The pressure was “nail the story”
Jodi Kantor, one of the Times reporters who broke the Harvey Weinstein story, was on Maddow last night. She also talked to Isaac Chotiner at Slate.
Isaac Chotiner: Tell me a little bit about how you got on this story. When did you start and what was the impetus?
Jodi Kantor: The Times has made a real commitment to sexual harassment reporting this year. My colleagues Emily Steel and Michael Schmidt did the Bill O’Reilly story and Katie Benner had done some really startling reporting on women in Silicon Valley. So basically we said as investigative journalists we can look at the whole pattern here, and not just focus on one individual woman’s experience. Let’s see if there is a pattern of allegations over time.
And Harvey Weinstein fit the bill. They spent about four months on the story.
If you look at the two big stories we have done so far, which were the initial investigation that we published last Thursday, and then the story that we published [Tuesday] about the casting couch with these well-known actresses going on the record, they have a variety of forms of evidence. They do have on-the-record accounts from women, and those are really important, but they also have settlement information. There is the financial trail of the money that was paid out over the years. And then also there are internal company documents, which was a really important element of the first story, because we were able to show that these were live issues at the Weinstein Company. There is a woman named Lauren O’Connor who was a junior executive and in 2015 she wrote a stem-winder of a memo documenting sexual harassment allegations at the company. These were really upsetting incidents. She had a colleague who was forced, she says, to give Harvey Weinstein a massage in his hotel room when he was naked. The memorable line from that memo is, “The balance of power is me: 0, Harvey Weinstein: 10.”
It was good to have that kind of evidence because it took some of the pressure off the women.
And I say that with very mixed feelings as a reporter. Because on the one hand, of course I believe in women coming forward. That is in many ways what this entire project has been about. But on the other hand, there is something really unfair in sexual harassment reporting. In the course of reporting the story, some of the alleged victims would say to me, “How come it’s my job to address this? I was the victim. I don’t necessarily want to go public. I didn’t do anything wrong. Why do I have to do this?”
That’s one reason it’s so infuriating to see people demanding why the women didn’t come forward immediately. They’re not the ones who did something wrong here.
So why did some talk to the Times?
I will tell you what they said because I think their reasons are more important than mine. Some of them were really heartened by the fact that the Times had such a strong recent record of sexual harassment reporting—that the O’Reilly story had worked and the Silicon Valley story had worked, and in all of those cases the women were believed and there was a lot of impact and a lot of accountability. And that made them feel, I hope, like we had the playbook and we had the experience to handle these stories right. Another reason they gave was, yeah, they did feel that the culture had changed somewhat, and the days of women being slimed for allegations, they hoped, at least, were over.
To be honest I think some of it is that Weinstein was a lot less powerful in Hollywood than he was years before. So many, many people were still afraid of him and I don’t want to understate that. But there was more of a feeling that he was at the end of his career.
And then I have to tell you one more thing if I am being honest: A couple of sources said they spoke to us because we are women reporters with a long history of reporting on women. There were sources who had never spoken to any other journalist who said things like, “Every other journalist who has approached me is a man and I want to speak to a woman about this.”
It was all so systematic.
Megan Twohey and I had a version of one of those journalistic “aha” moments where you have been putting all these puzzle pieces together and then you begin to grasp that there is a larger mechanism that you are looking at. What we became convinced of, and then very committed to documenting, was that this wasn’t a case of a producer hitting on some women at a bar, right? This was much more organized than that. What I think we have now been able to prove, both through interviews with actresses, but also the assistants and the executives, is that there was a lot of facilitation here. Weinstein’s MO, as far as we understand the allegations, is that he lured women to private places, usually hotel rooms, with the promise of work. He would say, “I want to discuss a script with you,” or “I want to discuss your Oscar campaign for this movie,” which for an actress is like—who isn’t going to go to the hotel room to have that conversation? Those meetings were set up like work meetings. If you listened to Gwyneth Paltrow’s story, she says of course I went to the hotel suite because the meeting was set up on a fax from CAA. It was my agent telling me to show up at that suite, so it really did seem like a normal work thing.
And then once he had the women alone, that is when they say the tables were turned and they realized the work was just a pretext and they felt very lured and manipulated, and they were really there for him to make advances on. And all of that demanded support and facilitation. There were logistics with the hotels, assistants who set it up, there were travel agents, there were people who arranged the meetings.
Not just a casual grab.
It ends on a high note.
Can you say, when you were reporting the story, was there any pressure brought to bear on the Times that was then communicated to you by any people at the Times?
Yeah, I will tell you what the pressure from the Times was. The pressure was “nail the story.” The pressure was Dean Baquet saying, “Deliver the goods. Go get it.” The pressure was seeing the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, in the cafeteria and knowing that he was protecting us, and knowing the institution was standing by us. So Megan Twohey and I felt enormous pressure to deliver the best, strongest story we could. And it was so meaningful when we were talking to the alleged victims to say, “The New York Times is so committed to this. This institution is willing to lose advertising and this institution is willing to stand up to this guy who can be a very intimidating figure.” Anyway, I should leave it there, but there was a tremendous amount of pressure, but the pressure was to get the story, not to abandon the story.
Activists flew this banner over the Hollywood sign today. pic.twitter.com/CXrAl3FlX6
— jodikantor (@jodikantor) October 10, 2017
The moment just before we hit "publish" on the Harvey Weinstein investigation. Note the button on the left. pic.twitter.com/Lr83QlBfNi
— jodikantor (@jodikantor) October 9, 2017
This nails one of the things I’ve often felt. When a woman is harassed, she is re-victimized by the vultures picking over the story, trying to find any hole, calling her names, questioning her innocence, etc. I realize this sort of thing happens with every crime, the victim is questioned, but there is something a lot different about having your wallet stolen and being a victim of a sexual predator. Plus, people tend to believe people who said they had their wallet stolen, and don’t usually blame them for the theft.
@inklast
Yes. There was a rape earlier this year in a nearby town. The trial is going on at the moment.
The man was highly intoxicated, had been watching porn on his phone before approaching the woman and punching her to the ground. He then dragged her down a river bank out of sight then appeared to change his mind and walked off. Then he changed his mind again, ran back and raped her before casually walking away, stopping to chat to friends on the way. Now, there’s a hell of a lot for the papers to talk about there, right?
What are the local newspaper reports full of? The fact that the woman had been “drinking until closing time” and how she – foolishly, they imply – decided to walk home by herself. You can tell they’re just dying to describe what she was wearing but presumably that hasn’t come up in court. Which is a miracle in itself.
The rapist’s account of the story (he maintains his innocence) doesn’t exactly cast him in a glowing light either. Remember, this is the story he is using to gain the sympathy of the court:
He says he saw the woman walking along the river and was “curious to get to know her” in his words. He followed her for a while and started talking to her. She smiled at him at first then started telling him to go away and leave her alone. He was so horrified by her response that he “put his hand to her face” and she fell over. Curiously, her trousers happened to fall down at the same time and as he bent over to help her, that must have been when her DNA ended up on his underwear. Presumably his trousers just happened to fall down at the same time.
The problem is that some people will be thinking “oh well that’s perfectly all right then.” Perhaps not the parts about trousers, but some people will think his story of harassing a woman on a riverbank late at night is just fine.
So, the victims who report ‘prematurely’ are punished for not fitting into a prefabricated story-line?
And the screw ups by Rolling Stone can be seen as the generation of the expected story leading to carelessness.
This isn’t about Hollywood. Its about money, power, status, commodification, patriarchal rationalizations. Remember Jimmy Savile? Once a coherent ‘story’ came together, the lid was off the whole tribe of old-boy rapists. Not that many have been called to justice.
The abuse of women in Hollywood in particular has been going on for a long, long time; what horrifies me even now is that, when I was young, the public attitude to the rapes and assaults of the ‘casting couch’ (oh, yes, it was a well-known phenomenon from the beginning of moving pictures; the attitude was entrenched decades before I was born) was based on the widespread assumption that the exact opposite was happening; i.e. that poor, reluctant producers were being seduced by wicked women into giving them a part. Not the truth; that powerful men were threatening actresses with never working again if they didn’t comply with demands of a sexual nature. Everyone knows that Adam is an upright and honest man, but utterly powerless, and any bad behaviour is always instigated by Eve.
@ latsot
That is horrific; not just the events, but the attitude of the rapist. As if he is utterly convinced in his own mind that physically punishing women for not being compliant is so completely normal that everyone will agree that he behaved appropriately.
Tigger:
George Clooney seems to have said something along those lines in response to the current news. He says he was aware that women had sex with Weinstein for parts (note the ordering there) but that he, Clooney, didn’t know that anything inappropriate had happened. Nothing fucking inappropriate? Even if actors and actresses were throwing themselves at Weinstein for parts without his initiating anything (which we know is not true), it would still be horribly inappropriate for a gagillion reasons. And yet nobody seems to be criticising Clooney for this remark. It’s the same thing we’ve all spoken about right here: can we really consider even that fictional account as an environment in which consent is possible? No. We obviously fucking can not.
That’s what leaps out of the story at me, yes. But we all know others will see it differently.
The jury is out as I type and the upside is that there’s virtually no chance they are going to take his story seriously. He’s absolutely bang to rights and there were witnesses.
Some additional details about the rapist: when he was arrested he started screaming that he was Saddam Hussain, for some reason and that Britain is a “bitch country”. Then he refused to speak to a female police officer because “in my country we talk to men”. He lives here in England as far as I can tell. Maybe he’s right.
From the beginning, yes. And celebrated by Hollywood in many ways. My husband and I were watching a picture not long ago starring the Ritz Brothers and, I think, W.C. Fields, so that can tell you it was old. The whole ‘casting couch’ trope was part of the film, and the young girls were, in fact, throwing themselves at the producer, and were delighted with the situation (even though you never see any of them actually get jobs). I was red with fury the whole time, which sort of spoils a movie right there.
Then there was one of the Man With No Name movies which tops my list of least favorite movies, mostly because Eastwood rapes a woman, and she becomes his biggest fan because of it. A strong, independent woman is “tamed” by rape, and becomes a properly submissive girlfriend.
iknklast: If you ask any group of forty-something dudebros in the geek/tech sphere what movies they liked best in their teens and early 20s, there’s a fairly recurrent list: Wargames, Real Genius, Weird Science and Revenge of the Nerds.
It’s that last one that explains so much of modern geek culture’s attitude towards women. If you ask the aforementioned dudebros what they liked/remember about the movie, they’ll talk about how the movie ’empowered’ geeks, and maybe mention the big competition, particularly the musical number.
What they won’t mention (most of the time), is that every horrific element of modern internet culture is in that film (which came out decades before the ‘Web’ became a real thing in people’s lives–this was all the analog equivalent)–stalking, voyeurism, victim-blaming, revenge porn, all culminating with a scene where the hero of the film rapes a woman (through deception, by posing as her actual boyfriend) and is magically so good at sex that she decides to switch sides. And if you bring this all up, you’ll get one of two responses–either an embarrassed, “well, that was a different time” (because the 80s are pretty much just as irrelevant as the Victorian era, right?) or a hostile, “you’re just an SJW with no sense of humor who wants to censor everything” (it’s weird how any criticism of media is derided as censorship, bu threatening bodily harm to women* who talk about these things is just exercising free speech. Never an actual, “Good lord, I had forgotten about all that and had never put it into context and that was really horrible.”
*: To be clear, to those who don’t know me–I’m a male, and so I never, ever get threatened while speaking about these things online. I get angry accusations of white knighting/political correctness/virtue signaling, of course, but never actual threats.