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Saying It All
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safety and protection and fairness. So, they were a mo-
tivating factor in this work, for sure.
How did this story weigh on you emotionally? JK:
Very early on, we began to understand what a serious
situation this was and how much cover-up there had
been over the years. We felt enormous pressure to get
the story and to get it right. We thought about what it
would mean to have heard these stories privately and
not be able to publish them and what it would be like
having to live the rest of our lives watching Harvey
Weinstein at the Oscars, knowing that we had failed to
bring this information to light. We felt responsibility
and had a certain fear of failure.
When you broke the Weinstein story in October
2017, it really opened the floodgates and sparked all
the #MeToo conversations. Could you have antici-
pated this movement? JK: Well, there are many, many
authors—ranging from Tarana Burke, the founder of
the #MeToo movement, to people like Anita Hill—who
have been doing this work for years. We also want to
say that so many other journalists contributed to this
body of work. Nobody could have anticipated this kind
of reaction. Part of the reason we wrote She Said is that
we really wanted to probe deeper into, Why did this
unleash the floodgates? And, also, How can we learn
more? This book gave us an extra year of reporting on
Weinstein, so we were able to explore questions like,
How can a company become this complicit in abuse,
and, W hat does that mean for the rest of us in our ev-
eryday workplace?
It has been reported that Weinstein hired an Israeli
spy firm to try to kill your story. Did you ever feel
afraid or paranoid during the reporting process? MT:
W hat was surprising to us was how in-depth that kind
of machine was [willing to go] to silence the victims
and block our investigation. Those were some of the
new things that we were able to piece together in this
book. I don’t think there was a time when we were
ever scared of Weinstein. We were much more scared
of failing than we were of him coming after us as indi-
viduals. We are investigative reporters; that ’s our job.
We wake up every day to square off against the power-
ful and hold them to account. JK: One of the first
women to go on the record about Weinstein was Laura
Madden, a former Weinstein assistant. By 2017 she
was a stay-at-home mom in Wales. She had just sur-
vived breast cancer, and she needed another mastec-
tomy and reconstructive surgery. To our horror, the
publication of the story was basically going to coincide
with that. So we were thinking about people like her
much more than we were thinking about ourselves.
Your book has an unexpected villain: Lisa Bloom. She
has a history as an advocate for sexual-harassment
victims, but based on your reporting, you portray her
as a real snake in the grass. MT: You’re absolutely
right. The Harvey Weinstein story is full of surprising
heroes and villains. And Lisa Bloom is one of the most
prominent feminist attorneys in the country, as is her
mother, of course, Gloria Allred, who also appears in
the book. They have publicly presented themselves as
champions of women. And in 2016 Lisa Bloom crossed
over to the other side to work for Weinstein. Previ-
ously she has said that she was only aware of Weinstein
making inappropriate comments towards women and
that she went to work for him in order to help him apol-
ogize. For our book we obtained confidential records
that show she had much deeper knowledge of the seri-
ous allegations against him and that she played a much
darker role. She was basically going to use all the
knowledge she had gained from working with victims
and deploy it against them. It ’s just one of the more
jaw-dropping revelations.
In terms of surprising heroes, you got Weinstein’s
brother, Bob, on the record. MT: It took a long time,
but finally, after about a year of hanging up on us, Bob
agreed to interviews and really opened up. Yes, he was
aware of allegations of sexual harassment and sexual
assault against Weinstein going back to the early ’90s,
and in some cases he provided the money that wasused to silence the women that came forward. But
Bob claimed that he believed Harvey when he said
that he was engaged in extramarital philandering and
nothing more. And there was also this unique ratio-
nale that Bob brought to this: He convinced himself
that Harvey suffered from sex addiction, which was a
perspective that was clouded by Bob’s own battles
with substance abuse, which had also not been
known. In this book we reproduce this letter that Bob
wrote to Harvey in 2015, basically this very long, inti-
mate letter in which he’s pleading with him to get
treatment for his “misbehavior.” We reproduced it
word for word in the book because we wanted readers
to see it for themselves. JK: We tried to include a lot of
primary material in the book. We’ve got our first
notes from our interviews with movie stars. We’ve got
that Bob Weinstein letter and a lot of other internal
documents. We included even some of the correspon-
dence between Christine Blasey Ford [who testified
in September 2018 that in 1982 Brett Kavanaugh, now
a U.S. Supreme Court justice, sexually assaulted her, a
claim he vehemently denied] and her own attorneys,
in part because every thing about #MeToo has be-
come so controversial that we want the readers to
look at this original material.
You mention in the book that since you published
your story, some less well-reported #MeToo stories
have come out, like the Aziz Ansari piece on Babe
.net, which have thrown doubt on the entire move-
ment. Is that frustrating? JK: We think there are basi-
cally three questions about #MeToo that remain
very unresolved. Number 1 is, W hat kind of behaviors
are under scrutiny? Is this only about serious sexual
assault, or is it also about bad dates? Number 2 is,
How do we determine what information is correct?
And number 3 is, W hat should the accountability and
the punishment be for all of this stuff? There’s enor-
mous disagreement about all three of those ques-
tions. It ’s just something that we’re still puzzling
together as a society.
In January you brought many of the women you inter-
viewed to Gwyneth Paltrow’s home to meet each
other. You wrote that it wasn’t for group therapy, that
it was for journalistic purposes. Why did you want to
interview them together? MT: This fall will mark the
third anniversary of the Access Hollywood t ape [of
Donald Trump], the second anniversary of the Wein-
stein story, and the first anniversary of Christine Bla-
sey Ford testifying about Kavanaugh. We thought that
it would be a remarkable thing to bring together some
of the women who were central to all three of those
major #MeToo stories and put them in one room. [Be-
sides Ford, the group included Weinstein accusers
Ashley Judd and former Miramax employee Rowena
Chiu, Trump accuser Rachel Crooks, and former Mc-
Donald’s worker Kim Lawson, who lodged a sexual-
harassment complaint against the fast-food giant.] All
of these women have helped spur change, and so the
question was, W hat have the public implications been
for them stepping forward? W hat was the impact on
their personal lives? It ended up serving as a kind of
marker for how far we’ve come. In the case of Chris-
tine, she was still grappling with some of the mean
things that were being said about her online, and so
people like Gw yneth Paltrow and Ashley Judd were
able to swoop in and say, “Stay away. Don’t read what ’s
written about you on the Internet.”
It must have been so strange to see everyone sitting
together in Gwyneth Paltrow’s living room. JK: We
did not know what was going to happen. A really mem-
orable moment for me was when Christine, who had
recently given that testimony and had basically been
living in hiding in the months after the testimony, was
quizzing Rachel, who had come forward about Trump
three years before. It was almost like Rachel held the
road map to her experience. Christine was saying
things like, “OK, how long is it before you can just go to
a restaurant and sit down at a table without feeling
like other people are saying, ‘Is that really you?’ at
the next table?” There was a commonality about how
hard it is to come forward about these stories.Do you think of the #MeToo movement as ongoing or
as a cultural moment with a beginning and an end?
MT: Within those first two months of returning to the
paper after book leave, we were reporting on E. Jean
Carroll and her rape allegation against Trump [which
he denied]. We were pulled into the Jeffrey Epstein
story. And right after the Weinstein story our phones
started ringing off the hook. Our email in-boxes
swelled with women coming to us with their own sto-
ries. In some cases they ’re stories of powerful men. In
some cases they ’re stories of the boss at an office in the
middle of Ohio. I don’t think those stories are going to
stop. JK: I know #MeToo has created a lot of dilemmas
and controversies, but you can’t solve a problem that
you can’t see. We’re still just beginning to grasp the
full depth of it all. We can’t predict what we’ll be cover-
ing a week or a month from now, but we are still inves-
tigating and reporting every single day.Kantor and Twohey’s book, She Said: Breaking the
Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a
Movement, published by Penguin Press, is out now.The MVP
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 157
LB: Of the Democratic field, who do you really enjoy in-
terviewing? And who’s a challenge? RM: It just so hap-
pened that my exit interview with [Washington
governor] Jay Inslee was a ton of fun. Then there’s
[New Jersey senator] Cory Booker, who I’ve known
forever, since college. We’ve spent Thanksgiving to-
gether. But that does not translate into me having
super-loose interviews with him, which is interesting.
We’re not best friends. I’ve probably interviewed
[Minnesota senator] Amy Klobuchar more than any of
the other candidates. It ’s always a little unpredictable.
I’m also not that reliable of an interviewer. [laughs]
I’m never quite sure what I’m going to say. I always
write questions, but they don’t always come out.
LB: W hen you’re getting palpably bullshitted with po-
litical messaging, how do you manage your frustra-
tion? RM: I’m not a natural interrupter. [MSNBC host]
Chris Matthews is famous as an interrupting inter-
viewer, and it ’s not because he’s rude. It ’s that he has
such a feel for the back and forth of conversation that
he knows when you’re not going to answer the ques-
tion or when it ’s going to be boring. He can see it com-
ing, and before you start to turn that steering wheel, he
has redirected the car. That ’s a talent I so wish I had.
I’d be a better interviewer if I were more comfortable
interjecting. I try to work around my own weaknesses.
But I also try to insist on candidates being here in per-
son, because then I can do a magic juju thing.
LB: Is there someone who’s eluded you? RM: President
Barack Obama. I interviewed him as a candidate, but
the entire eight years that he was president, he never
did another interview with me.
LB: Any theory as to why? RM: I don’t know. There
were a bunch of times we thought it was going to hap-
pen. We did get close toward the end of his presidency,
but the interview was canceled. I couldn’t travel be-
cause of a hurricane. Can’t blame him for that.
LB: Have you been in a room with Trump in the past?
RM: I’ve told this story before, but I tried to interview
him when he was a candidate. [Trump’s then–cam-
paign manager] Kellyanne Conway kept saying, “I’m
going to get him for you.” And I was like, “I’m totally
ready. I’ll go any where. I’ll do any thing.” Eventually,
the campaign came through and said, “Mr. Trump is
willing to have a phone conversation with you, but he
wants to do that before any interview. Every thing that
happens in this conversation, and the existence of the
conversation itself, is off the record.” OK, fine. So I’m
on the phone with him lobbying for the interview—
this is as he’s wrapping up the nomination—and we’re
talking about what the primary ’s been like and the nu-
ances of the polling. He says he likes how I show the
polling—at that point, I’d have a bar graph showing the
polling result, and I’d put a little headshot of the candi-
date on top. He said he liked the way his head looked on