call I got from Weinstein's people a week ago and a former Weinstein assistant had called her and this was more of a carrot than a stick but he she was trying to persuade Laura not to speak with us and she called us cockroach journalists and you know that that was sort of method one I think the sort of softest lightest method which was just to sort of badmouth us to make to try to make people scared of us to tell people not to speak to us but he also used methods that were really extraordinary including the hiring of black cube which is a firm of Israeli X intelligence agents they do some of the things that private detectives do but they go far beyond it because they actually tried to dupe and manipulate people there was this agent actor type who I got an email from in the summer of 2017 who claimed to be a women's rights advocate from London she claimed to be putting together a sort of fancy corporate feminism conference where she wanted me to speak I blew off her email because I was too busy actually working on the Weinstein investigation to talk with her but it turns out that she was not what she represented to be she was a black cube agent and she was in the business of trying to get not only journalists but more importantly alleged victims to share information so that was some of it but Weinstein also used a really prominent feminist attorney Lisa bloom to try to back him he hired a kind of all-star cast of PR people fancy lawyers we were writing by the end under legal threat he threatened to sue the New York Times but one thing we always want to emphasize is that although these methods were very elaborate and they were terrifying for some of our sources who don't have some of the institutional protection that Megan and I have they ultimately didn't work they were no match for somebody like Laura Madden of Swansea Wales and the story she had to tell touching a bit on as you mentioned Lisa bloom and Gloria Allred who were considered the country's leading feminist lawyers and they were deemed by W magazine to be defenders of women your investigation you've found already and bloomed to be involved with the settlement that Weinstein had reached with all of these women and bloom was in fact representing the producer so on task how is it that you reconcile kind of their earlier contributions towards the feminist cause and the achievements with Condesa port for Weinstein well it's a really good question and actually before I answer that to go back to black cube this private investigative firm that was on our trail Weinstein had basically promised this investigative firm that they would receive $300,000 bonus if they put a stop to our investigation and another person who worked on that secret campaign was a British journalist assessed Freedman who had you know who had written for the Guardian and he basically got linked with black cube and the Weinstein case and was reaching out to journalists and other women that Weinstein you know suspected might go on the record and claiming that he was working on an article and trying to fish out information that he then passed back to Weinstein so that was another kind of jaw-dropping moment for us to realize that this you know somebody who had appeared to be an established journalist had crossed over to the to this other side to work on behalf of this the you know black cube and by extension Weinstein but Lisa Bloom was probably one of the most jaw-dropping moment for us this was I mean if you know she is probably one of the most prominent victims rights attorneys in the United States she has made a name for herself and kind of cultivated legal celebrity by representing victims of sexual harassment and sexual assault and in 2016 she crossed sides and went to go work for Weinstein and we we knew some of that like she came into focus as we were doing our reporting she was by his side at the end when he was trying to fight back publication but you know she and once that came out once our first story was published in 2017 she got some heat for it and she apologized and she said well I only went to go do this because I thought that he had made inappropriate comments towards women and I wanted to help him apologize I wanted to help him see the error of his ways and apologize and in the course of reporting this book we were able to obtain confidential records her billing records an hour-by-hour accounting of exactly what it was she did for him and also this basically this memo a kind of a job audition in which she spelled out for Weinstein all of the underhanded tactics she was prepared to use on his behalf to undermine Rose McGowan and you know ultimately other women who thought were gonna come forward so it was clear that her a knowledge of what he would had done was much deeper and that the role that she played was much darker she was basically saying I will smear on your behalf I will manipulate I will lie I will basically take all of my experience working with victims harness that and use that with on your behalf to work against them and so you know we were when we asked her about that when we confronted her with our findings she refused to comment she said that she you know was gonna adhere to attorney-client privilege but I think that it really raised questions not she wasn't the only attorney who had gone to work for him who ultimately we realized had ambitions of crossing in so the entertainment industry she wrote a book that Weinstein had agreed to make into a movie and she we were able to sort of document a conversation she had had with another lawyer at one point saying this guy can really do a lot for your career but it really raised this questions and served as an example of there were a lot of surprising figures that we encountered in the course of our investigation in terms of the people who helped bring the truth to light and the people who helped conceal it so I'd say Lisa Bloom was probably one of the most surprising people in terms of the people who worked to cover things up but there were also some surprising figures like Owen Ryder who was the longtime accountant in the weinstein companies she had been one of Weinstein's top executives but over the years had been concerned about the boss's treatment of women and ultimately became one of our most valuable secret sources ultimately flipping us internal company records that helped reveal all of these various serious allegations against Weinstein so particularly towards the end of your investigation you the two of you did have some conversations with Weinstein himself could you describe what these were like what is it that you expected from these meetings what was that - towards the end did you get what you were kind of expecting why don't you take that one well it was interesting it's like when you're reporting on a subject like Weinstein you basically are collecting all of these stories about him and we you know months into it we felt like we kind of had a composite sketch that was coming into view and we had heard stories of the people who had worked with him worked for him actresses who had you know bet been in his movies and people would describe somebody who would swing back and forth between flattery and then basically sort of menacing threats and then at the very end of our investigation it's part of the due diligence that you do is that you go to your subject that you're preparing to publish all of these various serious negative allegations and you you give them a chance to respond and so when we did that that really set in motion like a 48-hour roller coaster we were on the phone with Harvey Weinstein as he was basically kind of swinging back and forth between flattery and threats and then the day before publication he actually like barged into the New York Times with some of his high-priced lawyers by his side and these folders of information that he had on some of the women that he knew were going to be in our story photos of them you know of him posed with some of the women who were gonna be making allegations against him in which the women were smiling with this idea that if they had been seen on red carpets with him after the fact that it was evidence that they were lying other information from their backgrounds that he thought that he could use to smear them and so that was something where we weren't quite sure what to do when we realized that he had basically was showing up unannounced to the New York Times but one of the reasons that I took that meeting is that I wanted to show him what we were made of and so at the end of the day all of his threats and all of his bullying and all of the menacing tactics that he had used to evade kind of accountability over the years really came crumbling in that final moment when he was not up against just you know that all of the brave sources who had participated in our invest gation but the entire institution of the new york times which was like never going to be intimidated by him in any way will turn now to some questions about the case that's self in kind of ruinas story so in all the cases of harassment that that you've described in the book there appears to be a common theme or what you refer to as the pattern so the women is invited to Weinstein's hotel room and the guise of a business meeting and he abuses his power and kind of commits sexual harassment this immediately leads to a settlement of some kind and the woman is silenced and paid good it's a substantial monetary sum and then there is a PR cover-up so Romina could you tell us a bit about your story that you spoke out about a few months ago of course so I was very young when I went to work for Harvey Weinstein I had only really graduated from Oxford a couple of years prior to taking the job with Harvey and you speak about a pattern and that's very typical of his assistants when they start off working for him that is typically their first or second job out of university we Zelda Perkins and I at the time worked as Harvey Winston's European assistants so we were based in London and our job was to travel with Harvey across Europe to either film festivals or where different films were shooting for Miramax so we could end up in location at different places France Italy typically would go to film festivals and sort of similar cities so on the occasion of this particular sexual assault I was at the Venice Film Festival and when you say that people are called to Harvey's hotel room for business meetings and I think that refers more to industry executives or actresses I think the difficult thing about being Harvey's assistant is you're with him throughout all of his waking hours and so the way that our working life worked is that the first assistant would wake him up in the morning at 6:00 a.m. and she would stay with him on her own until about 10:00 a.m. and then I would the second assistant would come on duty and then we would have a sort of 12 hour shift until 10:00 p.m. so on the particular night of the assault it was a very typical pattern in the sense that the first assistant was out attending a dinner or a guard some kind of glamorous event with Harvey and she would return with him to the hotel suites in this case elder Perkins and she would settle him for the evening and I as a second assistant it would have been my role to read a number of scripts that were in the office to organize the office to make some calls just you know other international cities that were still working and then away - Harvey's return at 10:00 and then there would be a period of time until 2:00 a.m. where we would be doing some kind of office work either making international calls setting up scripts and discussing the scripts that I'd read so it's important to emphasize that it was part of our work to be in the hotel room late at night it wasn't a social occasion I wasn't invited there for a business meeting I wasn't there for a drink but it's part of my shift work that I would be working and discussing scripts so then Harvey's modus operandi in terms of when he moved in on assistants was he would make a pretense that we were at work so a lot of the discussion would be about the scripts that I just read or it about things to do with the office opportunities for advancement and as Jody and Megan portray in the way that he had he he veered between charm and bullying for those outside of the company there was very similar sort of process for those within the company so you know he would talk about how he valued our opinion on the scripts and he valued our insights into I read English to Oxford so we talked a lot of our story development and character development and I think as a young assistant you're really made to feel that you can shape the films that Miramax makes in the future and that's a sort of very attractive thing but at the same time there's also inappropriate conversation so he would ask questions about my private life about who I might be dating about my family situation about where I was born and what I aspired to do more generally with my life and then interesting and sort of insidiously if you have a boyfriend he would start to ask questions about the boyfriend he would say who are you going out with what do they like they also work in the film industry if they work in the film industry or a related industry like music I can also help them and I really like to meet him and I'd like to take him out to a fancy hotel a fancy dinner and so in various ways he's insidious in terms of trying to get into your life and get into your private life and persuade you that there's a deal with the devils that can be struck that you know if you are willing to have sex with Harvey it can really make your make or break your career and but if you don't play the game he'll make sure that you don't you know it sounds like a cliche but he'll make sure that you don't work in the film industry again so from then it resulted to the next stage which was the settlement could you talk a bit about what it felt like when the settlement was being made and did it feel like this was the only way to get justice for what you'd been through after the assaults in the hotel room in Venice I reported it immediately to Zelda Perkins who was the other assistant working with Harvey at the time and my closest colleague and to be honest it was a big jump to the settlement so I just wanted to explain a bit about our thinking at that time we were 24 and 25 we have very few resources at our disposal we were on business travel at the Venice Film Festival it sounds ridiculous but we had gotten there through limousine and private jet the only access to any kind of finance we had at our disposal was a mirror acts corporate annex card so it wasn't as though we could just get up from this hotel room and either report ourselves turn arthas into Italian police we didn't speak Italian we didn't have any idea where the police station was or suddenly disappear and go home to London so it seemed prudent although we very much wanted to do something right away it seemed prudent that we should at least wait until we got back to the London office before we thought through our next steps but Zelda immediately confronted Harvey and she put certain self safeguards in place that I that the two of us would for the rest of our time at both film festivals worked together and we wouldn't be alone in her or certainly I wouldn't be alone in a tell room with him so that is how we safeguarded ourselves for the rest of that particular trip and then when we went back to London we started what turned out to a very complicated process of trying to escalate and to expose Harvey for the things that he had done and so internally at first we spoke to more senior women at Miramax saying that this had happened saying the other women were at risk and so on and trying to find sort of help internally which turned out to be very difficult to do it wasn't our intention from the get-go to seek our own legal representation but it became apparent that within Miramax there wasn't any way of escalating it such that he either he would be exposed or that you know he would be in any way held accountable because at the end of the day a CEO of Miramax knew his power was really completely invincible and so we did seek legal representation and it led to after a few weeks that legal representation recommended that we invoke constructive dismissal so via fax at the time it was 98 so we faxed our resignation to the New York office invoking constructive dismissal and being very clear that the hostile work environment that we refer to was sexual assault and a number of other incidents you know particularly that in the hotel room in Venice but also a number of other incidents and overnight you know Harvey's office reacted very quickly Harvey himself reacted very quickly there are a number of you know he left a number of very desperate voicemails on Zelda Perkins home line and mobile phone and you know his lawyers kicked into play they were on a jet across London that very night our lawyers kicked into play and sort of before we realized it we ended up in a large glass conference room really brought to the negotiating table and you know initially as I as I was saying this was really not our intention our entire throughout this entire process was really to expose Harvey to either take this to the police or to because there was no accountability within me relaxed really talk to the Walt Disney Company however on the other side they had quite a different agenda and as you eluded Harvey's way of closing people down is through settlement agreements or non-disclosure agreements and payoffs for silence and really as it turned we did not know being only 24 and 25 that this is part of his that they had previously been NDA's we didn't even know that there were NDA's after our own DEA until October 2017 we lived in a belief that our nd moat might be the only NDA which you know in retrospect is naive we did not know that this was a really a pattern of behavior but because he isolates and silences his victims through these settlements agreements and through these payouts we had no way of knowing what his past was or what he did to women in the future all we could do at that time was say we wanted two explosive as a predator and we also wanted to put things which were safe which would act as safeguards at mirror acts specifically for assistance going forward you know so we had negotiated Hill were talked about things like he could not travel with he could not spend time in hotel rooms with single female assistants he there had to be accompanied at all times by two female assistants or one male assistant that eventually got cut out of our settlement agreement but there was one clause that we wanted to argue for very adamantly and that he would go to see a therapist and he'd go specifically to see a therapist about sexual issues so that he wouldn't just say oh I've got an anger problem or you know I'm struggling with Fame or something like that he would acknowledge that he had this issue with sex addiction and we also tried to put in place just basic HR safeguards you know that there will be three Ombudsman at Miramax complaint handlers if you will so that people could report such incidents so 19 years down the line Jody I think it was you that went to arenas doorstep as a part of your investigation and you spoke to arenas husband who at the time was unaware of what had happened in the past Rowena could you talk to us a bit about your journey and the family and the journey your family went on since this investigation in October 2017 and how that led you to break your silence just in September this year you know keeping a 20 year secret is a very distinct experience and I think when you are thrown inst at a very early point in your career when you're really quite young it is a very suffocating process you can't speak to your family of origin we were not permitted it that the NDA made it impossible to seek further legal advice to go and see a doctor to go find a therapist to speak to a friends from college so it was really a complete isolation at the point when Joji door stopped my husband we had been married for 10 years and had four children and he didn't know anything other than I used to work at Mara Mass different reporters actually had come to speak to me in the intervening two decades but by some stroke of luck nobody had come within the ten years that I'd been married to Andrew my husband so I really felt like the bottom fell out of my world when he called I was visiting my parents in the UK and he calls from California to say Road there's a New York Times journalist standing on our doorstep but I was determined out to panic and I and I I tried to be very calm and I said don't worry about her she'll go she'll go away that they come from time to time they come from feinstein but she'll go away and the story will go away and i actually although that sounds like a comic response i really believe that because different journalists had come over the intervening years and over the course of two decades i had persuaded myself nobody will ever get Harvey he's invincible he pays people off he has people followed they threatened at the time when we signed our NDA that they would be watching us for the rest of our lives and there was really a sense that we felt like terrible terrible things would happen if we ever breathed a word to anybody so I didn't think I didn't know Jodie and Megan but I didn't think that no matter how tenacious a reporter who came to my doorstep I didn't believe anybody could break the power that Harvey the power and charisma that Harvey had around him so I was bound and determined not to speak and I really can't imagine that two years later I'd be sitting here at the Oxford Union telling my story because that time I was completely terrified that it already kept the secret for two decades and I watched as their articles published in the New York Times as Rowan ferry's article came out of the New Yorker as the whole thing exploded and everybody was posting me to on Facebook and it was a very weird feeling because different people would come and say didn't you used to work for Harvey Weinstein and I still maintained this absolute complete silence and I think and I often get asked why did a lot of my friends and colleagues come out including Zelda who was my closest colleague at the time come out in October 2017 but why did it take you two years to get to this point and I think that it's a multi-faceted answer everybody has that very much their own journey with when they feel they can come forward with a story that is so searing and so personal and so dramatic so I think in those intervening two years I had to do a lot of soul-searching as you famously know my husband didn't know but my children were also very young the youngest who's actually here tonight was there only six months old at the time that this investigate that this story broke and he he's still only two-and-a-half now so they're really serious considerations around the impact on my on my children who are very young I thought they'll be followed by to school I thought our house would be ringed by reporters and really once the story is out in public it is no longer or although a secret is lifted so it is in one way a relief there is also the aspect of the story develops a narrative of soon and grows legs of its own and I think I'm even still trying to understand how that works I've only my story has only gone public for a month so I still very new to speaking about it alright I have a few more questions about the meeting movement in general so I wanted to ask about Christine blaze Ward who the world witnessed almost a year after you article was published so all three of you have interacted with her in the recent past could you tell us what it was like witnessing all of this just after your story had come out and how was how was she similar or different to the several women you had interaction with during an investigation well maybe we should answer that together because Megan and I interacted with her at different moments right after the testimony and then in the months afterwards I met Christine Blasi Ford the morning after the testimony we met secretly in Washington really just to get acquainted and the reason why Megan and I had thrown ourselves into that story is that we wanted we were fascinated by what was happening and we wanted to write in this book about the complexity of me to the Weinstein story at the end of the day is relatively straightforward it in the sense that the pattern is so strong the evidence went you can dispute individual incidents but the sort of whole of it is so overwhelming and also I think that there's a lot of consensus we'll see what happens with the trial in jail January but in terms of people's reactions to the descriptions of these accounts there's there's a lot of unanimity and and as we wrote this book and in the year following the publication of our story we saw some of that consensus fracture and me to grow a lot more controversial there was a mounting sense of backlash a mounting sense of male grievance and we could see as the Blasi Ford allegation slowly became more public that this was going to serve as a kind of apotheosis for people's very complicated feelings about me too and so when I met her the morning after the testimony she seemed both exactly like the person who was on who had been you know sort of on the public stage the day before but she also seemed like such an everyday person the sort of California scientific researcher and mom that she is her hair was tousled she had exchanged that dark suit for you know informal clothing she was wearing a turquoise hoodie and Megan and I had been you know really for some time dealing with women who had found that their intimate personal stories from their past had this outsized effect in the world globally on the public stage but this was a little bit different because you could there were even glimpses then that this woman had not necessarily intended to affect the public discourse in the way that she had that that she had sort of wandered onto a much wider more brightly lit stage than she ever intended to and when Megan picked up the conversation with her I think that feeling only grew right it was we quickly realized that we really wanted to report into her personal story and in the like in the coming months so a couple months after her testimony I actually met with her and had sort of obtained the first you know in-depth interview of her she had she was back in Palo Alto down the street from Rowena where she lives and at that point two months after tests fiying she showed up to a breakfast appointment that we had with her a baseball hat pulled down she had not yet moved back into her family home because of security threats she was still basically living in hiding and so you know on on one on the one hand she had been flooded with I think tens of thousands of letters of victims of sexual assault and other supporters who were pouring their hearts out to her so she had and you know many segments of society was seen as a hero but on the other hand she was really still grappling with death threats and other people who really had come to see her as probably perhaps the biggest villain of the me2 movement and so we realized once we were able to sort of piece together the backstory the the behind the scenes story of her path to testifying in Washington we realized that it was so much more complicated than either side knew and we wanted we felt like we had to tell that story but we also wanted to and you know that we the last piece of reporting we did for our book was to bring together women who had been at the center of all these high-profile stories so we we conducted a group interview in January of this year and so there were women there there was a woman Rachel crooks who was one of the first women to go on the record with an allegation of sexual misconduct against Trump against Donald Trump during the presidential race there was you know Zelda Perkins and Rowena and Gwyneth Paltrow and Ashley Judd some of the women who had been at the center of the Weinstein investigation and there was also there was also Christine Blasi Ford and it was so interesting we knew what the kind of public impact of them coming forward had been but we wanted to ask what the private impact had been and it was so interesting because in Reno was there the only woman who at that point had not yet gone on the record or gone public with her story and it was so I think one of the most interesting things was to watch you and dr. Ford interact and so while she had on the one hand seemingly had one of the roughest times of coming forward you still talked about seeing her is a really inspiring figure and somebody who played in your into into your decision to come forward so my very final question before we take questions from the audience actually about this particular gathering you the women you described who were at this gathering that you had in Paltrow's house in fact a quite diverse as see you had Quinn falco you had Ashley turned all these actors producers and they were sitting alongside figures such as Kym Lawson who was a member of staff at McDonald's who had recently taken action against sexual harassment at the food chain so in this instant the meter movement appeared to be very intersectional and prepared to represent women from all sorts of backgrounds ethnic social cultural and so on but in many cases the meter movement still is not as intersection as we'd like it to be so what do you think we can do to make hashtag me to a movement that speaks for everyone well it's an interesting question you ask because there's certainly a question about who's gotten the attention in me too and which cases have been brought to the fore and in our work I think we've we've both felt the power of the big-name actresses going on the record and I think struggled with that a little bit on the on the one hand were the ones who took Ashley Judd Gweneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie on the record Salma Hayek and Lupita Nyong'o wrote their op eds in the New York Times pages and we are very very proud of all of those things but we've also felt to be honest the frustration of sometimes seeing that these famous actresses words can be weighed more heavily than regular women's I mean we went because The Times has done stories you know across industries you know factory workers restaurant workers female prison guards etc and you can be they're trying to you know tweet out your colleague story and get it some attention and feel like why is the story about the factory workers you know not getting you know quite as many eyeballs you know as as the ones about the famous actresses so there's that but I think you know I have to be honest I think the even bigger struggle with me too to do with the backlash that we feel very strongly in the states and also I think just a general sense of confusion and throwing up of hands and I think that this matters for everybody because there's been a lot of change in social attitudes with me too but those changes in social attitudes have generally not been locked into place by law laws in the US and the UK have barely changed in the last two years and part of why it's so important that that happens is that that's when you get a more Universal kind of change that affects everybody regardless of background and we see a lot of the controversy about me - coming down to basically three questions number one what is the scope of behavior under scrutiny is this about classic sexual harassment and assault only or is it also about unwelcome advances that don't involve touching verbal harassment and unwelcome hand on somebody's back etc etc also included in that first question how far back do you go in time when you're looking at these allegations question number two how do you get to the bottom of what actually happened we know how we do it as investigative reporters but I think if you go to a random HR department in the US or the UK there's a lot of confusion about how you ascertain what actually happened and then number three the question of accountability it's very it's very easy to call for accountability generally but it's much harder to assign if somebody has committed a low-level offense that they apologize for is that a firing offense there's a lot of controversy about that and what we've noticed is that these questions become intertwined in a way that makes them even harder to answer for example there's a senator senator Al Franken in the US who resigned his Senate seat because of some of these allegations and so within hours of him resigning people including fellow Democrats were debating whether or not he should have had to resign this Senate seat that was before the facts were even clearer and there was even a sort of consensus on what the guy actually had or had not done so you know as reporters we cannot solve these questions these are for all of you to answer but what we hope we can do is you know we're reporting and investigating every single day we're still trying to shed light on what actually happened you can't solve a problem you can't see and we're also hoping to be as clear as possible about these questions and how they intersect so that all of them can't read so that all of us can try to answer them together we do have time for some questions from the audience if you have a question put your hand up and a microphone will come to you if we go to the hand in the front row over there in the maroon jumper yeah the one that's there in front me hi thank you guys so much for coming here this is I think your reporting has been inspirational for everybody not just women but everybody around the world I had a question from a technical perspective and this is before people really came out and kind of like disclosed who they were so how did you deal with confidential sources and like publishing so many confidential sources in the original article because you know if you read it it was a lot like this person can't speak out Wow this person like can't really disclose who the identity is and I think when it comes to trust with an institution like the public doesn't know whether it's hearsay if it's actually happened so how did you guys build that credibility with the audience who is reading the piece to say like you know we actually took this it's not just something we made up and how did that affect the reporting yeah I mean well actually if you do go back and look at that it at our first story there were two women who went on the record Laura Madden and Ashley Judd but it also involved a lot we there there were not anonymous accusations and there our editors were very adamant about that and there are different news organizations that apply different standards but the case of the Harvey Weinstein investigation and a lot of the stories of sexual harassment and sexual assault that the times have done you're not you don't see you you're gonna see very few anonymous accusations from anonymous you know victims and so you know our story actually was we realized very quickly that we you know that in addition to seeking on the record allegations which we did ultimately have that we also needed another body of evidence which we did include in that first story so we were able to we had been able to piece together the the trail of secret settlements that had been paid stretching from 1990 to 2015 at the end of the day we were able to show that Weinstein had paid as many as 12 secret settlements over those years this was basically like time and again he had used these as a tool to cover his tracks and so while many of the while many of the women who had entered into those secret settlements did not break those secret settlements in our story just the fact that we were able to show that they existed became a important component and then we also had obtained you know in this like important internal company records in which there were allegations of sexual harassment made against Weinstein so you know I think that the the story the the title of our book she said is is sort of you know has has a variety of meanings but I think that one of them is that oftentimes the model for these types of stories and just more broadly these types of allegations in general have been made in a just to sort of he-said she-said vacuum in which both sides can kind of point fingers and the person who's been accused can say there were no witnesses and this person's lying and we really wanted to make sure that we were creating stories in which there was so much evidence that we weren't asking women to go on a limb on a limb like that and put them in that position yeah if we go to the hand in the second row in the red top thank you so much for coming here today I have a question regarding the journalism profession itself I think as women journalists we do kind of have this competition with some of it some of our male colleagues and the meet you I mean the entire story itself did kind of create this massive success with the global movement highlighting sexual activity like sexual assaults against women I mean I want to hear your side like your opinion like how was it for you I mean did you receive any sort of backlash from male journalists you know as the story went out or any questions you know any doubts or any form of intimidation from powerful people in the media no the opposite we've received a lot of support and maybe there too but I think that your question maybe raises two interesting points one is that the team that worked on this story at the times is incredibly diverse our boss Dean Beck a is the first African American editor of the New York Times our editor Rebecca Corbett is a groundbreaking figure in journalism she was actually the the journalist who took the New York Times masthead to 5050 female when she was appointed to the masthead which for our organization was it was a historic switch to officially have the leadership of the newspaper be half female so I think that even though we didn't sit around and have you know conversations about newsroom diversity as we were dealing with Harvey Weinstein but I think it's a real argument for a newsroom diversity and kind of no accident in the end that this is the team that did this the second thing that happened not only with me - not only with our story is that so many of these big me - investigations involved men who served as narrators and storytellers for the culture Roger Ailes Bill O'Reilly Harvey Weinstein there's a radio host named Garrison Keillor who used to be very popular in the United States Mark Halperin the male political journalist les Moonves who determined so much of TV programming in the United States these are the people Matt Lauer who was a big famous NBC host and these were the people who told the story of who we were they were the narrators they were the ones who always held the microphone who were always in charge of what story got told and so there was I think when the allegations accumulated against those men there was just this sense of recognition like wait a second this is the way the storytellers in our culture have actually been behaving and what does that say about the way these stories have been told and have been shaped and I think that since that's happened there has been a little bit of a changing of the guard if you look at Charlie Rose's old show who's it hosted by Christiane Amanpour I think that is a really fantastic note to end on and that's all we have time for Megan Jodie arena thank you so much for joining us here today and everyone please join me in thanking [Applause] you

Channel: OxfordUnion

Views: 14,171

Keywords: Oxford, Union, Oxford Union, Oxford Union Society, debate, debating, The Oxford Union, Oxford University

Id: bundrl-l6tw

Length: 52min 5sec (3125 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 24 2019