“I think what that story shows is how there really was a business calculation that was being made at these companies,” Ms. Steel said. “They saw that Roger Ailes had just left. Megyn Kelly had just left. Bill O’Reilly was their biggest star and he pulled in hundreds of millions of dollars a year for them. And that was more important to them at that time.”
For Ms. Kantor and Ms. Twohey, examining the system that Mr. Weinstein built — one full of attorneys, agents and assistants — to shame, silence and coerce victims was the next step after the first story was published.
“We can’t just stop by sort of revealing allegations against individuals,” Ms. Twohey said. “We have to start to kind of piece together and peel back the layers of systemic failures and really push this conversation forward into solutions. Not just systemic failures but systemic solutions.”
Patterns of abuse are often similar.
Reporters on both the Weinstein and O’Reilly cases say they were struck by a pattern. In Mr. O’Reilly’s case, he would offer women exposure or jobs with Fox, Ms. Steel said.
In 2013, Mr. O’Reilly attempted to invite a woman, Wendy Walsh, back to his hotel room after giving her career advice. When Ms. Walsh turned him down, he retaliated by getting her dropped as a guest on his show and rescinding his offer to make her a network contributor. She did not report the episode out of fear of jeopardizing her career.
“There are a lot of systems in place that allowed these men to continue to perpetuate this harassment against women,” Ms. Steel said, “and get away with it.”
Of Mr. Weinstein, who often used assistants to accompany women to hotel suites before leaving them alone with him, Ms. Kantor said, “It was eerie how similar the stories of predation were,” despite speaking to women of different backgrounds, ages and eras of Mr. Weinstein’s career.
“He was calculated,” Ms. Twohey said. “He was very smart in creating allegiances and relationships throughout a variety of industries that he used as cover for his bad behavior.”
Examining what’s at stake for the victims — and reporters.
The high-profile men at the center of these stories were not afraid to intimidate their victims, or the reporters who worked to shed light on abuse. Ms. Steel recounted an earlier conversation with Mr. O’Reilly on an unrelated story, where he threatened to go after her “with everything he had.”
“It did help me understand how it might be to be on the other end of a threatening phone call from O’Reilly,” Ms. Steel said, “or how he would respond in some situations.”
Ms. Kantor, who was at one point subject to intimidation from Mr. Weinstein’s self-built protection network, said that the bigger fear for her was endangering sources, some of whom were not famous and who had risked their livelihoods to speak out.
Ultimately, both she and Ms. Twohey said, the fear of failure drove the reporting forward; they did not want Mr. Weinstein’s tactics of intimidation to work.
“We have felt the greatest sense of journalistic and moral responsibility,” Ms. Kantor said. “The prospect that we could’ve failed, that we could’ve known this material and yet not been able to publish it, and walked around for the rest of our lives holding this terrible secret and not being able to share it with anybody, that was the really scary part of the process.”
Ms. Judd, who had been a target of Mr. Weinstein’s information-gathering efforts against his accusers, said that she was prepared for the outcome.
“There was definitely a gap between ‘this is easy, this is the right thing to do,’” Ms. Judd said, “and ‘something really big is getting ready to happen.’”
She said that one outcome of speaking out could have been a libel lawsuit against her, but then she considered the alternative.
“Maybe the change was going to be that all of the girls and women who had been affected by Harvey in these damaging and obnoxious ways would come together with women across all spaces and sectors and industries,” Ms. Judd said, “and say basta — enough is enough.”
Harassment does not occur just in high-profile industries.
With stories of sexual abuse spilling out of Hollywood, Congress and the news media, reporters must grapple with a related issue: the abuse that occurs in lower-profile industries, where employees have even fewer avenues of recourse.
“It does feel like there is a lot more journalistic work to do in different places at the other end of the economic spectrum,” Ms. Kantor said. “I do think that part of what is important about these high-profile media and Hollywood stories is that so many of the men who have a history of these allegations, these were our culture’s storytellers.”
Where does the movement go from here?
It’s a moment that feels like a national reckoning, but a big question has appeared: Will the stories about Mr. Weinstein, Mr. O’Reilly and others bring about lasting change?
“All I can say is we can see things now that we were never able to see before,” Ms. Kantor said. “Now you can really see the patterns,” including that women are generally abused early on in their careers, in episodes that can sometimes change their career trajectory.
Another prominent example, she said, is the new scrutiny over confidential legal settlements — a tactic that has long been used from Hollywood to Capitol Hill to erase disputes — and if they really protect the abused or whether they enable predation to continue unabated.
“On a collective level,” Ms. Kantor said, “it doesn’t go away at all.”
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