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Decades of allegations of sexual harassment by powerful men in numerous fields, previously kept as open secrets among those in the know, are now spilling out into public view.

Is American society rethinking what it will tolerate or overlooking the scale of the problem?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, executive editor of The Atlantic.

I'm joined by my esteemed co-host, Alex Wagner.

Hello, Alex.

I love when you introduce me as esteemed.

It raises my self-esteem.

You are, in fact, esteemed, Alex.

Good to hear from you, Matt.

Good to hear from you, too.

And in our third and fourth chairs today, I am delighted to say we've got Jodi Cantor and Katie Benner, who report for the New York Times.

Hello, Jodi and Katie.

Hi, great to be with you.

Likewise,

joining us, guys.

It feels like the Times this year has committed itself to a real effort to root out reports of sexually predatory behavior at the tops of many different industries.

Jodi, the dominoes are still falling from this massive months-long investigation into the behavior of Harvey Weinstein that you did with your colleague Megan Tui.

Katie, in covering Silicon Valley, you've chronicled what people say goes on in prominent startups like Uber and SoFi.

I've I've got to shout out several of your colleagues, Emily Steele, Michael Schmidt, Michael Barbaro.

And I should add that some of the personal accounts the Times has published in recent weeks, like those from Lupita Ngungo and Sarah Pauley, have added an incredible dimension to the reporting.

What was behind the decision within the Times to take this subject on so forcefully

I think we realized that as investigative reporters, we're in a unique position to tell these stories.

You know, maybe this is a funny thing to say in the middle of the Me Too explosion we're having.

But if you go back a couple of months ago, what we saw is that

it was really hard for any one woman individually to come forward and tell these stories.

But especially beginning with the Bill O'Reilly story, we began to see that, you know, there are stories that have never been told because of settlements.

There are stories that have never been told because of confidentiality agreements or because women were simply afraid to talk because of their, because of potential career consequences.

And so what we made a commitment to doing is really going back and digging and saying, what are the untold stories of sexual harassment in America?

And, you know, with the Weinstein story, a lot of the emphasis has been on the big actresses that have gone on the record.

I spoke to Angelina Jolie and Ashley Judd and Gwyneth Paltrow, and it's really important.

And I am very grateful to them for speaking up about this.

But a big element of our reporting was really the digging.

You know, when we first started doing this, before we knew that a lot of people were going to come forward, we said we wanted to build the strongest investigative platform we could for these women coming forward.

We wanted to find other forms of evidence.

So we looked at the settlement trail.

We were able to show that Harvey Weinstein had paid at least eight settlements to women for these kinds of allegations over the years.

We were able to get internal Weinstein company records, including this stem winder of a memo that Lauren O'Connor wrote saying that this had been a live issue at the company and that they had never really dealt that well well with it.

We wanted to show that there was something happening beneath the surface that had been quieted, that was secret, but that all of us had to pay attention to.

Jodi, what about doubt?

I mean, at some point along the way, there must have been people that you spoke with.

Maybe people that you worked with that said, is this really a story?

Is this really something that we need to pursue?

Is this really bad behavior on the part of Harvey Weinstein?

Absolutely.

I spent a lot of time in interviews this summer, especially with, I don't want to lump all the former Miramax and Weinstein company executives in one place because they were very varied and a lot of them felt that something was wrong and that they wanted to help us in our reporting.

But there was a kind of former Harvey executive who was totally dismissive, who tried to convince us that this was not worth the New York Times's or anybody else's attention.

They essentially said, oh, Jodi, you know actresses.

They knew what they were getting into.

They wanted to sleep with a powerful producer the casting couch has been around forever this is just the way holiday hollywood works um it was um

they were so

they were really diminishing it was almost like they were trying to tell me that we didn't have a story on our hands or like this wasn't a worthy topic you know sometimes what people will do to you as a reporter is a kind of gaslighting to use the popular term yeah where they make you think like you're the crazy one right

did you feel like the crazy one at any point Not really, because almost as soon as we started looking into Harvey Weinstein,

we started hearing some firsthand accounts

that

they weren't on the record initially, but once you hear these stories from the women themselves, you can't dismiss it.

You just cannot dismiss it.

You can't get it out of your head.

And we went through like a mini version of what's happening now.

You know, the astonishing thing about this moment is that new women are coming forward with allegations about Harvey Weinstein every day.

Megan Tuey and I experienced a more private version of that over the summer where like we were hearing about so many incidents.

Some of them were very hard to document, but

we just kept saying,

what is the size and scope of this thing we're looking at?

Yeah, this is, I mean, this is a question I had for you too, Katie.

These stories, they have this quality of like a damn breaking.

It's like this conversation that's that's been in whispers and shadows is suddenly in public view, and suddenly scads of people are just coming on the record, testifying in public about what they've seen.

And I'm curious whether these stories are making it easier to report on other companies, other industries, other individuals who might be perpetrating sexually predatory behavior.

And particularly, Katie, for you in Silicon Valley, where I get the impression that these accounts are like nearly ubiquitous.

How has your reporting changed as these stories have come out?

That's a great question.

I think one of the reasons why you're getting this sense of a damn breaking is because what we are reporting on is something that is a known secret.

So whether it's venture capitalists hitting on female founders, whether it's executives at companies abusing their presence of power,

bullying through sexual assault and violence, This is stuff that's happening that everybody has known about.

And it's the same in Silicon Valley.

It was the same at Fox.

So in some ways, where we are revealing something that is known, which is a very interesting position to be in as a reporter, because it's not,

there's definitely discovery and you're discovering new things, but you are also trying to convince people to talk about things.

that have been kept secret for a long time.

It's not that they haven't been known.

So that is a very particular position to be in.

Now that people have come on the record, that absolutely changes the way that these stories are reported because the taboo around breaking the dam is done.

So certainly there are people who are still hesitating to come forward.

I'm not saying that it's easy for anybody.

It's still an extraordinarily personal decision.

But

that changed the quality of what it meant to come forward and sort of the way that people have been treated since coming forward, certainly.

I wonder how much you think, I mean, we talk about individuals acting in these scenarios, whether it's Silicon Valley CEOs or movie producers.

But the common thread that connects Silicon Valley and Hollywood is that you have an industry where, by and large, most of the power is concentrated at the top in the hands of men.

There is not diversity of race or ethnicity, particularly at either of these companies.

Women are in sort of subservient positions where they're, you know, either trying to start and get funding for their projects, as in Silicon Valley, or they're actresses looking for roles in Hollywood.

Britt Marling just published an essay on The Atlantic, and she points out that a large portion of the town, Hollywood, functioned inside a soft and sometimes literal trafficking or prostitution of young women.

And I wonder for both of you guys, and I'll start with you, Jodi, when you think about how this ends, I mean, how much of it is limited to individuals and how much of it is connected to a broader culture that would fundamentally need to shift?

I think it's the broader culture.

And,

you know, as I listened to you describe the similarities between Silicon Valley and Hollywood, I thought the analogies you drew were very apt.

And yet, I'm very skeptical of industry-specific explanations.

You know, in every industry we've looked at over this year, people have their rationale for why sexual harassment occurs, right?

They say, oh, in TV news, it's because there are these huge personalities, you know, who get the ratings and, you know, basically anything they

want to do, they can get away with.

In Hollywood, you know, people talk about,

you know, the like sexism that seems almost baked into Hollywood and the commodification of women and women's bodies.

In Silicon Valley, they talk about the vast amounts of money rolling around and this sort of new world that seems entirely, almost entirely male-controlled, arising.

And those are all compelling descriptions, and I believe all of them.

And yet, they're not a satisfying explanation for why we see sexual harassment in, you know, name an industry that, that doesn't have it.

There's been news in the last couple of days about the restaurant business, the financial services industry, et cetera, et cetera.

I think what's going on is that the system is essentially broken.

Decades and decades and decades after women entered the workplace in mass numbers in the United States, we just don't have a great system for dealing with sexual harassment in the workplace.

The EEOC, which, you know, the people who work there work very hard on sexual harassment issues, but it's not clear that it's a strong enforcement mechanism.

And we've got this system where sexual harassment, if it's reported at all, is often dealt with through the settlements that we've written about a lot.

And what happens with a settlement is that, you know, a woman gets some recompense

and the whole thing is kept quiet, which may be good for her in some ways.

But what often happens is that she has to leave her job.

offender, the alleged offender, gets to stay at the company, and then the whole thing gets quieted down with a confidentiality agreement.

And so first of all, with that, we're saying to people that in a sense, it's the victim, you know, whose career doesn't get to flourish.

We see that with Harvey Weinstein.

There were women who left his company.

They had burgundy film careers that were essentially cut off.

And then the whole, then the message that settlements send is, this is meant to keep quiet.

You know,

be silent about this.

Don't speak up.

It's actually in your interest to sign your right to speak away.

And with that, I think we're encouraging an atmosphere in which it becomes like really hard for women to speak up in some cases because the alleged victims, the people who know the most about it, legally can't do it anymore.

So

I think it's really like,

you know, I was in meetings with Kate and Mike Schmidt and Emily Steele, and we would talk about what we were finding in various industries and really what we found were powerful common threads.

So I think that one, I want to backtrack.

So one of the reasons we have this broken system and wherever we see men at the top, we see women being treated badly, is because it's not just that the corporate system is broken.

I think it's a reflection of the fact that in society we are still grappling with sexism in a real way.

So

I don't want to dance around the fact that business is simply a reflection of culture and that in our culture today we are still trying to figure out what to do about women.

And we don't know how to treat them.

And we're not sure that we really want them to be in positions of power full stop.

So I think that that sort of schizophrenia within a corporation that has a great HR policy, but at the same time treats people extremely badly, or a culture like Silicon Valley, which is supposed to be the most egalitarian place for people on the planet who have great ideas, and yet this sort of systemic sexism is happening.

It's not just because we have sort of broken corporate systems.

It's because we have a problem.

within the way that we as a culture talk about women and we're not sure we're comfortable with it yet.

We certainly aren't.

I think one of the reasons why these stories are actually happening now is because we've seen in our political lives an administration that does feel very

anxious about women, hostile toward women, and it's coming from the very, very top.

You know, because above business, we have a president and a cabinet that is creating policies that feel extraordinarily anti-woman.

And so I think that there was a way in which this is actually a backlash against a cultural shift that happened post-Obama.

So that's one thing.

Sorry, Katie, just to interrupt you, roughly,

do you think that these kinds of revelations and this kind of reporting could have happened under a different president?

I mean, how tied do you think this is to the Trump administration?

Well, it's so interesting because in a lot of cases, let's put Fox News aside.

That's a different animal.

But with Harvey Weinstein, with a lot of the Silicon Valley venture capitalists that I've written about who have

you know, been accused of sexual harassment, they are professed liberals.

They are champions of women's causes.

They give money to Planned Parenthood.

And so I do think that one of the sentiments when I spoke with people was, I always knew he was a bad guy, but outwardly he seemed to be doing so much for women.

I felt like, well, is it worth rocking the boat just because he hurt me?

Is it worth it when he's done more to invest in women or in minorities than anybody else?

So what is the point even of coming forward?

Because the whole world is moving in this more liberal, more progressive direction.

Maybe I should just shut up.

Now it doesn't doesn't feel like the whole world is moving in this more liberal, more progressive direction.

And on top of it, you know, it feels almost more galling to have somebody use this mantle of being a champion of women and minorities

than quietly going and behaving in these reprehensible ways.

And so I do think that the shift in politics really did

encourage some people to come forward who might not have come forward if they thought that the world in general was going the way they wanted.

So why rock the boat?

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Yeah, it seems like there's a broader cultural awareness of these potential dimensions of men who identify as feminists, but are perhaps finos.

SNL did a sketch about this, in fact.

Absolutely.

And at the end of the day, these settlements, what they're, I interviewed one lawyer and her quote was amazing.

The settlements are a reflection of something going on in society.

And what they are saying is that a man's ability to make money is more important than the life of a woman and her career.

That's what that settlement is saying.

That's what that agreement is doing.

So it's codifying in a contract and with money a belief in where men and women should be relative to one another in life.

I was just thinking about the way the Trump politics cut both ways for my sources.

Some of them were very motivated by the Trump moment.

They said,

It really bothers me that we have a president who's been accused of this kind of behavior.

I'm going to speak up because this is what I can do now.

This is my contribution.

So for them, it was very motivating.

For other people, it was not.

It was the opposite.

They felt hopeless.

They said, well, people came forward about President Trump before the election, and he was elected anyway.

Nobody cares.

Why should I stick my neck out?

Why should I put myself on the line if he got elected president anyway?

So it's really complicated.

The other thing...

that influenced people, I think, for a long time with Weinstein is that he did have the imprimatur of Democratic politicians, particularly Hillary Clinton, who he was very close to and very involved in fundraising.

And there was even the appearance of the closeness with the Obamas.

I don't know how actually close they were, but the fact that, you know, he had done these Obama fundraisers, but also the fact that Malia Obama worked for him made people think that they were very close.

And women did tell me that gave me a sense of hopelessness because I thought if he's close to the Clintons and the Obamas, then nobody's going to listen and nobody is going to care.

I wanted to speak about the events of a year ago explicitly.

So it's mid-October 2017.

A year ago, America heard the now infamous Access Hollywood tapes.

And there was a belief at the time that a presidential campaign couldn't withstand a revelation like that.

And yet...

an electoral majority processed that news and gave the presidency to Donald Trump.

And Jodi, what did that reveal to you?

And what has and hasn't changed in the country since that moment?

Well, I think that was an earlier stage of a conversation that's been really powerful.

What I remember about that moment was women talking more openly about

their experiences of harassment.

And I think another thing, by the way, that was true of the Trump discussion and the Weinstein discussion is that they placed harassment and assault on a kind of continuum.

You know, I should speak more closely to Weinstein because that's the material that

I reported myself.

But part of what is really interesting about the Weinstein allegations is that they begin with somewhat physically milder but disturbing definitions of workplace harassment, including some very

brazen and specific kind of sex for work quid pro quos.

If you do this for me, I'll do this for you.

And then, as we know, the range of allegations goes all the way to very serious assault charges.

And so I think part of the strength of the conversation in recent weeks is that we're not only talking about harassment and we're not only talking about assault.

We're talking about a continuum kind of between them.

And by the way, I've spoken to a lot of women whose cases kind of fall in like an interesting gray area

between the two.

And so I think that that Trump moment was kind of an earlier wave of people speaking up about their experiences and also realizing that they were significant.

One thing that I remember about that last round was a lot of women realizing that they had never even told their husbands what had happened to them, that it was something that happened to them when they were 20 years old.

And, you know, God, it had just never come up in conversation.

But, you know, the Trump discussion sparked something within them and they wanted to tell their stories.

And so then I think the more recent moment, you know, the kind of Me Too moment, builds off of that.

And I think part of what is fueling, I kind of think part of the relationship between the Weinstein material specifically and the me too moment is the fact that we know with Weinstein that very few people spoke up over the years.

You know, we've been dealing again and again with the question of how could this have gone on for 30 years and how could this guy have racked up all these allegations, by the way, kind of in plain sight, right, in the realm of popular culture with people even joking about it and nobody does anything.

And so I think that has created, for some people, a kind of moral imperative to tell their stories and speak up because they don't want to be the person, the equivalent of the former Miramax person saying, oh my God, you know what?

I didn't realize the extent of it.

I talked to Quentin Tarantino.

Yeah, Quentin Tarantino.

Yeah, I talked to Quentin Tarantino last week.

And look, his own girlfriend, Mira Sorvino, says she was harassed by Weinstein,

has a story she shared with the New Yorker.

And he said that he managed to even diminish his own girlfriend's story.

So I think part of what is fueling the Me Too moment is a feeling of, let's not diminish these stories.

Let's take them really seriously.

Let's find the pattern and also let's speak up about it because we don't want to be in that Tarantino position of saying, God, now I have egg on my face because I should have said something earlier.

I do wonder though, and Katie, I'll direct this to you.

Jodi talks about the moral imperative, but it seems like there's increasingly becoming a business imperative woven into this, right?

Like you look at the repercussions for the Weinstein company after the fallout from Jodi's and Megan's story, and

they are in dire straits at present.

You look at Uber and you look at what has happened to Fox News.

Do you think that there will become a business imperative,

led in part by boards, to root out sexual harassers and sexual predation because simply put, it's bad for the bottom line?

I mean, absolutely.

First of all, I want to say that I've always thought of these stories as business stories.

I've been a business reporter for a very long time.

And

when I published my first story about venture capitalists sexually harassing female entrepreneurs, for which I must say there are very few consequences for them.

They often own their own firms and they're not going to fire themselves.

Anyway,

I received a lot of notes from people who've known me for a long time saying, oh, I didn't realize that you were working on sort of women's issues now.

I always thought of you as a more business-minded person and a business reporter who investigated around business.

And I said, listen, if something's happening that keeps 50% of the population from succeeding in the workplace, that's a business story.

So I do, as much as I do believe these things are culturally rooted, I think it's always important to think about this as a business story, partly because it helps people to take this more seriously, because a lot of times people don't want to take the stories of a woman being hurt as seriously as they will take the story of an employee who is not allowed to succeed at work seriously.

So that is false.

Unfortunately, I do think that's the case.

And so I do think these are definitely business stories.

And when they do start, and when you look at it from that lens, of course, they're going to affect the bottom line.

SoFi is a great example.

That CEO, Mike Cagney, he had settled with somebody who claims that she was sexually harassed by him in addition to doing all sorts of other things in the business that

the board later frowned upon.

And it was hurting the business and their ability to go public, for their ability to sell bonds into into the market and of course for their ability to attract talent.

So

it's not only that it will be considered a business story.

I think it should always be considered a business story and taken seriously.

Because as we know, our ability to make money, to earn money, to create careers and to make a living, no matter where we're working, whether it's at Miramax or whether you're a barista at Starbucks, that's extremely serious and should be taken seriously.

And it is very hard for us culturally to take the stories of quote-unquote women seriously.

And so, I think that's an important shift to make and to say, like, no matter how you feel about, you know, whether or not you doubt a woman or whether or not you believe that people can be sexually harassed in the workplace, if it's a systemic behavior that's keeping people from succeeding at work and keeping people out of jobs, especially in Silicon Valley, which is one of the greatest wealth creators we have right now in the economy, that that's an extraordinarily important issue.

It's a job story.

It's a job story.

Absolutely.

If you look at who works in Silicon Valley, where I can't emphasize how much wealth creation goes on here.

If you don't see women, then there's a problem.

After the break, we'll talk about whether the most prominent cases we've seen actually understate the extent of that problem.

Stay with us.

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We've been talking a lot about allegations made against a few prominent individuals.

Harvey Weinstein is currently near the top of that list, but you'll get a sense of the number of reports that have come to light if you peek in the show notes.

Many of these allegations have been either disputed or apologized for or both by several of the men who've been named, including Weinstein, and I really do encourage our listeners to spend some time with the coverage to get a sense of both the reporting and the response to it.

But I wonder, is there a risk that in emphasizing prominent men and some of the most egregious behavior that's been imputed to them, is there a risk that we constrain our understanding of what constitutes sexual harassment?

Absolutely.

So one of the VCs who I spoke with,

when I came to him and I said, listen, these allegations are being made against you, his immediate response was, but I wasn't powerful at the time.

I was a nobody.

so what does it matter?

So I do think that we

run the risk of saying that the only people who can sexually harass others or bully others, you know, full stop, are people in positions of power.

I've received so many notes from men and women who are in the workplace saying, my colleagues are doing this to me, my peers, my subordinates, and I don't know how to stop it.

And is that harassment?

Is it harassment if it's not coming from my boss?

And absolutely, of course it is.

You don't need simply an imbalance of power, but the sensational stories

are important because they shine a light on an issue.

But it's true.

We also need to start looking around and thinking clearly and presenting stories also of people who are facing everyday obstacles in the workplace.

We lack a common working definition of what sexual harassment is.

And two people, even in the same workplace, will not agree on it.

The law itself is really tortured tortured on this.

The Supreme Court has set the standard pretty narrowly.

Courts have been reluctant to interpret it in a broad way.

And so part of the problem is that the legal definition is very, very narrow and has become very distanced from what everyday women feel is sexual harassment.

So there's kind of a yawning gap there.

And I think one of the things that can hopefully happen now is that we can have a productive public debate about what sexual harassment actually is.

Jodi, you talked about women who had stories in the gray area.

What I was talking about,

and this is a specific feature of the Weinstein case, is that there is a gray area

where

the normal definitions and the line between consensuality and non-consensuality becomes very tortured.

For example,

there are actresses who we've written about who

Harvey Weinstein took an interest in them and got them up to a hotel room.

And then they were very uncomfortable about some of the things that happened there.

And what they said about those situations is that

they didn't immediately run out of the room fleeing because they felt they had no good options.

They felt like to stay was to get involved in something sometimes physically that they did not want to be involved in.

But to leave, they really worried about the risk and the damage to their career.

So they would sometimes say things like, well, okay, like I'm just going to go through with this massage thing and it's not, you know, it's only a massage and then I'm going to get out of here.

And I think the point they make about these instances again and again is that,

you know, what Weinstein has said repeatedly is that he's denied allegations of non-consensual sex.

But I think in a way his denial only opens up a question because the power dynamics were so skewed between this really powerful male producer who had, you know, buckets of Oscars to his name, and then in some cases, these actresses who were just starting out and had no names and no experience that, you know,

how could you could you even fully say that they consented?

That is, I think, the the question.

And that's going to be part of the debate over what constitutes, I mean,

what the behaviors are, right?

You know, I think there's been, in a way, less of a debate than I anticipated.

I thought there would be more of a reaction of people saying, hey, they went into the hotel room.

What did you expect?

Instead, I think actually people really get what these actresses or what a lot of them are saying.

they

understand

that the basic problem here

is that they were in a work situation where they felt pressured for sexual favors.

And also remember that part of the Weinstein allegations almost always involve a bait and switch.

What he very often did, according to the stories we've heard, is say, come to my hotel room because I want to discuss a script or an Oscar campaign or a part for you or your screen test or something like that.

So they really thought they were going into a work situation and then they say Weinstein turned the tables on them.

absolutely.

And also some of these situations are, if you take Hollywood out of it, which has this mystique, and I hate the term casting couch, that stereotype, because it's horrible.

But if, can you imagine in any other workplace, whether you work at Goldman Sachs or whether you work at Walmart, somebody saying, I think it's time for you to give me a massage now, whether it's a boss or a peer,

it's on its face an absurd thing to do in any workplace setting.

So I think that's part of the reason why there wasn't as much pushback is because it seems like a pretty bright line.

I've never worked in a job where I was expected to massage my colleagues.

I keep thinking about what we as a society focus our attention on and what we don't.

Lots of people spent lots and lots of time, nearly two weeks worth of news cycles asking whether a random male Google engineer had some special insight into what caused gender disparities within Silicon Valley.

Meanwhile, Katie, you, along with your colleague Nathaniel Popper, reported this eye-popping story about the popular online lending startup SoFi, including numerous current and former employees describing what the company itself described as disturbing anecdotes about staff behavior.

And from where I sit, your story didn't get nearly the length that freaking Google memo story did.

I'm wondering whether you think the patterns of attention around these stories will also start to shift.

Do you think that as people start talking about gender imbalances in powerful industries like finance or Silicon Valley, that they're going to start connecting the dots with the reporting that you and your colleagues are doing?

Yeah, you know, I think that's interesting.

For example, with the Uber memo or with SoFi, there is a process people had to go through and say, first of all, okay, how important is it?

Because keep in mind, while Uber and SoFi are big deal companies out in Silicon Valley, a lot of the country has not encountered either as consumers, right?

It's not a ubiquitous name like a Walmart or a Starbucks, these big consumer-facing companies.

So

I think people sort of went through the process of, what does this company do?

How important are they?

And how bad is the behavior?

That sort of math of how much should I care about this?

Because we're being pulled right now in all different directions in terms of outrage.

We are asked to be outraged about so many things

that I think people actually have to stop and say, how outraged should I be about this again?

Okay, yeah, Uber's a big company.

Okay, SoFi is like a $4 billion company, and they actually create loans and lend to consumers.

All right, okay, now I can care a little bit more.

So there was almost a pause, what you've described, and I think that's some of it.

I think part of it, too, is that now that now that the conversation has been split wide open, I think part of the reason why the Weinstein story was so important is because the movies that Miramax and the Weinstein company produced were big cultural events, things like pulp fiction or, you know, more recently, you know, these big Oscar-winning movies.

So it it gave everybody a stake in the story because they'd seen the films.

That has now allowed for a much broader conversation.

So I think you're right.

Perhaps we will see people start moving more quickly on these stories, responding more quickly, taking them more seriously faster, because they can now say, all right, we've had the Me Too campaign.

We understand how pervasive this is.

And now we can just get down to the business of dealing with it rather than getting so stuck on, how important is this?

Is this really happening all the time?

Is this a big deal?

Which is, I think, where we were,

you know, when Emily wrote about Fox, right?

It was definitely, that was part of the conversation.

It's like, well, is this just Fox?

Is Fox just some sort of like troubled company

with a leadership that seems really unsavory doing some bad stuff?

Or is Fox indicative of something bigger that's happening in the world of business?

And as the year has gone on, I think we're seeing it's the latter.

Yeah.

Jodi, at one point in your discussion about how the story came together in the press,

certainly not to minimize the courage of the women that have come forward, you did say, you know, Harvey Weinstein actually isn't as powerful as he once was, and that that may have contributed to people feeling like they could come forward

and

speak, perhaps.

Or am I paraphrasing that incorrectly?

Just that his power, I think, to some degree, while he did make many, many movies and definitely had clout in Hollywood,

he was not the same Harvey Weinstein of five to 10 years ago.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

His power had decreased.

It's been a while since he was on a really hot streak with movies.

What's interesting, though, is that he still did have tentacles into so many different areas of society.

Business, fashion,

charitable organizations in New York,

Los Angeles, London.

He he, the media, and even people who knew that he wasn't as powerful as he used to be had a kind of memory of his power that I think was hard for them to get rid of.

He, I think they'd experienced him as this kind of omniscient figure who, you know, was so dominant and so everywhere.

And it was almost hard for them to believe that

anybody could go up against them.

It was one really funny thing about the summer is that people kept telling me in in this really paranoid way that my own employer was going to kill the story.

They'd say, the Times is going to kill the story.

Your editor's just going to walk up to you one day and

put you on a different assignment.

Now, first of all, they were wrong.

The joke of it was that our editors, of course, were not only fully behind us, but, you know, really cracking the whip.

Yeah, exactly.

We were under enormous pressure to get the goods.

And also, I knew that I had had like specific conversations with everybody from Dean Bucket to Arthur Sulzberger, where they said the institution is fully behind the story.

We're willing to lose advertising, et cetera, et cetera.

But, you know, what sources say to you is always a clue to something, right?

Even if they're wrong, there's always something underneath you want to listen for.

And the thing to listen for in that instance was the fear.

They still believed that Harvey Weinstein could control the New York Times.

Wow.

Well, thank goodness that he couldn't.

And thank goodness for your reporting, both of you.

And thank you so much for for spending this time with us.

Thanks for having us.

It's great to be with you.

Great to have you.

We had to say goodbye to Katie and Jodi.

Thanks again to both of them for a rich and enlightening conversation.

Before we turn from this topic into our closing segment keepers, though, I wanted to put a word in for a reporter whose praises we were singing off-mic.

Lisa Chow, who hosts the podcast Startup for Gimlet, has done some really incredible reporting on the topic of sexual harassment.

I'd play a clip here for you listeners, but because of the intensely personal and nuanced nature of the conversations that Lisa and the startup team captured, I think it's better that you hear those stories in context.

Season two of Startup focuses on a company called Dating Ring.

Early in that season, the founders of the company, all of whom are women, are forced to grapple with the behavior of a male VC that causes some frank and difficult conversations.

I highly recommend that whole season, which many listeners will find controversial.

And I also recommend a full listen to season four, which focuses on Dove Charney, founder of American Apparel.

Now, let's turn to our closing segment, Keepers.

Alex, what have you heard, read, seen, watched, experienced recently that you do not want to forget?

So there has been a lot of press lately about the author Claire Massoud.

She has a new novel out called The Burning Girl.

And I'm going to tell you, I have not bought that novel, but I do like Claire Massoud.

And all of this talk about The Burning girl prompted me to go back to the claire massoud archives and reread the emperor's children and let me tell you it is a delightful read i have long been skeptical of people who go back and reread books mostly because i feel like there's so many books i haven't read like the burning girl that i need to be focused on the forward movement But there is a really specific pleasure that's, I think, largely unsung that comes with going back to your library and rereading something that you really, really enjoyed the first time.

Because chances are you've totally forgotten it, and it'll be just as pleasurable the second time around.

Exactly.

I think that's, I think that's just right.

As someone who enjoys pretty regularly the experience of reading.

Jane Austen.

Yes.

Jeff's not here to give you the Jane Austen ribbing, so that's fallen on my shoulders.

I'm always here for it.

Yes.

So

I've been reading Richard Rothsdine.

This hasn't been a reread,

but it has been a first time read.

Richard Rothsdine's book, The Color of Law, A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.

And

this your bedside reading is much more intensely intellectual and smart than mine.

No offense, Claire Masseuse.

I love your writing.

I am no stranger to bedtime reading, the, say, the no-sleep subreddit where people write horror stories.

Like

not all my bedtime reading is so enlightened.

However,

this book

is just...

Rothstein is making an argument that the Supreme Court has significantly under-attended the government's role in

fostering and cultivating segregation and in creating disparate policies

that have redounded to the detriment of African Americans.

And this book is just the evidence.

This is just Richard Rothstein basically laying out his case, a semi-indictment of the courts,

but also just if he were to argue

about policy's role in fostering policy disparities that have hurt black Americans, this would be his case.

This would be his book.

An important book to pay attention to, given the fact that the judicial branch seems to be be the only functioning wing of our government.

Yeah.

I mean, it's so like so many of the things that he chronicles are not,

I think,

cases that stand any chance in the next few years of coming back before the court.

And if they did, it's,

I don't expect that they would go a different way than they did in the account he chronicles, but it is an extraordinary book.

It includes just a ton of, he goes from sundown laws to redlining.

He just, he brings all the evidence.

I can't recommend it enough.

And so many of the things that are in there, I'm like, man, oh yeah, that did happen.

Good lord.

That was a really bad thing.

So, so that.

I've also got to say, just in tandem with this, there's been a lot of excavation of history, of policy, of various things.

Gimlet's new podcast, Uncivil, is fantastic.

Their episode about Sherman's Order is terrific.

High recommends.

That show, Uncivil, features Shenjirai Kumanika, who was the co-host of another series, Seen on Radio's Seeing White series, which I also listened to this year.

It's 14 episodes.

They are fantastic.

I cannot recommend it highly enough.

If you want to just like a history lesson in America,

these three things, color of law, uncivil,

Seen on Radio Seeing White, high recommend.

Look at the magnanimity on this podcast, just just directing people to other podcasts.

I love it.

That's why you're one of the giants, Matt Thompson.

I stand on the shoulders of giants like you, Alex Wagner.

Okay, we should probably end the show.

Yeah, let's end the show.

All right, all right.

It's great to talk to you as always.

I look forward to

talking with you next week.

Bye.

Bye.

That'll do it for this week's episode of Radio Atlantic.

This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Kim Lau.

Thank you to the New York Times, where Alex and Jodi taped in New York.

And thank you also to GoTo Productions and Charlotte GoTo in San Francisco, where Katie taped.

Thanks as always to the one and only John Batiste, creator of our theme, whose rendition of the battle hymn will play in full after these credits conclude.

Cheers as always to my esteemed co-host Alex Wagner.

We'll be back once again with our esteemed editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg on the next Radio Atlantic.

If you've got thoughts or feedback on our episode, I'm sure you do.

We want to hear from you.

Please give us a call at 202-266-7600 and leave us a voicemail with your contact information.

Once again, that's 202-266-7600.

As always, please look for us at facebook.com slash radioatlantic and theatlantic.com slash radio.

If you like what you're hearing, don't forget to rate and review us in Apple Podcasts and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

Once again, detailed show notes are linked in the episode description.

Most importantly, thank you for listening.

We'll see you next week.

Oh,

glory

to the glory

of the coming of the Lord.

He is trampling, defeated with great and wrath and sword.

He had lost the faithful lighting of the terrible blissful.

His truth is marching on.

Glory, glory,

hallelujah.

Glory, glory, hallelujah.

Hallelujah.

you.