I think everybody has a very personal journey about coming forward, especially about incidents that happened long ago. When I knew that Jodie Cantor had turned up on my driveway in California, my only reaction was sheer terror. There are deep personal reasons for not speaking out. Even if your family is supportive, there's a big difference between going on record and being public about a story like this. And you find that you're not the protagonist, even in your own story, once it goes public.
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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