"She Said" [it on the record] -- notes from a fellow #MeToo reporter
The film starring Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan as the Pulitzer winning duo who (journalistically) busted Harvey Weinstein is a good adaptation of an excellent book. But it raises some issues.
When “She Said” was published in September 2019, Amazon knew what to do: My pre-ordered copy was on my doorstep the first day it was released. (Ronan Farrow’s book about his own investigations of the Weinstein case, “Catch and Kill,” was published the following month; Kantor/Twohey/The New York Times and Farrow/The New Yorker had shared the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for reporting in recognition of the journalism behind the two books.)
The books were published just in time for the 2019-2020 academic year, when I taught Introduction to Journalism to undergraduates at City College of New York. I made liberal use of them in the classroom, because both books—but especially “She Said”—were excellent primers on reporting, and especially working with sensitive sources such as sexual assault and harassment survivors.
But they also resonated strongly with me because of my own reporting on sexual misconduct, which began in the fall of 2015. That’s when I began work on my first #MeToo investigation, for Science, where I had been a reporter for the previous quarter century. The accused abuser was the anthropologist Brian Richmond, then curator for human origins at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Our report in Science, published in February 2016, would eventually lead to Richmond being forced to resign, and the end of what had up to then been a long and illustrious career.
The same month I began reporting on the Richmond case, BuzzFeed and its then reporter, Azeen Ghorayshi, published a story about the University of California, Berkeley astronomer Geoff Marcy, who had been found guilty of sexual harassment of students by the university, which had then attempted to keep it all quiet. In fact, it was Azeen’s article that allowed me to convince my editors at Science to “cut me loose” on the Richmond story, as I had been asking them to do all that summer. And like Richmond later on, Marcy was forced to resign after considerable evidence for the allegations came to light.
It’s not taking anything away from the terrific reporting on Weinstein by Kantor, Twohey, and Farrow to say that the modern era of #MeToo reporting started not with them, but with much earlier stories in BuzzFeed and Science. (As many readers may know, Tarana Burke is credited with founding the #MeToo movement itself.) More on that previous coverage, and why it matters, below. For the moment I just want to say that my engagement with the film “She Said” is informed and influenced by more than seven years as a reporter specializing in sexual misconduct, involving several dozen cases—all in academia and the sciences. That reporting, made entirely possible by the courage of victims and survivors, led to the firing or forced resignation of at least a half dozen accused abusers, from the United States to Australia to Brazil.
A good film of an excellent book.
But first, let’s talk about the film. It was laudable in many ways, and brilliant in a few very important ones. (Spoiler alert for one very critical plot device.)
The film was laudable because it kept the focus right where the book did, and where it belongs: On the attempts by the two female reporters to get the survivors of Weinstein’s decades of sexual harassment and assault not only to talk to them, but ultimately, in several cases, to go on the record about what he had done to them.
As a reporter who has had these kinds of conversations dozens of times with victims of abuse, I can testify that these are extremely difficult decisions, not ones that are made at all lightly or impulsively. In every case, there are very good reasons why they did not “go to the police” or otherwise “report it,” as they are so often told they should have done if they wanted to be believed years later (but would they be?)
Part of the equation, of course, is whether the victim trusts the reporter with their experiences. Often that requires communicating over weeks, months, or even years with a journalist, observing what they do and whether they keep their promises. This process was captured very clearly in both the book and the film. And both made clear that good reporters neither try to, nor should, remain “neutral” or “objective” in the face of the stories they are being told. The default mode is, and should be, to believe the victims, even if the standard of “innocent until proven guilty” must be applied to the alleged abuser if a case gets to court. (Weinstein was given the benefit of those doubts in his court trials, and he is in jail, where we can be confident he belongs.)
In the film, Jodi Kantor is played by Zoe Kazan, and Megan Twohey by Carey Mulligan (full disclosure: Mulligan is one of my all-time favorite actresses.) Kazan does a fine job in her role, emoting convincingly when a survivor makes the crucial decision to go on the record, even if a few too many performative hugs at critical moments disrupt the film’s authenticity, in my view. But for me, Mulligan, who can display a complex mix of ideas and emotions with just one fleeting facial expression, really carried the film. As they are working on the Weinstein case, Twohey has just had a baby, and she is exhausted as most new mothers are. (Reportedly, Twohey was also suffering from postpartum trauma disorder.) But in Mulligan’s portrayal, she is also somewhat world weary, not as surprised as Kantor at what they are finding out about Weinstein’s conduct, and very angry, as demonstrated in more than one scene where she lashes out at sexist behavior.
Despite the strong star turns by both Mulligan and Kazan, the film also features very strong supporting roles by the actresses who play Weinstein’s victims. And, spoiler alert here, one moment in the film struck me as particularly brilliant and powerful. That’s when Ashley Judd, played by herself, calls the reporters to tell them she has decided to go on the record, thus breaking the story wide open. This sudden but very brief intrusion of the real world into a dramatized version of events was really a masterstroke; it got to me, anyway.
I must criticize, however, one very odd decision by the filmmakers. Kantor and Twohey’s editor on the Weinstein case, Rebecca Corbett, is renowned for her skill in shepherding difficult stories through the reporting and editing process. And in their book, the two reporters give her full credit for the important role she played in the Weinstein investigation. But in the film, as portrayed by Patricia Clarkson, Corbett is reduced to a one-dimensional mother figure, checking regularly to see whether her reporters are “okay” but never seen giving them serious guidance about how to deal with the story. In contrast, in Andrew Braugher’s depiction of Dean Baquet, the Times editor steals the show in conference calls with Weinstein and his attorneys, sometimes taking the phone from the reporters and giving Weinstein ultimatums before stalking out of the room.
#MeToo, fiction and reality.
From some of what I wrote above, readers might get the impression that I am envious of the Pulitzer prizes awarded to the Weinstein reporters. Well, yes and no.
Yes, in the sense that serious #MeToo reporting began more than two years before the Weinstein stories, although it focused on the sciences and not on Hollywood. The months of work that I, Azeen Ghorayshi, and other reporters put into our stories probably did deserve some kind of recognition—in large part because the impact of those stories on the sciences has been just as great as the impact of the Weinstein stories on the film industry and beyond. And yet the New York Times, although it was fully aware of the Richmond investigation at a major institution in the heart of New York City, never did one story about the inquiry, the museum’s decision to force Richmond to resign, or any of the aftermath of those events. I have since talked to reporters at the Times who agree that this was a mistake. And when the Times shared the Pulitzer for the same kind of reporting we science journalists did much earlier, there was no looking back.
But no, in the sense that it is not just personal envy behind my criticisms of the way the mainstream media has focused on glamorous, high-profile domains like the film industry and the media. In my view it is wrong, morally and journalistically, since most sexual harassment and assault takes place in walks of life where no one cares much about the victims: The ordinary workplace, from white collar offices to McDonald’s franchises.
I wrote about this problem in a piece for Columbia Journalism Review a few years ago. Here is what I said:
I believe such stories are as important as the succession of exposés of some of the most powerful men in America. While the investigations of Weinstein and others have been carried out in a very serious manner and deserve the accolades they have garnered, they have tended to focus on fallen men whose positions in the national consciousness can make them seem like subjects one might encounter in a Greek tragedy. Yet for every Weinstein, there are a hundred less powerful figures—academics among them—who are getting away with similar behavior simply because they don’t attract the same level of scrutiny. Sometimes a reporter can change that, even working alone.
But there is another issue I did not write about in the CJR piece, and that is the need that mainstream publications clearly feel to get victims of abuse “on the record.” Indeed, a major focus of “She Said,” the book and the movie, is the efforts of Kantor and Twohey to get actresses and other film industry employees to agree to be named in their story. In my experience, and in my opinion, this high bar for allowing a story to go forward and be published is as much intended to satisfy the concerns of the publications’ lawyers than to satisfy journalistic principles.
Thus in my stories for Science and The Verge, we used various kinds of pseudonyms for the survivors, but provided enough details about them to make it clear they were real people, not individuals whose existence we made up. Thus the credibility of our stories depended on the credibility and reputation of both the reporter and the publication. But after the Weinstein stories, editors at those and other publications raised the bar, and in most cases now require that at least some of the victims be named.
To me, this is misguided. Thought experiment: What if, as was the case when Kantor, Twohey, and Farrow began their reporting on Weinstein, the survivors had continued to be so fearful of him that they could not risk coming forward publicly? Would Weinstein still be the head of a studio, and still abusing women, rather than in jail where he obviously belongs? One of the key principles of journalism is “do no harm.” But what if greater harm is done by essentially forcing victims to name themselves before they can get any kind of attention to the abuses they have suffered, and which future victims may well suffer if the abuser is not exposed?
I’m not sure how likely it is that these issues will get a real airing. That’s because despite the success of “She Said,” #MeToo investigations seem to be on the wane these days. Instead, the media’s focus, perhaps necessarily, is now on abusers who are increasingly striking back with defamation suits and media campaigns to try to “clear” their names. (Ben Smith’s interview with disgraced writer Junot Diaz is a good example of this new genre, and is itself being criticized by feminists and those who support victims of abuse.)
But for every #MeToo story that has gotten media coverage, there must be a thousand or more involving powerless victims who have little choice but to put up with abuse. One way or another, journalists, #MeToo activists, and the public at large need to find ways to save them.