Zelda and Rowena are here tonight in speaking in active violation of this NDA. We're beginning to see a sample size of women who have broken these NDAs. Erwin Ryder was Harvey Weinstein's corporate accountant of 30 years. In 2014, he was hearing more office chatter about Weinstein and women. And he saw the Cosby case playing out. He said, what if we have a Cosby problem at this company? So little did I know when I met him in a dark bar in September 2017 that I was meeting somebody who was really frustrated because he had failed in intervening in the problem. That was his motivation for eventually handing over information which helped us publish the story.
International Women’s Week on Intelligence Squared. On this episode we hear from some of the women who helped sparked the 2017 MeToo movement. Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey are the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalists who first broke the story of Harvey Weinstein’s alleged sexual misconduct with dozens of Hollywood’s most elite actresses. The journalists were joined on stage by three women who had previously worked with Weinstein and broke their long-buried, and legally bound, silence over his sexual abuse allegations; Rowena Chiu - Former assistant to Harvey Weinstein; Laura Madden - Former production executive at Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax Films London; and Zelda Perkins - Former assistant to Harvey Weinstein and a campaigner against non-disclosure agreements. In this conversation they recount their work to publish a story which had been silenced for decades and how this sparked a movement for societal change. Our host for this conversation was Carrie Gracie, Former BBC China Editor and author of Equal: A Story of Women, Men and Money. This recording took place in central London in 2019 as part of the series “Intelligent Times” – a partnership between Intelligence Squared and The New York Times.
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