Jodi Kantor: We say in the beginning of the book, “Thank you
for witnessing what we witnessed, and hearing what we heard.”
We wanted to bring readers to ground zero and say, go through
this process of examining this with us so you can have your
own conversations.
JOURNALISM’S POWERAND ITS LIMITSJK: At a time when the president of the United States talks about
journalists as enemies of the state, at a time when we’ve all been
guring out what the new nancial model is for journalism, at
a time when it feels like the truth is fracturing, I think Megan’s
and my response is to show our work. We are totally transpar-
ent about what goes into this, and this is an example of facts
driving social change. The reaction to this story was so outsize,
and #MeToo has become both an example and a test of social
change in our time. We feel that we lived the experience of
careful information actually moving the needle and having an
impact on people’s lives.
Since October of 2017 we’ve been flooded with messages
from women who want to tell us their stories. And there have
been times when we’ve felt overwhelmed, because there’s no
way that any publication, even a publication with the resources
of the Times, could ever get to every one of the stories. So many
systems have failed, and of course we want journalism to step
in and do what it can. But journalism can’t compensate for an
entire system that’s broken.
THE FUTURE OF A MOVEMENTJK: Like everyone else, we have been staggered by the size and
durability of this movement. It doesn’t feel like a news story any-
more—it feels like a way of being. I think we all experienced it
this summer with the Jerey Epstein story, which brings up a lot
of the same questions as the Weinstein story: How could this
have gone unaddressed or inadequately addressed for so long?
How could so many people have been complicit? What is behind
this seemingly prestigious world that is clearly masking some-
thing much darker? Epstein, like Weinstein, is a sprawling story
that’s shocking in the sheer number of allegations, the number
of women who appear to have been hurt. We feel that you can’t
solve a problem you can’t see, and all of us collectively are still in
the process of seeing that problem clearly for the rst time. And
clearly we all have a lot of work to do on that.
We also understand that #MeToo has become controversial.
Basically, there are three questions about #MeToo issues that
are totally unresolved. One: What kind of behaviors are under
scrutiny? Are we talking about Aziz Ansari? Yes or no? Two: How
are we evaluating this information? What are the tools we’re
using to gure out what actually happened? And three: What’s
the punishment or accountability that we’re going to use? Each
of those three questions is a matter of huge debate.
HOW MUCH HAS #METOO CHANGED, REALLY?MT: There’s no question that some of the secrecy around sexual
harassment and sexual assault has been shattered. For so long, as
reporters looking to uncover these types of stories, we were the
ones having people slam the door in our face. To have this rever-
sal—in which tips and victims are now coming to us—is massively
signicant. At the same time, there hasn’t been the type of system-
ic reform that both the accusers and the accused are looking for.
For instance, secret settlements with restrictive clauses helped
conceal the conduct of Harvey Weinstein for years. Those types
of settlements are still being signed every single day.
JK: It’s confounding because everything’s changed and nothing’s
changed. On the one hand, we’ve been through a seismic social
shift and a change in attitude, and things that were accepted, tol-
erated, dismissed a couple of years ago are now taken much more
seriously. I do think that, on a corporate level, people are aware
that the reputational risk of protecting a predator is much greater
than the reputational risk of doing something about it. The cal-
culus has changed. On the other hand, our basic systems for pre-
venting and dealing with these problems have barely changed at
all. Nothing has happened that says to us, legally and structurally,
the United States is taking a new approach to this problem.
I do think there’s a private reckoning that’s taken place along-
side the public one, and in some ways the private one has been
much more powerful. The public conversation about #MeToo
has been loud and fractious and controversial. But in private
conversations, whether they’re in oces or in bars or among
old friends, I think what you hear is a much more searching and
delicate reevaluation of old behavior. You hear people allowing
themselves to be vulnerable and to question things that hap-
pened years ago that they accepted that no longer seem right.
Sometimes I think that, as reporters, we can never capture the
true power of what’s happened because one function of the
news reporting and the public conversation is to drive these real-
ly signicant private ones that most of us will never hear about.
MT: We can’t necessarily predict how systemic change will
work, and how these reforms will come about and what they’ll
look like, but we can continue to do our jobs every day as report-
ers, which is to unearth and publish the facts.ILLUSTRATION BY YUKO SHIMIZU VANITY FAIR 85