Two of Harvey Weinstein's Former Assistants and the New York Times Reporters Who Broke The Story

good evening everybody thank you all so much for coming my name is Hana K and I'm the executive producer at intelligent squared we're absolutely delighted and honored to have these extraordinary women on our stage tonight thank you all very much for coming the kickoff for this event is this book she said which is written by the two New York Times reporters at Jody Lee Kent oh sorry yeah and Megan Chui it's a really gripping page-turning read about the painstaking work that they put into uncovering the evidence until they were ready to publish the Harvey Weinstein story two years ago in the New York Times and also about the courage of some of the sources who were brave enough to speak up and we are delighted to have three of them here with us tonight now this event is the first in our new series which were calling intelligent times it's a collaboration between the New York Times and intelligence squared and we're bringing together some of the most prominent writers and thinkers from the New York Times to come and take part in our events here in London and now please would you give a very warm welcome [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] please please will you give a very warm welcome to our chair BBC news presenter Carrie Gracie thank you good evening everybody this is a very special event I feel moved I feel privileged to share this evening with these five courageous women I hope you do too three of them have taken great legal and reputational risks to challenge a powerful foe in a system that so often protects the powerful the other two unflinchingly inexorably built a story that was a fortress of investigative reporting one too strong for that powerful foe to pull down and as a result together these five women helped trigger the me to movement I pay tribute to them [Music] so we're going to talk about how they did that and then we'll also ask what has changed in the workplace in the two years since for sexual aggressors and for their victims and we'll talk about whether all the fallout has been for the better so we'll start the conversation up here on the platform and then I'll open it to questions from you let me start by introducing the panel first our two reporters Jody Kanter and Megan T the puller Pulitzer prize-winning investigative team from the New York Times Jodi's long reported on gender power technology and culture she also found time to write a best-selling book on the Obamas mega this work has often focused on the treatment of women and during the 2016 presidential race she reported the stories of many of those who accuse Donald Trump of sexual misconduct from the reporters to the sources Zelda Perkins yeah former assistant to Harvey Weinstein Romina Chu also former assistant to Harvey Weinstein and Laura Madden former production executive at Miramax Films here in London well hear more about their subsequent lives in the course of the discussion but right now I want to move on to the story so let's begin with the background and just before we do that I should say that this is a story which we all know has a past but which also has a future because Harvey Weinstein is expected to face trial early next year with the criminal charges brought against him by the Manhattan district attorney's office and they include predatory sexual assault and rape and I should say that Harvey Weinstein denies all allegations of non-consensual sex so we're talking about allegations now let's start with Jodi and Meghan Jodi you first we know now that there were rumors about Harvey Weinstein not just for years but for decades both within his company and why don't within the film industry why did all of this take so long well Cary first of all thank you so much for joining us tonight thank you intelligence squared Thank You Bloomsbury publishing which brought she said to the UK if you are a New York Times subscriber thank you because you paid for the Harvey Weinstein investigation without even knowing what you were paying for and especially thank you Zelda Rowena and Laura you know the reason we're so thrilled to be in London is that I think what many people don't understand is that this is very much a UK story there's sort of this broad idea of the Harvey Weinstein victim as a famous actress in an evening dress and that's true as far as it goes but it is really because of decisions by these three women and especially the early crucial decisions by Zelda and Laura that we were able to publish this article and so it's incredibly special to be with you here tonight to tell the story so to answer your question it's because people chose to protect Harvey Weinstein instead of protecting the women what we found reporting the story and reporting the book is that it's an x-ray into how power so often works and what we're trying to do in this book is take you behind the scenes to sort of see how that functions and you know frankly it's a kind of invitation into our investigative partnership and what we want to do is because we know that these events have meant so much to so many people we want to invite you along for our first hushed conversations with actresses our first conversations with these three women and the final confrontations with Weinstein in the halls of the New York Times Thank You Jodi now Megan why did you two get involved tell us this genesis of the story for you well earlier in 2017 something remarkable happened that we actually flashed the the headline but our colleagues Emily Steele in Mike Schmidt book broke the story of Bill O'Reilly probably one of the most powerful media figures on the right in the United States and they broke the story of how he and Fox News had basically paid off women who had come forward with allegations of sexual harassment against him now Fox had been aware of that they had actually been involved in the some of the secret settlements that were paid which ultimately told him more than 40 million dollars but it was really when the story was published in The New York Times that something really significant happened advertisers at Fox News were outraged and almost immediately Bill O'Reilly was ousted from his job something that seemed almost unfathomable only months earlier and so then the editors and reporters at the New York Times took that as a significant turning point and sat down and asked what now seems like a quaint question are there other powerful men who have engaged an abuse of women and tried to cover it up so Harvey Weinstein had long been a rumored predator in Hollywood and so he was one of the people that we decided to investigate in 2017 but it's worth noting that we had investigations of alleged sexual harassment in Silicon Valley in the restaurant industry in academia and factories in Chicago and there was no guarantee of what was going to happen but there was just a commitment across the New York Times newsroom to taking the moment to dive into these stories thank you so from the porters to the sources and I'm gonna start with you nor I think actually in one way this all began with you and you know as Jodi paid tribute a moment ago oh no ordeal when you were summoned to your boss's hotel room and during a film shoot in Dublin in 1992 you were in your early 20s you've described how he demanded that you undress before masturbating over you to you over you until you sobbed so much that he got angry how did it feel to be asked by Jodi across a picnic table in Cornwall 25 years later to dredge up that very painful episode I mean it was a long time after the event so you know not of my life had moved on but Jodi handled it with huge sensitivity and she never asked me to give her of her first steps were to say I want to ask you some questions and do you recognize any of this behavior and so it was an easy you know she lured me in rather than expected me to just blurt out what had happened to me she made me feel I was in safe hands so she built up a relationship of trust from the biriba guess I mean I think it's important for the audience here tonight to understand what great courage she showed there and I want to mention that obviously in the book Jodi and Meghan recount how the Harvey Weinstein team insisted they would prove you a liar and this was in the run-up to surgery that you had to undergo it meant you'd have to tell your children what had happened 25 years earlier and with your permission I want a quote from the email you wrote to Joe dear Megan on which they include in the book is that okay thank you I feel I'm speaking out on behalf of women who can't because their livelihoods or marriages may be affected I am the mother said Laura of three daughters and I do not want them to have to accept this kind of bullying behavior in any setting as normal I have been through life changing health issues and know that time is precious and confronting bullies is important my family are all supportive of my decision I am happy to go on record that sounds to me like the voice of someone very composed very determined do you think you'd been waiting for this moment for 25 years well certainly when revelations of other predators started to emerge I did think I mean this has to break there has to be so at that point start I think there was a possibility that it would come out and yes and I started googling his name to see you know were there any stories and yeah so I suppose yeah literally you just want to forget it you want to move away from it you want to live you know change your life move on but the further away I got from the assault the more I started to yeah I suppose a the more I started to hope that he story would come out he would be he would be discovered you know discovered his predation would be exposed really can I turn to you now at your ordeal I'm just going to summarize these so that if you haven't read the book yet which you must do that you have you have a brief understanding of what exactly everybody went through Rowena your ordeal was in 1998 at the Venice Film Festival as I understand it now you were also in your early 20s unlike Laura after it you were asked to sign a very strict non-disclosure agreement which meant you couldn't even talk to your husband or a therapist about what happened you've only started talking about this publicly in recent weeks so when their New York Times in the shape of Jody Megan approached you in 2017 why did you decide against talking taking the opposite decision from the one Laura took I think everybody has a very personal journey about coming forward especially about incidents that happened long ago there might be very traumatic and highly personal I have to say that other women have spoken about how they waited for the knock on the door when I knew that Jody Cantor had turned up in my driveway in California my only reaction with sheer terror and I think that you don't overcome a 20-year secret overnight so I wasn't really able to wake up the next day and be resolved about what I wanted to do in fact to begin with I was pretty certain that I would never speak out I think there are deep personal reasons for not speaking out you've alluded to marriage and livelihoods and certainly I wanted to consider my relationship with my husband and my four children who were very young at the time the youngest child was only six months so I was very immersed in pretty intensive parenting and that can sometimes make you a bit blind to what is going on in the rest of the world but then as time has gone on I started to think more no once I'd begun to square things away with my own personal intimate circle I also began to think more about the cultural and societal pressures when you speak out even if your family is supportive there's a big difference between going on record and being public about a story like this my story has only been public for barely two months and even though I had the privilege of being able to observe friends and colleagues such as Laura and Zelda bravely stepped forward with their stories first it's a very different experience when you come forward yourself and I think the things that you imagine might happen and the things that you imagine the ways in you might you imagine yourself feeling actually bear very little resemblance to the real experience and what I will comment on you know my story's been out for a few weeks in some ways it's still a live experience and I haven't thoroughly processed what it might mean for me but it's interesting that people speak mark very much you're keeping a sufferer suffocating secret and I've spoken about it too in the New York Times keeping a suffocating secret for 20 years and the challenges that bears and that's certainly an incredibly difficult and traumatic experience but you know there are also challenges that come with speaking out your story is not your own anymore it's in the private domain people comments about it people tweet about it people form their own views there may be misperceptions there may be disagreements and in some ways your story grows its own legs like a little child and walks away from you and you find that you're not the protagonist even in your own story once it goes public in the way that you thought you once were very interesting way of putting that yes Zelda you are slightly different because for you the bigger trauma was not dealing with Harvey Weinstein's behavior though you had to put up with some of that but you found ways as you described it to protect yourself but you talk about the biggest trauma being the lawyers afterwards when you reported what had happened the attempted rape of Rowena tell us about that what did happen and why was it so traumatic for you well I think I believed very naively that once we went to the law we would have access to justice and I think it all seems very obvious now but Rowena and I were very young neither of us had ever dealt with lawyers in any form and I didn't know the difference between a criminal lawyer or an employment lawyer or any of those things and I just presumed that when when we couldn't find the course within the come that we would go to the law and we would go to court and Harvey would go to prison I really thought it would be that cynical and the awful revelation and it really was earth-shattering I mean Harvey's behavior was terrifying and disgusting and painful to experience every time you were with him but actually the what you thought were the pillars of your own culture being taken away from you immediately and suddenly realizing that you had no help and we were too well educated middle-class girls who really had a lot of help essentially at our fingertips you would think and we had nothing and were told or certainly it was explained to us that really the only option we had without risking our entire family's reputation lives and finances was to accept some form of settlement agreement for the damages that had occurred in exchange for your silence in the form of a nondisclosure agreement yes it wasn't really described initially as a nondisclosure agreement that's a sort of me that was what it turned out to be I think when we first entered into the negotiations for this agreement we again naively thought that this was our only weapon and this settlement and agreement would stop Harvey's behavior we actually negotiated more clauses that he was meant to uphold then we had to uphold and I believe if he had been made to uphold those clauses we wouldn't be in quite such a terrible position that we're in today yes history might have been different if he had had to apply some rules thank you let's go back to the reporters and I want to talk directly about non-disclosure agreements because they seem to have been a huge problem they come up again and again and again in the book both in relation to the sources and are in relation to your difficult is a reporting the story and so thank you to your reporting we are all now familiar with the way that MBAs are often used to hide patterns of abuse in the workplace but I want to know how you worked it out for yourselves how you mapped it given that the very nature of an NDA is that people can't even acknowledge they exist Megan do you want to go first with this one well sure yeah I mean we quickly realize that that there were multiple women who had been forced into secret settlements with Weinstein there was we came to see her as the patient zero of the Weinstein investigation a young woman who had gone to work for in Weinstein's first company Miramax right out of college in 1990 and pretty much pretty quickly disappeared from the office following an alleged sexual harassment and so when I was able to track this woman down to a home outside New York she and I knocked on the door and she opened it and she said I've been waiting for this knock on my door for 25 years but she was like many of these other women legally prohibited from speaking to us and so we realized that there was actually likely a long paper trail of these financial payoffs that had been made and that while biet they had been used to help hide this alleged misconduct over the years that if we could piece it together it would have actually helped expose it and so over the course of the many months you know this involved Jodi showing up in ruinas driveway it involved Jodi actually meeting with Zelda here in London and it ultimately actually Harvey Weinstein's side of high-priced PR and lawyers ended up ultimately confirming information as well but in the end we were able to show that Weinstein had paid as many as 12 secret settlements from that first one in 1990 all the way up through 2015 and while nobody would disagree that victims of sexual harassment and sexual assault deserve financial recompense this is just one story that story that also shows how they can be used by alleged predators to cover their tracks and go on and allegedly hurt more women and jody in defense of MDA some lawyers say their clients want privacy and that the women involved sign of their own free choice that no one's holding a gun to their head what's your response to that what we've found in our reporting is not really a challenge to the idea that victims want privacy not really a challenge to the idea that they deserve some financial recompense for what happened but instead the critique is that the confidentiality can be so ironclad that first of all it binds the women forever and in such a severe way I mean when Rowena was talking about her reluctance initially to speak to us I think we have to acknowledge you were legally bound from from answering that knock on your doorstep from telling us anything that had happened and then I think the bigger critique the sort of wider one is that not only does do these agreements not help us address the problem of sexual harassment right they clearly haven't helped us rectify this problem in society because they've helped cover it up but they also end up enabling predators in many instances you know for the New York Times this work was never just about Harvey Weinstein it was about Bill O'Reilly it was about stories in the restaurant industry and in Silicon Valley and in sports and even in areas like cheerleading and among female prison guards and you see these NDA's as a common motif across all of these different industries and you know it was a there was a real sense of recognition for us reporting on this because we said there were so many people on our team and even Megan and I had reported on gender for a very long time and so when we under what there was a moment in the investigation when we came to understand wait a second the United States and the United Kingdom essentially have a secret unofficial system for dealing with sexual harassment and abuse and that system is to pay women money so that they cannot speak about their experiences even to the people closest to them for the rest of their lives they cannot warn other women and these agreements often allow the perpetrators to go on and hurt other people thank you Romina ha can you just tell us briefly what impact signing that NDA had on you how did that feel how bound and alone did you feel with that secret I think it has to be said that when you are 24 and you sign an agreement like the one there Zelda and I signed I strongly believed when I walked away from the law offices that that was the end of a very difficult chapter but I was able to draw a line and that I was still young in my industry and that I could go ahead and get another job in the film industry and essentially recover quite quickly and really the reality is very far from that I spent some months looking for another job in the film industry I wasn't you know doors would open for interviews but certainly not for job prospects once you'd left Harvey Weinstein's office so finding a job in the film industry was much harder than I had ever anticipated you know eventually as has been reported I was coerced to return to Miramax and that in itself was another form of being bound really and it felt terribly constrictive but really the career repercussions are only the beginning the emotional repercussions run much much deeper and they're much more difficult to unravel and I think the pressure of not being able to speak to anyone either from a professional or personal point of view I don't think one can underestimate the burden of that and I think you know having kept a 20-year secret and then just having spent two months talking about it more publicly I'm yet to see what the full repercussions are in terms of how to unwind that really emotionally you'll have to ask me again in 20 years we will thank you and Zelda I put that to Jody a moment ago but obviously you will have heard people saying well it's a free choice no one's got a gun to to anyone's head some clients want privacy - did you feel you had a choice we had no choice though there was absolutely no choice and I think in fact Jody said something very pertinent yesterday which is there's a difference between privacy and secrecy and frankly there isn't a place for secrecy around criminal behavior or abusive behavior and I think what Rowena was saying is is that you know these agreements offered as a panacea and the reality is is that signing an agreement isn't the end of it it's actually the beginning of much darker more complex battle and I think nobody really understood that until this story broke and we're still discovering that well again thank you for bringing that to the light because that is very important Laura I want to ask you you weren't required to sign an NDA you there was no settlement in your case but like Rowena you stayed at Maronites while Braden went back to MERIS you stayed at miramax for some time after the incident with Harvey Weinstein now some people are puzzled by that can you explain it to those who are puzzled it I was how do I explain it I think when I walked out of that hotel room having gone through this terrible experience I walked out feeling deep shame deep humiliation and a sense of responsibility for what had happened to me and I couldn't bring myself to tell the full story to anybody but I did need to say what had happened so I rang my parents and I told them a sort of version of what had happened I told the Miramax producer who I was working with what had happened but again it was a more palatable version and I think at that point I was guided by them their advice which was you know first of all the producer got Harvey to apologize and say he would never do it again my parents not knowing the full story thought that if she's working in London he's never going to see him so and I believe that you know this was a job I really wanted and they weren't that many up opportunities but you know it came at a real cost you know you I walked into a job never feeling I feel like he took he you know I did deserve the job but he never I never got to enjoy that feeling of what it was like to be there because I felt I compromised hugely thank you now this is obviously not just a story about the brave women on this platform it is a story about a predator behind the predator is a system which we've heard a bit about from Jody and Megan a system which protects so let's look at that more closely and how it protects when it feels under threat so um Jody tell us how did the Weinstein operation fight back once he and they became aware of the investigation you were running in so many ways for example when Laura and I first got on the phone she had just gotten a phone call from an old loyal assistant of Weinstein who had tried to convince her that they were all one happy family and this assistant had warned Laura she said there are cockroach journalists calling around with questions about what happened in the past so that was a piece of it so that we knew about and there were other parts we knew about right before publication as we got closer Harvey Weinstein staged the sort of massive counter-offensive he had a huge team of high-priced PR people lawyers who came at us with everything they had we were writing under legal threat at one point Harvey Weinstein himself barged into the New York Times uninvited we got a call like 15 minutes beforehand saying that he was coming and we were like he's coming here like do we let him upstairs and what he was holding essentially was a folder of information intended to slime some of the women who were going to be in our story and not only that but he was accompanied by two famous women's rights advocates he was flanked by Lisa bloom a sort of famous American celebrity lawyer a victims rights attorney and also Linda Fair spine who was an incredibly famous sex former sex crimes prosecutor in New York but it turned out that even that was not the extents of the extent of it and there was an entire sort of secret manipulative operation on the way to target not only Megan and I on the times but also sources who might speak to us the in the language of Harvey's papers which Megan later obtained they were called any woman who might speak to us with a story was called an adverse source and basically Weinstein hired black cube an Israeli form consist firm consisting of private X intelligence agents who tried to dupe and manipulate us and potential sources for instance one day in the summer of 2017 I got a phone call I know I got an email from a woman who seemed to be named Diana Philip she told me she is she was a women's rights advocate from here in the UK that she wanted to speak to me for an event it turns out she had she was no such thing she was actually a black cube agent who was trying to dupe and manipulate us and and actually what we also found out later is that Harvey Weinstein had tract out on our story if black cube was able to prevent the publication of our story they would have been paid $300,000 as a reward Wow going back to one aspect of the of the of what you were up against that you just mentioned the number of women high-profile women in acts of what appeared to be great hypocrisy Leeza blue you mentioned famous as longtime advocate on victims rights now in the book the two of you quote an emo she wrote to Harvey Weinstein I feel equipped to help you against the roses of this world that's Rose McGowan she's talking about because I have represented so many of them she went on to suggest ways of discrediting accusers by portraying them as liars I mean it is really really shocking isn't it me I mean I hate I mean I heard everything Jodi said and the question that comes to mind is were you terrified and we're you shocked we were not we were never terrified for ourselves I mean there's investigative journalists we wake up every morning ready to go toe-to-toe with the powerful and wanting to do that but we were at it we certainly were scared for our sources at certain points in our investigation especially when we had to go to Weinstein with everything that we were preparing to publish and naming the people who were going to be on the record in the story that really opened that set and said about a 48-hour period where we really felt like our sources were kind of sitting ducks for any last minute desperate attempts he was gonna make but you know on the question of where we shocked absolutely and you know in the course of writing this book we're able to show some of the surprising figures who helped bring the truth to light you know Irwin wieder for example was one of the he was a longtime accountant in Harvey Weinstein's own company and ultimately became one of our most valuable secret sources slipping us information that helped reveal the truth about the boss but some of these other people who who worked for Weinstein like Lisa bloom I mean our jaws dropped we knew obviously in the course of our investigation when we were doing our reporting in 2017 that she was working with him that she was by his side at the and as he was trying to fight back the story she said that she had she said that she would only cross sides to work with Weinstein because she was under the impression that Aiden made inappropriate comments to women and that she wanted to help him apologize for his behavior in the reporting of this book we were able to obtain confidential records including her billing records an hour at by our accounting of what she really did for him and this this sort of the the email that you quote that basically her job audition memo and what she spelled out all of the underhanded tactics she was going to use to help him undermine his accuser she was basically saying I'm gonna take all of my experience working with victims over the years harness that and use it with you to work against them it is terrifying it's terrifying to think what you were both up against and it's it must be you know quite something daunting for the three of you in retrospect to think about what you were up against some of which it's probably a good job you didn't know I guess at the time but I want to put you a question and I don't know I don't know where they all want to answer it or whether one rather of you wants to answer it on this side because even among the victims and the bravest women were not the biggest names they were people like you Lauren News elder who came forward so early to give your accounts Gwyneth Paltrow did help behind the scenes only Ashley Judd as I understand it went on the record early so do you feel that powerful woman let you down do any of the three of you have a view on that did you feel let down well yes we were let down by our initial reporting which was to the only powerful woman that we had access to who was our direct senior and it's a very complex discussion because I also understand the hoops that she would have jumped through through her life to get to the position that she was in and calculated decision about whether helping us would have a detrimental effect on her career and I think you know women who a lot of women who are in positions of power have had to fight dirty and I hope now that more women in power will feel empowered to help those who are more vulnerable I don't feel that we were let down by the actresses I think again it's an interesting discussion that the invisible women our stories wouldn't have been heard if the visible women hadn't spoken nobody would have really listened as intently as they did if Ashley Judd hadn't gone on the record first and then if when if Paltrow hadn't followed and although that may seem like a shame I don't think it really matters because all that really matters is that this truth comes out and I think the truth coming out is what will empower people further now I mean the lurid you were to add to that well I felt I was felt supported by the powerful woman above me who wasn't particularly powerful and I think her career was affected by standing up for me you know she says she never worked you know she was a self-employed contracted by Miramax and she ended up not ever getting so defected her career in these situations has a cost even for powerful people doing it hmm I'm gonna move on to it because we'll be running short of time for the platform bedroom any minute now we're gonna open the questions to you but just before we do that I just want to run through the very that the how you built the forensic reporting at the end because it's such a torturous document trail Trust building with your sources what did it feel like to be the people right in the middle of that investigation as you try to push it through against all these forces resisting you to get to that point where you could press send Press print yeah I think they've now got the photo of up there of the moment when we finally practice publish on the story so yeah I could I'll tell you one story about that because really it's it's about two weeks worth of action that we recount in detail in the book but there was a point so Laura was really first to go on the record but we really did want an actress to join her because it's half the story there were two strands of women who Harvey Weinstein allegedly menaced and we just had a sinking feeling about not having an actress give a you know an interview about this for the story and so we had been speaking to Gweneth Paltrow all summer we had been speaking to Ashley Judd and I called Ashley and I made the ask with about two days to go until publication and to be honest it felt terrible because our ideal had been to ask a whole group of actresses to hold hands and jump into the pool we had had this kind of fantasy that you know Salma Hayek and Angelina Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow and Ashley Judd all would have done it together to ease the burden and instead I had to call Ashley I reached her at the dentist's office and I said I need to ask you to be the only one and so I emphasized that it was a strong story 25 years of allegations all of the different forms of evidence etc etc and Ashley who has like a real serenity about her did not answer she just took it all in she said I'll think about it I'll call you back and so she went for a run she prayed she's a Christian she just thought about what she wanted to do and 24 hours later after a very difficult interaction with the Weinstein team my phone rang again and it was Ashley and you know those moments in life when you're just braced for rejection I was so sure she was gonna say no and instead I picked up the phone and she said I'm prepared to be a name source in your investigation and you know I I wept and I was embarrassed because the bosses were down the hall and you you don't want to cry in front of the boss but Ashley Judd put her career on the line to go on the record for this investigation what I mean as and I remember fighting struggling to find the words to tell her what that meant to us because you actually don't want to be simpering or a suck-up you know in in these moments and it's still a professional relationship with your source so the sort of best I could muster is I said this means the world to me as a journalist and Megan was down the hall and she she saw me crying and she saw me on the phone and she knew exactly what was happening before I even had a chance to tell her oh such an emotional moment anyway less emotional or emotions of different kind of going to put to you Megan because in these moments there's a kind of tipping point for other people isn't that tipping point for I mean we mentioned a moment ago the accountant inside the company but also for Harvey Weinstein's brother and some of these people who'd been close to Harvey Weinstein is there a moment when there's a kind of this ship is sinking moment when people try to get off and kind of clean up their reputation by going the other way well I mean if you're asking you know one of the things that we did in the course of writing that reporting and writing this book was we we were able to we worked hard to a lot of what we're describing in terms of our interactions with sources and even our interactions with Weinstein happened off the record and we worked really hard in writing this book to bring all of that on to the record so the readers could be there had that front row seat for all of the action as it unfolded but we also have reported into what was happening on inside and it's interesting you know within hours of pushing press pressing publish it pressing publish on our story Harvey Weinstein's company held an emergency board meeting to figure out how to respond and we actually obtained the notes of this emergency board meeting and you can see actually in action as it's unfolding the way that these all met this all-male board of his company is grappling with how they're gonna respond to this crisis that's just emerged in the pages of the New York Times so you have his his his brother Bob Weinstein who submitted actually to a series of interviews for a book who did of who had had knowledge about these allegations going back to the 90s had actually provided the money that was used to silence Romina and Zelda and he's got an interesting story of his own but this was a moment in which he realized once he had read the story that the ship was sinking and he said you're done Harvey there were other board members who were saying let's stick by Weinstein side you know let's you know we can't be held responsible for his behavior and things that he did 20 years ago even though these allegations stretch up through 2015 and some of the stuff had happened on the watch of the board and they knew they were aware of some of these allegations themselves so it was interesting for us to kind of read through these notes and see some of these male board members saying let's actually stick by Harvey Weinstein as this as this story unfolds and then there was Harvey Weinstein himself who had least still had Lisa bloom by his side and he was proclaiming that he was going to he had issued a series he issued a kind of rambling comment to us about how he was going to take time off of his company to get help but he in this in this secret board meeting he he was he wasn't suggesting any that he had really done anything wrong and that he was going to take any steps to hold himself accountable in fact he was claiming that he was proclaiming to the board that there were actually going to be dozens of women's organizations feminists and other women like Lisa bloom who are going to fall in line behind him to support him in in this kind of crisis moment and he actually there was a pretty pretty ironic line that he said as he was promising all the support that he was sure he was going to generate in this in this tough moment he said there will be a movement to support me and he was right about that he was right there but it was not the movement he was anticipating come back to that and just when when when you saw that story I'm just interested in how you felt Zelda go first how did you feel when you saw the story come out October 2017 well not what Jodi was used to hear but I was actually really disappointed because it didn't feel big enough and I think that that was because it was such a huge emotional burden to have shared and at that point because I wasn't on the record and because the New York Times were very judicious and lowered it very carefully they didn't use and they couldn't use a lot of information that I had given so I panicked and I thought this isn't going to get him this isn't gonna get him this is just gonna disappear nobody's gonna care it'll be headlines for two days and it'll be gone little did I know so I can tell you two days later quite differently and Romijn it must be very strange for you because this was all happening you presumably couldn't talk to anyone in your life about what this meant to you no well my husband and I were hiding in the kitchen because he is not you know he had he had wrong conclusions with his encounter with Jodi so I was at least able to talk to him and it's interesting to hear what Zelda said about her reaction to the story coming out because it's all perspective for me it was really a holy crap moment because I don't think I believed that the story would come out they were not the first reporters to track me down and after that initial moment of fear when my husband said to me there's a New York Times reporter standing on our doorstep my next line to him was oh don't worry about her she'll go away and the story will go away because I believed that you know reporters had come and gone over the years of keeping the NDA and I honestly believe that nobody could counterweight Harvey's influence and power I thought it would be impossible to bring him down and so I bargained really without the tenacity and persistence of Megan tui and Jody canter because sure enough the story dick amount and they didn't only come out that sparked a global movement and I couldn't have anticipated anything like that at the moment when Jodie stood on our doorstep now before I throw it to the floor I'm just going to ask everyone here to just give me a very one sentence answer to the hugest question of all which is what has changed for women all over the world in the two years since Nora you go first yeah you can do that you get up to everything everything and nothing [Music] I'm gonna ask you for a second sentence to say which is the everything which is of nothing well it's out in the open people are talking there is still NDA's being signed there are still you know powerful predators preying on no vulnerable people it's just nothing even it's still those problems still exist so the talkies happen at one level and at the other level something else is having them yes but the activities is still the same ruinin I would say that some of us who were silent have found a voice tell them well I think Laura aced it actually everything and nothing but the point is it's the beginning of real change and it's not going to happen in a year it's not gonna happen in two years it's not gonna happen in three but it's certainly going to happen and you too I mean an incredible piece of reporting as pay tribute to by this side of the house and a Pulitzer Prize and now this is this brilliant book but when you look out there at the world around you I mean you mentioned the tech sector the restaurant sector the cheerleaders the everything do you still feel frustrated that there's still so much more to do you Megan well you know we actually in the course of reporting our book we it sort of would have been easy to stop with the moment when we published when we push publish and this story went into the world and that there was no question that there was I mean Jody and I felt the shift within days I mean our emails and phones were flooded with women who are coming forward some of them with stories about wine scene but other women who are coming forward with their totally separate allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assaults and it became kind of a group project across the New York Times and across journalism around the world and obviously there were many women who just took straight to social media and other environments to go public with their own stories and so for Jody and I who had work so hard to try to to try to sort of pry these stories into the light to see them flooding out into the public view was was was remarkable it was like nothing I've ever experienced in the course of you know my 20 years in journalism but you know there also was the we also reported into the year that followed and the me2 movement took off in earnest I think that there's no question that things got increasingly complicated and confusing and so we wanted to and ultimately in in you know in the United States one of the the most controversial she said cases that emerged was when Christine blase Ford testified before a Senate Judiciary Committee about being allegedly sexually assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh and so in the book we actually reported out her the behind the scenes story of her private path to testifying in Washington which turned out to be so much more complicated than either side new some you know millions of people watch that testimony some people walked away thinking that she was the hero of the me2 movement other people thought she was a villain and we realized it was just so much more complicated than either side ever knew showed you just before I put it to the floor glass half full or glass half empty on me too you can't solve a problem you can't see and we're finally beginning to see the problem and that's why we are so glad that Rowena did go on the record for the first time in this book Rowena I feel your contribution is different than the one that Zelda and Laura made but it's so important because by coming forward you're making the point that there are still so many stories we don't know this whole process has been driven by new information and we still have so much more to learn thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] now it's it's your turn and I I know we've only just grazed the surface of the me2 movement in the past two years I know there'll be many questions from all of you it'd be great if you could keep questions fairly brief I'm gonna take two or three at a time so let's go four for two and three first of all hello thank you so much it was just been really amazing to listen to you all my name's Lisa Rose I actually work for Miramax in 1992 together with my sister who's here with me tonight and I did actually speak to the BBC and do an article on the news and it was filmed and it was I just wanted to point out that I've followed a lot of howit's have been going and it's really lovely to hear you say that you think there is going to be change and that this is happening but I also see so much where he's just getting away with such a lot as a powerful man he's already silent still lots of people that the court case was meant to have happened I think twice by now and he keeps batting it away and my question is um I don't really want my daughter to grow up thinking that you can pay to make things sing silent and and I want to know if you think it really is gonna if there really is gonna make a difference or if he's actually going to just make the whole thing quiet because he's managed to do so much so far and on that point I also wanted to see if you can make this sort of thing accessible to people who can't afford to come to these sort of things maybe do these but also go somewhere in the east east of London in charge of five or something so that's really what all I wanted to say so we're just going to take two or three sometimes so the next one was here thank you hi I want to thank you on behalf of so many women who are still gagged my name is Lucille I work on a campaign called pregnant nun screwed which is about women who are being silenced and through the 10c discrimination um I want to know what you think the future of NDA's are thank you and thank you hi my question is broader really because yes me too movement is about women who are being abused in the workplace but surely it is more endemic than that we have a society where in the UK prostitution is illegal for a woman to sell her body but it is perfectly legal for a man to buy it and that is a law that has been made by men and while we allow that to continue that women in terribly impoverished and difficult positions are basically chastised and vilified but the men who use them the men who abuse them that's okay so just so that we could get through lots of questions I'm going to direct the questions to certain is it just on the question about on the point about doing sessions that are free or cheaper this will be free on the podcast and on YouTube so it's very readily accessible to all lissa though your question Jody do you want to take that will we get a conviction here or will something else happen so Lisa I don't think Harvey Weinstein is going to succeed in keeping this quiet but I do think that you're asking exactly the right question in the sense of what ultimate legal accountability will Harvey Weinstein eventually face on the civil side the cases against him have been moving very slowly they're extremely bogged down there have been attempts at a kind of mass settlement not involving an NDA but it hasn't happened yet and part of the problem is that it's not clear what sort of admission of responsibility on his part that will include it's not clear how much money the women will get or how the claims will be evaluated and it's not even clear if Harvey Weinstein will pay anything out of his own pocket because it turns out that you can insure against sexual harassment you can and the insurance companies may pick up a large part of the tab on the criminal and let's talk about that form of legal accountability because that trial is set to start in New York on January 6th Meghan and I can make no predictions about what will happen in this trial both the prosecution and the defense have had problems coming into the trial and also the way to think about it the way to think about it is this there's an ocean of female complaints against Harvey Weinstein right most of those are for sexual harassment which is not a criminal offense it's illegal but you sue somebody for sexual harassment you can't send them to jail so then within that ocean there's a smaller island of rape and assault complaints but a lot of those are outside of New York City or they're not eligible because of the statute of limitations there are also women who do not want to come forward or press charges so the New York criminal trial is essentially going to be based on the stories of two women with other women as witnesses about his alleged pattern of behavior and we really can't tell you what's going to happen in part because one of the women is still a mystery we she's anonymous we don't know everything about her story we and other journalists have not been able to interview her and also as we know these allegations can be very difficult to prove in court I mean it also is worth noting that and the well we can't predict what's gonna happen with the criminal in these civil cases it also is worth noting that Harvey Weinstein was in fact fired from his own company three days after our story ran and this particular individual who had been one of the most powerful if you work with them you know this that he had been one of the most powerful figures in the entertainment industry and it was from that perch of power that he had been able to allegedly prey on dozens of women for decades and so I mean it's worth noting that at the very least that perch of power has been removed from you know has been removed thank you both then the second question was from Lucille was you know what is the future of NDA's and Zelda does a lot of campaigning has done a lot of campaigning on D NDA so can you take that one Zelda yes hi and I'm very aware of the work that you're doing as you'll probably aware Maria Miller and their women equalities committee have been open had to select committee inquiries into the misuse of NDA's unsurprisingly our government is being pretty slow not least because we currently have in government several quite important politicians who are no strangers to their own NDA's however there is movement but I think again as I said earlier it's not going to happen fast but this issues not going to go away and something that is it is I think a very positive and I hope will give you some hope is that the loss XR has actually been taking this very seriously and there is an enormous amount of conversation which I know isn't it's changed but it's the beginning of change and there are many regulatory changes being looked at nobody has published anything of any great worth yet but this will change it also starts by everybody looking a little close more closely at their own businesses and the things that they sign and it sounds like a really small and insignificant step and I hate to drop intelligence squared into this but before we came on stage we had to sign a waiver and within that waiver there was a non-disclosure next door was we so read your contracts really carefully everybody also the human inequalities Commission have just recently published which i think is really important that people read new guidance on this which is very strong there's not legally binding but it's very strong and it's very accessible to the public there are also areas like there's a new charity called women for justice which means that you can get free legal advice on issues like this so it's beginning to happen in small increments and you know I do have hope that they'll be changed I think eventually there should be no place and they will be banned in the in areas of discrimination abuse and yeah and criminal behavior in the workplace thank you quick word from either of you two on NDA's you must have views after all that you've been through at the hands of NDA's sure you know it's interesting in you you had you had actually raised when one of your questions the the the sort of claim that victims do want privacy and you would put forth some of the arguments that have been made in large part by the the high-profile attorneys who have worked on settlements Gloria Allred in the United States is another at Lisa Bloom's mother is another one of the most prominent of feminists attorneys in the country who is often seen on TV talking about the importance of helping to give voice to women and you know helping to do justice on behalf of victims and another thing that we realized in the course of our reporting for this book is that she has also been very deep in the settlement business as she had worked on one of the secret settlements that had silenced one of Harvey Weinstein's victims into that her firm had worked on a secret settlement that had silenced one of Harvey Weinstein's victims in 2000 for her she had also worked on secret settlements that had silenced victims of Larry Nasser and Bill O'Reilly and she had also simultaneously been probably the most vocal person when it comes to she has become one of the most vocal people when it comes to setting the agenda and the public discussion of secret settlements without necessarily pointing out that she makes a 40 percent cut of those secret settlements so I think that first of all just the fact that we're now opening up the discussion of secret settlements to people like Zelda in rowena who have actually been silenced by them is a step in the right direction secondly there have been certain states in the United States certain state legislators six state legislatures that have been actually like California Gloria Allred's home state Rowena's home state that have actually started to pass reforms who have said of course these women deserve financial recompense but these confidentiality clauses are a huge problem in cases of sexual harassment and sexual assault and have worked on ways to limit them saying they actually pose a public danger I want to go to a third the third question from over here Jodi will you take it for us or Megan I I I the the question of sexual harassment and assault being endemic not just in the workplace looking at it wider the fact that women are vulnerable to prosecution for selling sex but those men who buy it from them are not so Joanie a view on that do we need to end that legal inequality I think your question raises a really broad challenge for all of us which is when you look at this body of reporting you have to ask has the law abdicated its responsibility as an arbiter of right and wrong because on so many of these issues including the ones that we spoke about tonight you just see the law weighing in on behalf of the powerful and not the vulnerable and so I think that's the question that threads through our work in so many ways and because it's only been two years it's very hard to see at this point what the over how the law will react to the set of developments you know I identified with what you said about the laws were written by men that is still largely true it's only beginning to change so do verdicts change in the courtroom does the composition of who's a judge and who's not a judge change now that people like Zelda and Rowena are breaking their NDA's do we begin to hear their side of the story and hear a different rationale thank you we're gonna take some more questions and just while the well the patterns are going around I probably should say that it's running a brothel and soliciting just to be very specific about what is a criminal offense in this country in terms of the selling of sex so let's come up we haven't had her over this side so remember one there and then number two and then number four again so one first place so my name is Mabel vano Vanya thank you for everything you're doing for all of us I would like to understand if you break and Deanne could you be brought to court I would like to understand Harvey Weinstein's wife was she a partner in crime or was she victim and I would like to understand are there any men who have been helping you in your investigation and who could potentially have been on the panel working for your case tonight thank you for that and sorry we were going to go for next thank you hi there I guess my question serve stems from the third question over there and as somebody who went to law enforcement in a case and was very scared away by how they handled the situation what system change do you think is needed thank you and no but to you thank you thank you thank you for everything this evening but also for what you all have been doing question I know that Megan has worked hard looking at Donald Trump and what he has been accused of by a number of women in the u.s. I wonder why you think what the differences are and why this has all worked out in a way that we're having this conversation and nothing and everything but with Donald Trump nothing nothing nothing [Applause] [Music] so let's because I know there's so many questions let's and time is time is running short so let's deal with these questions Charlie do you want to take NDA's will you end up in court if you break one Harvey Weinstein's wife and what I think it was I think if I understood the question correctly men and helping and being up here on the platform yes okay so I'm gonna try to be very quickly try to do this very quickly you know I'd like to say that Zelda and Rowena are here tonight in speaking in active violation of this NDA and this settlement and Harvey wine [Music] [Applause] [Music] and Harvey Weinstein through his lawyer has actually threatened legal retaliation against Rowena so there's potential to repay the money for example in civil court so these agreements are no joke we're beginning to see a sample size of women who have broken these NDA's and I think a question for us to report on in the future is did they end up paying the penalties or does it turn out that these are mostly tools of intimidation on Harvey Weinstein's wife what I want to say is that we chose instead to focus on his brother Bob because this was the co-founder of his companies this was somebody who had responsibility over legal employees there's a very searching letter there's from Bob to his brother that he wrote in 2015 that we that we reprint in in full in the book because it's such a dramatic personal piece of writing and it raises so many questions about what happens when there's alleged wrongdoing in your own family and in your own workplace I'd also like to say that Bob Weinstein wrote the personal checks that paid for Zelda and Romina settlement in 1998 and on the last question yeah the man I'd like to talk about is Erwin Reiter I think Megan mentioned him very briefly before it there was a kind of deep throat figure in the Weinstein investigation and he was a man and not only that but he worked at The Weinstein Company he was Harvey Weinstein's corporate accountant of 30 years and for a long time he did nothing for example he knew that Zell he knew you Zelda and he knew that you had left the company under mysterious circumstances and at the time he really did not inquire more however in 2014 it's funny you mentioned the Cosby case Laura because that was also a spur for Irwin in 2014 he was hearing more office chatter about Steen and what and women and he saw the Cosby case playing out and he said what if we have a Cosby problem at this company and for two years he tried to intervene he tried to confront Weinstein he failed and so little did I know when I met him in a dark bar in September 2017 that I was meeting somebody who was really frustrated because he had failed in intervening in the problem and that was his motivation for eventually handing over information to us that helped us publish the story thank you second question was what's what system changes do we need I'm going to put that to every one of you three on this side cells as soon as you're actually actively campaigning for system change if you had a magic wand you were talking about the government being slow to act and confused and distracted as we all know it is say you're in charge what is the one thing that's going to happen tomorrow I would ban NDA's entirely not for their appropriate use but for peace in the way that we're seeing them this you know where they've been weaponized and is it possible you define that in a way that works yes it is it's complex but it's very very possible and it's mostly about changing our cultural view that's actually the first big step thank you Rowena what would you like to see change you're in charge one change tomorrow what will it be system change I think on a grassroots level what is very important or what I'm just beginning to get involved with is kind of support groups of women that are sort of flying under the radar I've become a bit of a spokesperson for the asian-american community in California especially after my op-ed was published a lot of activist groups have come forward where they represent many women maybe from lower income categories lower from households who don't have power who don't have voice who don't have agency and I think that that has been very rarely spoken of in terms of the influence of these groups to bring together collective stories and Jody and Megan were able to the power of having many women speak out about Harvey Weinstein emboldened individuals like zeldron to come up break our NDA and so I think for these women that are very isolated and remain silenced the ability to come to a nonprofit organization and know there are other women out there who will support them who will tell their stories on their behalf may make some change at a grassroots level that is different than larger accompanying not to replace but the larger changes in government and in the law so it's making support groups universally available I think that they would be very effective in reaching women who otherwise can't be reached in any other way that are silenced and isolated in corners Laurel I think I'd agree with you I think yes breaking the silence don't speaking out being assertive trusting your intuition they're just lessons that you teach your your children your daughters your sons so it's in a way that's in the hands of all of us if you are the gut you have you have complete well I know no UK government has very much power but it's safe you are the government you can affect one change tomorrow what will it be from the top down it would probably be NDA's yeah thank you and let's take the the third of our questions our series of questions that we just had the Trump question Megan you heard the question I did yeah well you know our book actually begins with the reporting that I did in 2016 with women who came forward with allegations of sexual misconduct against then candidate Donald Trump and points out that I then went to also I was one of the reporters who helped cover his election so to say that that was a different experience from the Weinstein investigation in terms of outcome is an understatement that was probably one of the most bruising stretches of reporting I've done the women you who were sort of brave enough to go on the record while they did receive some support they also received a lot of attacks by Trump and his supporters who called them liars who that they were pawns of Hillary Clinton in some cases he said you know that the women were too ugly to have been his victims and so he threatened to sue the New York Times he's threatened to sue me when I sought comment from him as part of the due diligence we do in these stories he screamed at me and called me a disgusting human being so it's it's been in actually when we came back from writing this book one of the very first stories I did back on the job was a Jean Carol who was the most recent woman to come forward with an allegation a serious allegation basically of rape against Trump so the fact that I was doing those stories in 2016 and in the summer of 2019 tells you something and I think that Jodie and I have spent a lot of time talking about this why is it that certain stories gain traction and and bring about accountability and others don't and what we found both in the reporting on Trump and the reporting that we did on Christine bazi Ford who came forward in a against you know with an allegation against Brett Kavanaugh is that when these allegations are made in the political realm especially in these extremely politically polarized times that both sides it quickly descends into holy war with both sides taking up arms against each other and the women often forgotten that's a humble thought now have we got time for one more round of just looking at the team down there you know one more round I think of questions so let's go - I didn't realize to be speaking so fast and as a tiny bit of context I know it's very quick and I'm a journalist at my uni journalist and and in our student paper I broke a story on sexual assault our uni and it went national and it was really really hard but the thing that was hardest was making sure that my relationship with the victims was respectful my was breaking the story that was really hard in a way that didn't hurt them too much and some nice question for you is how do you speak to the victims and you know go go to their houses and stand in their driveways whilst respecting and maintaining an idea of how difficult that must be for them and thank you for waiting [Applause] [Music] hi my name is Louie I'm also journalist I guess my question is mainly directed a I'm Jodie and Megan I'm obviously given the scale of the story that you broke and the fact that you know you are at one one of if not the most powerful news organization on the planet you're in a uniquely powerful position to break these kind of stories and bring them to light I wonder if for both of you you feel as though you now have an obligation to continue to perceive these kind of stories and if you feel as though in some ways you're now professionally bound by the impact that this has had or whether you feels that you want to do different things and report on different stories okay thank you and three hi thank you so much for your contributions and perseverance toward this collective story and movement and also journalist I had this I'm not sure how this questions gonna lend but I'm curious how each of you personally made sense of this bewildering pervasive vast bizarre cultural phenomena of transgressors that I mean none of them see the fullness of the humanity of a woman you wouldn't otherwise cross all of those boundaries how how do you how did you personally make sense of this where you yeah that's that's all thank you so the three journalist questions we'll go to the jealous first Jody you do with the question of how do you manage those relationships with sources in a way that is respectful to those sources as they go through all the turbulence that they have to go through you know I think instead of giving you the easy answer which is of course we try to be respectful you know of course we try to be very professional we try to be empathetic in our work forget about all of that for a second because I hope you're taking that as a given I think instead because Rowena's here I want to talk about what for me was one of the most difficult moments of the investigation which is the moment she referred to when I showed up in her driveway in the summer of 2017 but so I flew to California because Rowena hadn't been answering my emails or my phone calls and I drove up to her house and there was a man standing in the driveway and I already knew that he was your husband because I had looked him up on LinkedIn I mean come on that's what we do and I asked him if you were home and he said no that you were out of the country in fact I know now that you were in the UK and I told him I was a journalist and that I wanted to speak to you and he asked me to leave and I said sure but I said I've come all this way from New York and the story I'm working on is so important that's why I've traveled so far so will you just talk to me off the record for five minutes in your driveway and and let me just explain why I'm here and he very graciously said yes and so I started to explain I said we're working on a story about Harvey Weinstein we have cause to believe he may have abused women among them his own employees we believe your wife may be among the victims that she may have a settlement etc etc and you know at first he said things that he said things like you know I don't know what you're talking about or I can't remember exactly what the words but there was a kind of non recognition but that's often what people with settlements say that's almost exactly what a woman who did turn out to have a settlement had said to Meghan just a few weeks earlier but as we kept so I thought you know he's he's giving me the line you're supposed to give when you when you have a settlement but a minute or two later we were still talking about it and I didn't disclose you know a ton of detail and I made it clear that I thought we might be wrong but he turned to me and he gestured behind him to your house which is a very nice house but a you know pretty everyday looking house and he said does it look do I look like a man whose wife got a settlement and you're laughing but my stomach dropped because I realized he really doesn't know Rowena hasn't told him and I've just in the interest of doing my job and in the interest of being transparent and honest about why it showed up in the driveway I may have just told this man something that his own wife has not shared and I felt terrible and I was worried that I had made you know a grave mistake now luckily Rowena and her husband have been incredibly gracious about this we've talked about it a lot since it happened it also helped that her husband it turns out is obsessed with the movie spotlight so so so even if even in the awkwardness of the moment he was like okay I get it this is like spotlight like now now I understand but we've talked about it you know a lot sense and you know the understanding that I have come to is that these settlements had left all three of us in such awkward positions and so you know I think I want to answer your question by saying that you try your absolute hardest and the times gives terrific guidance on this and Megan and I were constantly putting our heads together but I think if we're being honest I think we have to say there are still those really really hard moments but feeling terrible is what separates you a million miles from black cube I do think so you know second question the do you feel locked bound lash to these stories now to shine the big light of the New York Times Megan deal with that one I mean I don't think I think that if Jodie and I even tried to turn away from on everything that's unfolded with the me to movement and all of the stories I mean Jodie and I are still getting flooded with emails and phone calls from women who are who want to share their stories I mean they they keep us up at night I mean this this sense of like oh my goodness that I remember to respond to the woman from two weeks ago I don't think that you we have enough journalists in in newsrooms around the world to keep up with the stories that are start continue to surface so I think that and even just in the the months since we returned from our book leave to the New York Times not only was there the new allegation against Trump within our first week of coming back but there was also the Jeffrey Epstein story that broke that Jody and I got quickly pulled into which had so many echoes of the Harvey Weinstein story it was almost like a ground hogs day where movie we were we were back you know back to some of the same questions in terms of enablement and in terms of complicity and the people who helped cover up the truth rather than bring it to light and that's a story that still to this day has more more questions than answers oh yes to this side of the house could you please deal with the the third question how do you make sense given your own experiences how do you make sense of the fact that some of these sexual predators do not see the full humanity of women and this enables them to do what they do Laura do you make sense of it I think it's impossible to make sense of it in the same way I think it's impossible for men to put themselves in women's shoes I think there's such a lack of understanding on both sides in a way Maryna I think the power dynamics and indeed the power imbalances are almost impossible to bridge in my particular case it was really very egregious you know the most powerful man in Hollywood against someone who recently graduated from university I think it was not possible for us to understand one another and at that you know and that in no way excuses that kind of behavior but as much as I have found what has happened in 20 years ago baffling it I'm still coming to grips I think of the enormity of what the story means you know in a broader sense in terms of dynamics between sexual predators and their victims thank you I don't think it is something you can make sense of and if you can make sense of it then something's wrong but the truth is is that it's still it is still the reality for the majority of women around the world and not just more vulnerable women than us I very recently sat next to her 22 year old girls just left University her first job in the city and she is being treated in exactly the same way and suffering exactly the same things right now and I said to her but this is your moment she said I reported it to HR and they've told me it's it doesn't mean anything and so this is still going on and even though the conversation is loud we we really need to keep pushing forward and there I'm afraid I'm going to have to end the questions from the floor and we're going to have because of this precise point that we've just heard from from this side of the platform I'm going to ask everybody on the platform one last question before we all part and that is what one piece of advice would you give to young women entering the workplace today zel to pick up from the pick up from where you just finished the last sentence what advice do you give a young woman in the workplace today just give me very briefly speak up speak up speak up straightaway Rowena my personal support network has been very important in breaking a very public story and make sure that you've got your ducks lined up in terms of who is going to support you when you go public and Laura what's your vice - any young woman entering the workforce not expecting and hope and hopefully it might not happen to her but what is your advice to every young woman to trust your intuition and to assert yourself and stand out and speak out as thank you and and Jodie and Megan having reported this story and been through all their years of investigative reporting that you've done what do you say to young women you know coming out of university or coming out of school what is the advice you give them about the workplace well I think that I would say that you know the women should never underestimate what both brave and hardworking women can accomplish when they come together a loss what to you I would say seek work with meaning because take it from Megan and I you never know what impact that work can have [Applause] [Music] [Applause] thank you all so much thank you to you all on the platform Jodi Meghan Laura Rowena ed Zelda you have been an amazing amazing team [Music] two intelligent squared thank you to the New York Times thank you and most of all to all of you for coming and for showing your support and for giving voice thank you all safe journey home [Applause]

Channel: Intelligence Squared

Views: 50,161

Rating: 4.5991473 out of 5

Keywords: jodi kantour, megan twohey, intelligent times, NYT, New York Times, carrie gracie, rowena chiu, zelda perkins, laura madden, weinstein, harvey weinstein, metoo, sexual assault, me too, current events, harvey weinstein verdict, sexual abuse story on paper, new york times square live, weinstein verdict

Id: aQGtGTzHrG8

Length: 92min 25sec (5545 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 07 2019