YouSaid · the spoken record

Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey

lines on the record: 101
first: 2019-09-20
most recent: 2019-09-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“End up becoming so complicit in abuse And it turns out that Irwin had tried to intervene. He had totally failed. And so by the time I reached him, he was deeply concerned about the problem and deeply frustrated by his inability to do anything about it.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was for the company. He was like, this could destroy this company. So we write in the book in great detail about two years in the history of the Weinstein Company because we wanted to delve into this question of, you know, how can a company”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know. I mean, that rapport. So true. So it turns out that we had no way of knowing this. But I was talking to somebody who was who had been frustrated for years. When he first worked for Weinstein for like the first two decades, he had had some glimpses of wrongdoing and he didn't act. But in 2014, he had grown more alarmed. He was hearing more chatter inside the company. But just to show you how all these stories affect one another, it was also Cosby. He saw the Cosby headlines in the fall of 2014, and he had this recognition of what if we have a Cosby situation at this company. And initially, he admits that his concern was not particularly for the women.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, on the predictions every time on the story, I actually was like, how can you allow this to happen? I sort of appealed to someone who had a daughter and I said, this is embarrassing what you're doing. And then they felt terrible, especially they were dealing with rape victims' files. They had them in their possession and were trying to say these women and Uber hadn't been raped. Travis was, all of them were. And so I said, how could you do that? And I knew this person. And they were like, oh, I shouldn't. Like it was interesting. I know. I mean, that rapport.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he won't talk on the phone, but he gives me his email address. But at that point, so he and I started having this email correspondence, but really Megan was the third person in the room because she and I were composing every email together very carefully. Even in like... Sometimes one of us would be meeting a source, but we would obviously strategize beforehand. Right.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so you end up dividing up because these source relationships are deep. And so it's often better if it's a one-to-one relationship. But we were involved in each of them. Like, for example, when I When I started talking to Erwin Ryder, who. Erwin Ryder is the accountant who'd worked there for decades. I called Irwin Ryder, who was Harvey Weinstein's accountant for his companies for 30. And I had thought was a long shot to talk to us, but he started engaging. You just called him. Yeah, once I had a cell number for a while, but with a source like that, I often want some insight or intel before I call them. And somebody had said to me to my surprise, Erwin Ryder hates Harvey Weinstein. So I call him.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tell the story. Right, exactly. To get a copy of that police recording. And so, you know, that was an area in which, you know, I had decided to kind of dig around. And so we sort of divided the reporting up by.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've both dealt with these subjects. We both did door knocks. We both went on the hunt for records. We kind of would divide up, we had a shared Google Doc where we would kept a list of names and potential sources and we divide them up and start digging around into sort of different periods of time within the company. And so there was like, for example, the case of Ambra Badalana Gutierrez. She was one of the women who had She was as far as we know it, maybe the only woman who ever reported Weinstein to police here in New York in 2015 prompting a police investigation in which she wore Waya and tapes. And yet the prosecutor's office did not bring charges at that time. So that was one of the areas where I just was so curious to know what had happened there. And ultimately, we were able to figure out in the course of reporting that, yes, after the prosecutors had declined.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I showed up at their house and we stood in the direction. He was kind enough to speak to me off the record for a few minutes. But I realized at a point in the conversation he doesn't know. And so then I had to decide standing there, how much should I tell him on the one hand, you know, I've showed up in this guy's driveway. I'm not going to lie. I'm not going to misrepresent a reason why I'm there if I want these people to be transparent with me. I have to be transparent myself. But then again, it's not my place. Tell him what may or may not have happened with his wife. But I think ultimately in a way it wasn't about me or him or her. It was about this settlement system in which women have to sign papers, often saying they were literally never tell anybody about what happened.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who, by the way, lives in Silicon Valley. She has come forward in our book with a very powerful story. She had not even told her husband. So we tracked her down in the summer of 2017. And I went to their home to try to speak to her. Her husband was there instead. And it was a very awkward conversation because he hadn't known anything. She had never told him.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were a woman who worked for Miramax in 1990, whatever. And so how are we going to figure out who this person was? So a lot of our work that summer was talking to former Merrimack's employees. And Weinstein, well, yes and no. It took a lot of phone calls. Some people didn't pick up the phone. But lo and behold, we started hearing these stories of, you know, a woman mysteriously disappeared from the office in 1990. She was very young. You know, we started to hear in 1998, I think something terrible happened at the Venice Film Festival involving two women, but I don't know exactly what it was. Exactly. So I saw them the next day. They seemed very upset. So it was the process of going back and tracing that trail, but it was difficult because a woman with a settlement by deaf. Can't talk Rowena Chu.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, we knew about Rose McGowan's settlement and the question was, first of all, were there others? But also, how do you find these women? I mean, these women essentially have been wiped off the map. They've been erased from movie history. And Rose is an exception, but most of the women with settlements were not famous actresses.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, okay, so step one was to try to talk to the Hollywood actresses. And we immediately started hearing some alarming stories, but they were totally off the record. And understandably, nobody wanted to go on the record. So basically our editor, Rebecca Corbett, her attitude was this story is going to need to be founded on some real evidence. And we would be the”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, what was sort of What was interesting is later, I've told the story before, but when I did talk on the record and I wanted my name on the record in the post, I didn't want a source said. I said, my name is Kara Swisher. Put it down. And he came up to me. I was at the Washington Post by this time, and it was several years later. And he came up to me and said, Carol Swisher, and I'm like, oh, fuck you. You know, go away, like you awful person. I know you won, but you didn't. Like, at least I got to take it to you a little bit. And he goes, I just want to say in this town, people stab you in the back and you stab me in the front. And I said, anytime you son of a bitch. And it was like this moment when he never suffered. It was just one of my things. But I remember the threat of the NDA. And I was like, well, I don't have anything sue me. Like, what are you going to do? Which was interesting. And then I worked on the Nita Hilst at the Washington. I was there in the middle of that mess, which was interesting. Anyway, we're going to take a quick break. We're here with Jody Cantor and Megan Tewy from the New York Times. We're going to take a quick break and talk and then come back and talk about.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On Selly. Well, it just goes back to sort of what we accepted, what was sort of considered acceptable, just kind of what you had to go through being a 20-year-old girl on your...”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He paid someone off for the, he did it later. We all quit. The two of us quit. And then he did it again and paid off that person. And then someone else took him to court and he paid them off. And so I then said, I'm talking to anyone I can. It was, you know what I mean? Like, and so I did. And so I did talk publicly with my name attached to the Washington Post.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was just going to say that, and back to your question, that in the course of our reporting, we realized that, and we were taking our cues from the work that the kind of groundbreaking work that Emily and Mike had done in the case of O'Reilly is that we realized that was kind of a case study in how, yes, these settlements had been used to silence victims and conceal bad behavior. Witnesses, but if you can basically piece together that financial trail, if you can come, if you can basically get your hands on record.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The EOC has that information and we cannot look it up because a long time ago it was decided that secrecy was the best way to deal with a lot of this stuff. And so what we've come to, and we should say for fairness that for an individual woman who's been through something terrible, it can make total sense to take a settlement. You get to keep your privacy. You get financial recompense. You can avoid being branded a tattletale, a flirt, a traitor or whatever. You can move on with your life. Some of these payments, as we've seen, are enormous. I mean, there's Emily and Mike wrote about a woman who got $32 million from Fox and O'Reilly. So it can make sense on an individual basis, but more and more with our reporting, we're just coming to the question of like,”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, but this is totally. Legal. Like, here's the way I would put it our default way of dealing with sexual harassment and sometimes assault in this country is to pay to silence the women. Even if you look at the EOC, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is the government agency in charge of looking over this stuff, they keep their settlement secret. You or I, if we're thinking of taking a new job and we want to say, oh, you know, I wonder if this place want to work at Facebook, you know, what's their record on this kind of thing?”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Several different times. It happens across all industries. And it's not just, listen, I think there's been a general awareness of these secret settlements, but if you look at the specific clauses, restrictive clauses that these people have to agree to in order to get compensation for what's happened to them, they are jaw dropping. I mean, you have to, they can't tell their husbands, they can't tell if they want to get mental health treatment for what's happened. That mental health treatment provider has to sign an NDA. And it goes on and on and on. And the lawyers, the role of some of these lawyers like Gloria Osborne, who are in public present as some of the most vocal opponents of sexual harassment and sexual assault, have participated in these settlements that have helped kind of conceal.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gloria Allred would be among the attorneys who will often steer those people into settlement, saying secret, out of court settlements where they say, listen, this is your best option is to basically accept money in exchange for silence, which happens in the hands of the...”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we realized, so we realized that there was that another thing that we were, another challenge that we were facing was the fact that we were in the end were able to document that at least that he had paid out secret settlements to silence at least eight women over the years. And so we were sort of facing two big challenges, not just that women were scared to go on the record, but that in some cases they were legally prohibited from talking to us. Through these NDAs, through these NDAs. So, you know, sometimes, and this doesn't just apply to victims, Harvey's victims, these were victims, victims of sexual harassment and sexual assault across the country will often sort of step forward and turn to an attorney for help saying this just happened to me. I want to do something about it. I want to hold this guy accountable.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And we learned, I mean, obviously, we've learned so much more that it was such a more complicated and sort of thorough machinery that he'd put in place to try to silence his accusers and beat back scrutiny. I mean, it was, you know, if anybody is sort of skeptical of conspiracy theories like this, you know, don't read the Weinstein story because there's so many, it just gets deeper and deeper. Right, we'll talk about some of those.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But for people in his world and his orbit, he could terrify. He could make or break careers, you know, and with the snap of his fingers. And so he calls.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And he was, and listen, if you were, you know, if you were outside of his industry, I think you could have the courage to say, you know, you're an asshole. Zeitgeist. So I get”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And threatening and threatening. He wants at a tech conference. It was strange eating food and he spit at me. And I said, what the fuck, dude? And he was like, whoa, I said, I heard you're an asshole, but I had no idea you spit at women. But okay, whatever. And it was a weird encounter. And of course, is nothing, but it was odd and strange. And he was vaguely threatening like, how dare you to speak to me like this? It was a strange, it's the only time I ever met this guy. And I thought, what a jackass.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, we quickly realized that there had been this culture of secrecy in Hollywood in which these women, even the most famous among them, were really terrified to speak out because Weinstein had been such a powerful figure and threatening and threatening.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right, just like with Woody Allen, with a lot of things which people are questioning, like people start to question. So when you were beginning this, one of the interesting things I found in the book is the way you got to, it was not necessarily through the victim stories which you had. And that was critical to get Ashley John on the record, Rose McGowan on the record, Gwen Paul Drew eventually on the record, but through documents, settlements. That was an interesting way to go in because when you covered sex crimes, it was the victim-focused coverage area.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You see them acting out what a woman is supposed to look like, how she's supposed to behave, how she's supposed to flirt or fall in love or relate to other people. You see these romance scenes play out. And if all of that cultural history from Shakespeare and Love to pulp fiction was really concealing something that was so much darker, I just thought we didn't have a huge number of well-founded allegations at that point. We didn't know the severity. But I just thought, wait a second, this story could throw a substantial amount of our shared pop culture history into question.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was something else I felt look, I had no idea that this story was going to have the impact it did. But I thought there was something special about actresses because I thought these women write our scripts for what femininity is supposed to be. But they play.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and just to conceive of famous actresses as victims that warranted kind of the muscle of the New York Times to help uncover their stories and give them voice. And so Jody was actually no, and so we had an interesting conversation in which Jodi was basically like, listen, I've been, you know, first of all, this shows that if this is happening to actresses, this type of sexual harassment is happening everywhere. And that this is.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, what is going to not just what the interesting story is, but what's a story that can help bring about change. And so Jodie and I actually, so I consulted with some of the Trump reporters and then I consulted with Jody and I actually aired some of my concerns to her. I said, listen, she had just started to talk to Ashley Judd. And in addition to Rose McGowan, she was starting to talk to Ashley Judd and Gwyneth Paltro. And when she described at least Ashley and Gwynneth's stories of these kind of meeting in hotels and requests for massages, I will confess that my initial response was as somebody who hasn't played close attention to the entertainment industry. You know, I wasn't and had covered sort of more hardcore traditional sex crimes in the past with victims, you know, with some victims of rape. And I was just a little skeptical too of the Weinstein investigation in the beginning. Another thing that we try to do with investigative reporting is to kind of give voice to the voiceless to search out the victim.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. The first day back from maternity leave, Rebecca, our editor sat me down and was like, okay, what do you want to cover basically? Here are your options. You can go back to covering Trump or you can join Jody on this Weinstein investigation. And, you know, I actually took a day to think about it because I had been pretty battered by the Trump reporting in 2016. And I consulted with some of my colleagues, especially some of my male colleagues who were like, listen, you got to come back and cover Trump. I mean, he's the story of a lifetime. I'm sort of much more important than some sleazy producer who may have been praying. But listen, in all fairness, obviously the reporters at the time who have been doing Trump coverage have done an amazing job. But for me, sitting back and having like four months off on maternity leave to just observe, to be a reader of the news as opposed to a reporter, I had watched a lot of the coverage of”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know that they're thinking about the story, that they're curious. And also, truly, what is, I mean, on the one hand, this is a story of sexual assault, so it's a painful topic. But she had already tweeted it. And so without naming, without naming Weinstein. And so at that point, I felt my job. Well, Goal One was just one off the record phone call to begin to hear some details and establish some trust.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Convince her, and then you guys talked about how to write the email to her to get her to someone. But he did, I think the point you made is she did respond and she responded with anger at the New York Times at being sex is that she had been experiences at the times that were not to her liking, correct?”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was a gravitational pull to the fact that other people. Had tried, but we really didn't know anything. We were starting from a standing start. We didn't know if the rumors were true. The first page of the book is about how Rose McGowan initially refused to talk to me. And that first”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It really was amazing. David Carr sort of alluded to it and tried. I remember talking to him about it off the record when he was the late David Carr, but he couldn't get anybody to talk on the record. He couldn't convince women to talk. I know Kenneletta tried. Some people overlooked it completely for sure”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember as early as May 2017 there were two words she said she wanted me to focus on enablement and complicity because we were what happens is when you look at this stuff across industries you begin to see that there's a system and we were beginning to question that system so I called somebody I knew Shauna Thomas a feminist activist from an organization called ultraviolet and I said What stories haven't been told what's been covered up? And she said, Harvey Weinstein. And she said, Rose McGowan is working on this book. And I mean, I had, you know, I quickly figured out that there had been rumors for all these years that other journalists had tried. But I think the fact that nobody else had gotten it was actually, I mean, that was a dare. That was really.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so one of the that story had a lot of impact. And one of the pieces of impact is that Amazon introduced paid paternity leave for the first time. So I had had these experiences of reporting on pretty intimidating targets and feeling that if we did it right, we could really have impact. But so that is how I got drafted into what was really a team that was forming in the spring of 2017 at the times because this O'Reilly story had just landed. And it was so, I know it seems like it was many, many, many sexual harassment stories ago, but if you go back to that Bill O'Reilly story, critical. It was astonishing that he was fired. He was so powerful. And remember that he wasn't fired because of these allegations. Fox knew about the allegations. They were paying them off.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What they found was this really brutal culture that kind of had no give. A bad Which was different than the tech culture it put out. Now, Google was a place, for example, that did a lot of maternity leave, early stuff, a lot more than other companies.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Issues with the pretty brutal culture that was there. Yeah, it was a story meant to say Amazon has this incredible strength and power, but it can also be such a punishing place to work, even by the standards of the tech industry. And it almost seems designed to work that way. And so it was an unusual workplace story because usually labor stories are about lower paid workers. And he had been about Amazon, about the warehouse. Exactly. And instead, we were looking at the experiences of white-collar employees in Amazon's headquarters.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think what they taught me is that gender could be a kind of investigative tool, that because women are often still the outsiders and have less power at these organizations, if you learn the women's experiences, you're both, of course, like, you're literally writing about gender and their experiences, but it's also a way of prying the place open. Like to me, the way Amazon treats its women, it tells you so much about just the way power works at that company generally. Explain that piece. That was, that caused quite a... It did cost quite a star, and it was funny because NDAs were sort of a theme to that piece of this book, too. Yeah, exactly. We persuaded a lot of people on that story to break their NDAs to talk to us.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wrote about low income workers at Starbucks and really almost all hourly workers at restaurants and stores whose lives were being controlled by these crazy scheduling algorithms that through their everyday lives into chaos. And I did this big investigation of Amazon with another colleague. And those stories were kind of gender stories, but not gender stories. And what I mean is”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's how you met. That's how you met. So, Jody, why had you gotten on this? Because Harvey Weinstein was the sub people always talked about him this way. Like he was a pig, essentially. But nobody had followed these things to the thing. What got you onto it? And talk a little bit about your background. So it's interesting because our backgrounds ended up being complementary in a way that I don't even think I understood at the time I first started talking to you, Megan. Megan had done all the sex crimes reporting and I had done a lot of stuff on the workplace. And actually, often in the field of technology, women, business, the workplace technology, I did a big story about the way women were treated at Harvard Business School.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I was like, holy cow, maybe these stories can make a difference. And so it was soon after that that Jody called me and said, you know, I'm starting this investigation into Harvey Weinstein and I'm actually in the process of trying to make these initial calls and get people to talk to me and open up. But I think that people are going to be really scared. And I'm wondering if you have, I know you've done this type of coverage in the past in Chicago and with the Trump women, do you have any advice on what I might be able to say? That's how you met.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. But there was, but something remarkable happened while I was on maternity leave, which was that our colleagues, Emily Steele and Mike Schmidt broke the Bill O'Reilly story. And so in the midst, there was sort of one day where I was home amidst all of diapers and bottles. And I looked up at the TV and the announcement that Bill O'Reilly was basically being fired from Fox. And I was like,”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were online threats. Yeah, exactly. There were my sort of Twitter, I was totally new to Twitter at the time. And so my introduction to Twitter was just the trolls who were sort of threatening to kill and rape me as a response for examining Trump's treatment of him. Yeah, it was a little scary.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and that's right. That's one of the things. I was actually one of the first real meaningful conversations that Jodie and I had. So I continued to cover Trump after he was elected, did some of the initial reporting on Trump Russia, and then had a baby. And so I was off on maternity leave for four months. And I was actually feeling pretty battered during that time because to have, you know, to have worked with these women who went on the record against Trump and then to help cover his election and to undergo the attacks and to not just witness the attacks that Trump and his supporters made on those women, but also on me and the New York Times.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it was similar in that the attacks and the pressure and getting people to talk about this issue, which I think was the most difficult. But that was the most interesting part of the book to me is like as a reporter, getting people to trust you and how you approach them was really interesting.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of which there were many, right? We had done some stories before the Access Hollywood tape came out, and then we did some of the stories after the Access Hollywood tape. So I worked with some of those women who had come forward during 2016, during the race. And that was, you know, that was obviously a very different experience from the Weinstein reporting.”
2019-09-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "She Said" authors Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT