Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey Go Behind the Scenes of She Said

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MEET THE PRESS
Kantor and Twohey in the New York Times newsroom. She Said is in theaters November 18th. Hair, Kiyonori Sudo; makeup, Karan Franjola. Sittings Editor: Willow Lindley.
Photo: Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos

What happens when journalists become the story? That’s the question Vogue posed to reporters Megan Twohey, 45, and Jodi Kantor, 47, whose 2019 book She Said has become a new film, directed by Maria Schrader and starring Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan. When the movie opens on November 18th, Twohey’s and Kantor’s personal lives will be on display, alongside the bravery of the victims who talked to them about Harvey Weinstein’s sexual predation. Here, Twohey and Kantor take us behind the scenes of their Pulitzer Prize–winning investigation, and its journey to the screen.

The first clue that our investigation into Harvey Weinstein might one day turn into a film came, oddly enough, from the producer himself.

It was back in October 2017, the day before we published our investigation into his treatment of women, and Variety had somehow gotten word of what we were up to. The piece revealed that our story was in the works and quoted Weinstein pretending not to know a thing about it. He quipped, “The story sounds so good, I want to buy the movie rights.”

At the time, the idea of a movie sounded preposterous. We were rewriting drafts, coaxing reluctant sources, and struggling to force Weinstein to respond to allegations. We were also exhausted, subsisting on takeout and the chocolate almonds our editor stashed in her desk, and could barely see beyond the strict obligations to facts. One night, as we shared a cab back to Brooklyn, we wondered aloud: Would anyone even care about what we were doing?

Five years later, the film She Said, based on our 2019 book, depicts so much of what we witnessed and experienced, including the takeout, that late-night cab ride, and a few personal truths we’ve never shared before. In fact certain details are shown precisely as they were, down to the font on an incriminating document one of the victims read to us. The actors Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan convey emotions and moments we never thought could be captured, and Jennifer Ehle, Samantha Morton, and other actors embody our sources’ tenacity, deep reflection, and risk.

It’s not a documentary. There are differences, compressed chronologies, a couple of completely invented scenes. And some of the moments that feel like playback have nuance now. That’s because so much has shifted since 2017: The #MeToo movement has exploded, endured, and suffered backlash. Like many workplaces, the New York Times newsroom has been upended by the pandemic. Harvey Weinstein is a convicted rapist serving a decades-long sentence.

But the film’s focus on process and on truth feels just as relevant now—and it serves as a reminder of what journalists and courageous sources can accomplish together. It also may reach people who have never heard these stories before. We both have daughters who were babies during the investigation, and after the film’s trailer, they each had the same question: “Who is Harvey Weinstein?”

JODI KANTOR: Megan and I laugh about it now—our initial perceptions of each other. I had built my own little world at the paper, and she was new, arriving from Reuters in 2016. I noticed her because she broke some of the first sexual misconduct allegations against Trump while pregnant.

I had been through contentious stories during pregnancy too (an Amazon investigation, published when I was 38 weeks). Reporters usually keep the focus on our work, and we don’t want to complain. But I knew that feeling of trying to hold the story with one arm, a new life with the other.

So I brought a bag of maternity clothes to the office for Megan, hand-me-downs from a group of Times colleagues. She left the bag untouched at her desk. I was like, Who doesn’t take the clothes? There was something a little guarded about her, a little reticent.

Early in the Weinstein investigation, I called her for advice. Movie stars were confiding in me, sharing upsetting stories—but also saying that coming forward would be unlikely, maybe unthinkable. So I was holding terrible secrets, and a dawning sense of how big this was, with no path to making any of it public.

MEGAN TWOHEY: When I fielded that first phone call from Jodi, I was in rough shape. The hope and joy I felt being pregnant had turned to terrifying dread once my daughter was born. There’s a scene in the film where Carey is sobbing to her husband, not quite able to articulate what’s wrong. It plunged me back to a day in early motherhood when I asked my husband to come home from work because I felt too shaky and scared to be alone with the baby.

Jodi helped me bear the load. She’d suffered postpartum depression a decade before, and gave me the name of the doctor who had treated her. In return I offered her the phrase I had used before, a reporter’s attempt to give courage to victims: I can’t change what happened to you in the past, but if we work together, we may be able to use your experience to help other people.

The call helped me realize how much I needed to go back to work, how I needed that sense of self. In the film, there’s something about the way Carey yanks open the door to the newsroom on her first day back from maternity leave that captures exactly how I felt.

But I admit I was skeptical of Jodi’s investigation. A lot of my reporting had focused on women and children on the margins of society who are ignored or overlooked. The plight of famous actresses like Ashley Judd and Gwyneth Paltrow didn’t feel as urgent—and I wasn’t sure what Weinstein’s pattern of behavior amounted to.

I also wasn’t sure what to make of Jodi, who wore girly dresses and talked a lot more than I did. But I knew she had a track record: In response to that 2015 examination of Amazon, the company had granted paternity leave to its entire workforce. And soon all her talk made an impression on me. I saw that her reporting had promise.

GETTING THE STORY
Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan as Twohey and Kantor in She Said.


Photo: JoJo Whilden/Universal Pictures

JK: Megan knew about investigating sex crimes; I had delved into the workplaces of powerful companies. We would spend an hour polishing a text message to a source. The film shows how we became glued together—how we began to finish each other’s sentences. We shared everything: I had won Gwyneth Paltrow’s trust on the phone, but when the time came to visit her in the Hamptons, I wanted Megan along, to hear the unfamiliar sound of a star speaking with complete candor. On the drive back to the city, we shared a junk food binge and our own dead-honest observations about the Times, marriage, motherhood.

Have you ever met a woman you assumed was different from you, then realized you had a common core? That was us.

Also, I had been wrong about Megan’s reticence. Let’s just say the woman has a talent for confrontation. There’s a moment in the film when she tells off a drunk man at a bar. It doesn’t matter that the scene is fiction. As I came to learn, she’d done that before—even more forcefully.

MT: The pandemic has, for the moment, hollowed out the physical newsroom of the Times, but the office comes roaring back to life onscreen. You see not only the bustling cubicles, coffee-machine banter, and beautiful view from the cafeteria, but also camaraderie that is impossible over Zoom.

Watching the film made me realize how physical our bonds were during the investigation. In some of the moments in which Zoe and Carey square off against Weinstein and his team, they are physically surrounded by their editors. I remembered how empowering and poignant it was to have our bosses—Dean Baquet, Matt Purdy, our editor Rebecca Corbett—literally at our backs.

At one point, Jodi and I were on the phone with a Weinstein lawyer who was obfuscating on his behalf. Furious, Dean grabbed the phone from my hands and barked into the speaker: “Cut the shit.” After Ashley Judd called Jodi to say she would go on the record, Jodi broke down crying in front of us. When I ran through the newsroom to tell Rebecca that I had confirmed the number of settlements Weinstein paid to silence victims, she sprang from her desk and threw her arms around me.

Several months ago, Dean retired as executive editor, and much of the staff returned to see him off. It looked like the old newsroom, colleagues crowded together—and it felt like another moment to take stock of all that was lost to the pandemic. I had to slip into the bathroom to hide my tears.

JK: The film’s portrayal of the victims is not about replaying stories of abuse, but showing these women as individuals working through a choice—they didn’t do anything to cause the predation, so why was it on them to risk helping us?

Take Zelda Perkins—she’s a force, a former Weinstein assistant who spent decades prohibited by a heavy-handed legal agreement from telling her story. In those years of enforced silence, she gained a remarkable ability to look beyond herself. From the first moment I called Zelda, startling her on her work phone, she placed responsibility on our shoulders: This isn’t just about Weinstein, she said. You have to blow open the entire legal, financial, and cultural system constructed to keep women silent.

She’s played by Samantha Morton in the film, which depicts an actual meeting in a London restaurant when Zelda again delivered that charge. In Zoe’s face, especially her eyes, I felt the layers of my own reaction in that moment: I’m sitting here with a notebook, going up against huge forces. The scariest part is the prospect of failing. I believe in this process. I am honored by your trust. And we are not going to let you down.

In life, and the film, there’s an implicit but powerful contrast between the way women like Zelda were treated by Weinstein and the level of support our own editors gave us. That gap has always been a little bit of a heartbreak. Creative, enterprising women like Zelda were erased from the film business. Nothing can change that. But the filmmakers have returned them to Hollywood and given them a level of respect and dignity they were never granted the first time around.

MT: People always ask me and Jodi if we were scared of Weinstein. But the movie captures a common trait of investigative reporters: We relish squaring off against wrongdoers.

JK: The most frequent reaction we’ve gotten to our book, and now the film, is that going through this recent history is less depressing and more galvanizing than people assumed. Perhaps that’s because the story answers the perennially difficult question of how you confront a bully: You do it together.

MT: As she prepared for her role, Carey combed through my public interviews and observed me over Zoom from her home in England, then over meals and playdates with our children in New York. I’ll confess it all made me a bit self-conscious. But I can now see that research paid off.

Take the scene where she fields a surprise visit from Weinstein and his lawyers in a Times conference room. As they frantically scramble to try to smear Weinstein’s accusers, Carey watches calmly, a slight smile spreading across her face.

By that point, we knew we had the facts and the backing of a powerful news organization. There was nothing Weinstein could do to stop us.

JK: Zoe, who understood she was dealing with a reporter who wanted to know everything, was generous and clear: She wasn’t mimicking the precise me, but using certain things about me to build a character of her own. Her questions were half technician, about the details of reporting, and half shrink, about my deepest motivations. In that second category, she went to places we never could. If I try to explain in prose how my relationship with my older daughter, Talia, fueled this work, it would come out treacly. Zoe’s version onscreen is slightly fictionalized, but sharp, beautiful, and true.

MT: Along with everyone else, Jodi and I watched with wonder as the #MeToo movement that Tarana Burke had founded a decade earlier accelerated with breadth and speed no one could ever have predicted.

If this story was just a movie, it would have stopped there: Women triumph. The end. But as reporters well know, stories are rarely that tidy. And sure enough, as the movement progressed, it became increasingly complicated—and controversial. When we watched this film for the first time last summer, Johnny Depp was successfully suing Amber Heard for defamation, as his supporters flocked the courthouse and viciously attacked her online.

But as reporters, we’re also cautious about sweeping statements of where things stand. That same week, the Southern Baptists, the largest Protestant denomination in the country, were in turmoil over #MeToo issues, and there are other signs of the durability and scope of the movement. The final accounting on what has and hasn’t changed in the past five years is not done, and the question of where we go from here is unknown.

JK: Megan and I are on fresh reporting quests now—she has delved into online dangers to vulnerable teenagers, while I have returned to my obsessions with Amazon and the workplace. As the film was being made, the two of us were enduring the pandemic, trying to channel that newsroom energy from corners of our Brooklyn bedrooms. We coped in part by meeting for long loops in Prospect Park, developing our own shared ideas about investigative journalism and where it could go in the future.

We hope the film will help bolster the case for this work. Our job is to build people’s confidence in telling the truth. We want people to feel as deeply as we do that facts and stories matter, that change can happen. If a single truth-teller gains the confidence to call a journalist because of this film, that would be the best possible reward: the cycle beginning anew.