Investigation and the way that you conducted it that essentially got a simmering pot to boil. So 1st of all good evening we're thrilled to be with you were thrilled to be with all of you thank you so much to sit here and actually having. Removed and excited that will join the conversation in a few minutes you know in answer to your question I'd say this story and this is an x. Ray into how power works and the book is a kind of invitation into our partnership where essentially saying come be an investigative journalist with us and come behind the scenes because the events that me to have come to mean so much to so many people and come be with us on those 1st hushed phone calls with the actress says come be with us during the final confrontation with Harvey Weinstein in the offices of The New York Times and come learn the things that we learned during this investigation which were not only about celebrities being harassed they were about secret settlements and the role that the everyday legal devices that women around the country are still signing every day the way they can be used to kind of enable an alleged predator it's about lawyers and the role they play in our society and whether the law has been the arbiter of right and wrong on this issue or whether the law has been used to protect perhaps the wrong ball and we felt like we kept learning more and more about how power really works how is it that one man was able to accumulate essentially over 40 years of allegations and silence almost every woman who tried to come forward about him. Well you know in terms of looking at this particular individual you know sexual harassment is so much about power as you have reported out and the power that some individuals are able to hold over others in the workplace sexual harassment is ubiquitous it's in every industry every workplace or many workplaces why when you began working on this story was the focus on Weinstein in Hollywood what brought you to that story in particular Well I mean one of the things was that it was actually one of many investigations into sexual harassment that the New York Times took up in 2017 that spring something remarkable happened our colleagues Emily Steele and Mike Schmidt broke the story of Bill O'Reilly and the settlements that he and Fox News had paid to women who had come forward with allegations of sexual misconduct and other abusive behavior against him and in the end you know it turned out that Fox and O'Reilly had paid more than $40000000.00 to women to help silence women who had complained about him and what was so remarkable about this story was not that these complaints had been made in the 1st place Fox knew about that it was that these reporters the New York Times aired those complaints and when they did O'Reilly remarkable happened or rightly lost his job advertisers. It seems like a long time ago but we have the New York Times kind of stood up and took notice of that and the editors and reporters came together and said asked a question that may now seem quaint in 2019 which was are there other powerful men who have been able to engage in this type of behavior and cover their tracks and so we actually it was the launch of a much wider Investigative Project Weinstein was one of those investigations there were also investigations underway about sex. Alleged sexual harassment in Silicon Valley and the restaurant industry and academia and we had no guarantee that any We were going to land and the of these investigations all we knew is that we were committed to trying to uncover this behavior across a variety of industries Well Megan you know if I understand from the book that you were presented at a certain moment with an opportunity in terms of which direction do you take your reporting and you had some questions and maybe some reservations about the Weinstein story can you walk us through what those thoughts were and how you. You know I had joined the New York Times in 2016 as part of the presidential campaign team and I had done reporting on then candidate Donald Trump's treatment of women I had and had worked on some of the 1st stories of women who came forward with allegations of sexual misconduct against him and after he was and that was a completely different experience you know in terms of accountability you know and then helped to cover his election in terms of the experience of the women who participated in that journalism yes they received support on the one hand on the other hand Trump really went on the attack he called them all liars he threatened to sue them he threatened to sue the New York Times and me and my other colleagues who did this reporting it was pretty bruising and so I continued to cover him after he was elected and looking at some of the initial ties between Trump and his company and Russia and then I had a baby and I went off on maternity leave for 4 months and instead of being reporting on Trump I was I just watched it unfold and so when I came back from maternity leave I had this question of whether or not to join Jodi on the Weinstein investigation or go back to covering Trump and on the one hand I had sort of doubts about going back to cover Trump because I was starting to wonder if any of the investigative reporting on him was ever going to make an impact but on the other hand I also had questions about Jodi at this point had been talking to she'd been talking to Gwyneth Paltrow and. Ashley Judd and Rose McGowan and she was starting to gather these stories and I will I will confess that I sort of had a hard time grasping that somebody like when it could have been a victim. I had you know a lot of investigative reporting we work on giving voice to the voiceless and I had a hard time seeing these famous actresses as a category of victims who were in need of help of the New York Times but Jodi said something to me which really resonated was that it actually showed that if it could happen to these women then nobody was immune and that if we were able to help uncover the truth about what had happened here we might be able to have a broader impact. So what's remarkable about this investigation too is that it has been tried so many times by so many different journalists some very accomplished journalists. How were you able to succeed when so many failed. So we certainly can't comment on any of these that are after it's but I can tell you this we were using I think a different tool kit I think that a lot of those previous stories were trying to do the obvious thing which is to get women on the record and to get the stories we now all know which are these long horrifying detailed stories of pretty. And we were actually trying to do something different because as Meghan said we actually had some success very early on getting actresses to tell us their Weinstein hotel room stories off the record that was really important because it sent a kind of internal signal like Meghan and I could only tell each other and we could tell the editors and other than that it had to be secret but within the newspaper we thought there's a very there there's certainly a story here but what we also realized is that everybody was afraid to go on the record and that we could spend the entire summer talking to actor says and having these. Very disturbing but ultimately off the record and an reportable conversations with them and we realized that the Weinstein story was going to need to be broken with proof and so if you look at that very 1st Weinstein story we published we did get actually job on the record we did get boring mad and a former Weinstein assistant on the record but there's a Manton of evidence in the story that comes in other forms there are human resources records there's the legal and financial trail of the settlements that Weinstein paid the earliest settlement we've been able to document from a kind of patient 0 of the Weinstein investigation was in 1990 and the most recent one that was in that story was from 2015 so we had that whole span we had. Former Miramax employees on the record saying yes this was a big problem at the company and so the story I think I think the tool kit we were using was different and it's part of why the book is called She said Because week if you only get actor says on the record you're a little bit in danger of putting them in a sort of he said she said situation especially if there aren't that many of them because Ryan Steen would have been able to say things like well you know there were only 2 people in that hotel room and there were no witnesses and that's sort of the classic scenario where this story gets stuck and we wanted to publish it once we understood the material and we had a sense of what we we think happened here we wanted to publish a story that gave women who were able to come forward a mountain of evidence to stand on to Mendis So I you know I would love to shift a little bit into some of the particulars of these settlements and some of the documentation you were able to obtain You know I think what I really appreciate about the book and the reporting is that. It doesn't fall on this kind of misconception that sexual harassment or sexual violence is is you know perpetrated by a couple bad apples that there are actually systems in place and people and dynamics that allow this behavior to continue so you know the role of secret settlements seems to be pretty significant and how this problem continues and sustains. Was there a specific case that helped illustrate to both of you the impact of the secret settlements on sexual harassment. Well you're absolutely right I mean and one of the things that we felt one of the reasons we wanted to write the book was that and the 1st story when we 1st broke the story we had been able to connect some of the dots of alleged predation and how you've been able to cover it up but the. The course of reporting this book we were able to bring together so many other pieces of the puzzle and really pulled the curtain back on the machinery that was in place to silence women from the high priced lawyers who were by his side from David Boies and Lisa Bloom to also these secret settlements which are used every single day in the United States and cases of sexual harassment and sexual assaults across all industries and and there's there's perfectly understandable reasons why I mean oftentimes when women come forward when something when something bad happens to them in the workplace if they are you know if they are if they suffer sexual harassment or sexual assault they'll go to a lawyer seeking help because they want to do something about it and oftentimes they are told that the best recourse is to basically not go to court not go into civil court and through the e.e.o.c. And a whole system that can take years with no guarantees that you're going to receive financial damages for what's happened that you are going to be in the process of that opening yourself up to attack and smears and the loss of your own privacy and so they're often told that the best opportunity for them is to basically. Except money out of court in exchange for silence and we had we had understood that those secret settlements took place I think probably most people had a vague idea that these things take place they're a common tool used in sort of when it comes to violations under civil law but when we really started to report these out and learned the details of them the restrictive clauses that went along with them you know we are jaws drop Not only do these did did the women and we were able to document as many as 12 secret settlements that Weinstein had been able to pay from 1900 to 2015 this was like time and again where he was basically able to cover his tracks and go on to allegedly hurt more people and one of the reasons was like look at these restrictive clauses these women were not allowed to tell their colleagues about what had happened to them if they wanted to tell a therapist the therapist had to sign a confidentiality clause they had to turn over all evidence of anything that had happened and if a reporter came knocking or anybody else for that matter they had to basically they they were legally prohibited from talking and if they did they were going to have to they would take $1000.00 could come after them for money and damages himself and so there were a variety of women that we were able to identify who had entered into these secret settlements and when we came knocking on their doors and calling they were terrified to speak out and there was one the 1st woman to break her settlement was Perkins who is now gone on a campaign in the u.k. To battle these saying that they actually pose a public danger and when you approached her you know what. Was she at that point willing to take the risk to break her settlement or what did you have to do in order to get to the place where she would be willing to speak. Just to introduce the situation and really now went through this together they were assistants together. The Weinstein Company in the late ninety's based out of the London office and was the sort of senior partner because she was an entire year older then and Rowena at the time and so when we met 0. We. We essentially knew and what Zelda told further elaborated on is that something bad we were told had happened. We didn't know what and that I had felt sort of responsible for her and had known about it and that the 2 women had banded together and resigned and were trying to call Harvey out and to do something about the problem and instead they had this secret settlement and at the time was not returning my phone calls or e-mails she was taking the promise of the settlement very seriously and I think she'll speak a little bit later about why she was not ready to speak to a journalist Zelda was in a very different place over the course of that 20 years Zelda had begun to look at but it happened to them and especially the settlement and see it in much more systemic terms she said she had questions like How can it be that very young women face legal pressure to sign away the right to talk about their own personal experiences how can it be that we were instructed to sign pieces of paper that prevented us from warning other women about Harvey Weinstein Why is like this it even by the way these are the most risk there are secret settlements and generally are very restrictive but there's and roominess are the most restrictive we've ever seen they came with clauses like f. . They wanted to speak test era tests or accountants about what had happened they needed special permission if the truth somehow got out they had to sort of like make efforts to the document doesn't actually say why but that they have to sort of you know work to make things look much better than they were and so I went. In London and she she. Didn't really you know were not allowed to keep copies of their own supplement which raises the question how can you abide by an agreement that you don't even have a copy of the head caddish to gather some papers from her settlement and when she passed them across the table. You know in in our kind of journalism seeing documents is so important as you know and the papers even had this kind of distinctive old Merrimac logo that I recognized from the 1990 s. And seeing these restrictions in black and white you know really really showed us how punitive they were and so the extraordinary thing about Zelda is that from that conversation she was tempted to break her settlement she really wanted to speak out but she was also very scared of the settlements are no joke and a woman who speaks out faces serious legal and financial penalty is and so I was on the phone with lawyers in London saying like I didn't tell them of the specifics of the situation but I said Is it even ethical for me to go forward with a story in which this woman could break her settlement or is that too great a risk for the source and the lawyer was like you cannot do it nobody has ever broken a settlement in all of my you know decades of practice and I remember this one lawyer said to me in his crisp British accent he said Jodi. Money for silence that's the deal and so and so at that point what we decided to do with Zelda consented to do is to let us write about her case and about what happened to her. But we would have to do it with her off the record and we had to talk to other Miramax employees who knew what happened and that's how we could sort of document it but actually even when we were able to do that really you know remained a bit of a blank cutout figure in the story because we hadn't been able to reach her and so we were afraid to say too much about her so we were able to document this this trail of settlements without putting any of the women who had participated in those settlements at legal risk and some tremendous legal journalistic maneuvering I mean it's really impressive. That the we should say is a postscript one of the most fascinating thing is that's happened since is that. Broker settlement Ashley math another Weinstein victim broke her settlement with us Rowena is breaking her settlement technically by coming on the stage and talking tonight. Last night we were doing a very similar event in l.a. And during the audience q. And a a woman stood up and said I've had this settlement and da for 20 years I can't take I was sexually harassed in the fall to my job I can't take it anymore I'm breaking my settlement and Meghan said to her you're breaking your settlement right here at this event and she said yes and we didn't want to even ask her too many questions from the stage because we weren't sure how far she was willing to go but this is a small measure of I think the change that's happening that women are actually beginning to defy these agreement. Yes it is it's amazing and it's also been fascinating to see some of the legislation that's come into play. That will now prohibit these types of settlements thanks to your reporting. So you know these secret settlements of course it's lawyers who are facilitating them. You encountered a number of attorneys who essentially assisted Weinstein in preserving all of these cases in secret tell us about some of them especially maybe the ones that were most surprising given their other types of work sure. You know well there was I mean starting with there was there was David Boies who is probably the most famed litigator in the country who helped win the case for gay marriage before the Supreme Court he was involved in the Bush v Gore case. And he was also come to find out in the course of our reporting probably Weinstein's biggest defender he worked by Weinstein side for 15 years he probably had the most knowledge of the alleged the allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assaults against him and he helped him conceal and spin those allegations and worked helped him avoid scrutiny at every turn and he was by Weinstein side in 2017 when we were working on our investigation and in fact he helped him execute a contract with black cube a firm that made up of former Israeli intelligence officials that were promised $300000.00 bonus if they could halt our investigation they targeted journalists they targeted women who Weinstein fear feared would go on the record with allegations against him so we had a lot of questions for David Boies going into the reporting of this book and he talked. And at the end of it all said that he had no regrets about the work that he had done for him that he really feels like when you sign up to work for a client you stand by their side. Lisa Bloom was another attorney that we encountered in the course of our reporting now that and she was I think probably even more surprising to us because she had been one of the most famous feminist attorneys in the country Gloria all reds daughter she has been involved in a lot of high profile cases helping victims of sexual harassm