#jodi kantor
Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey photographed by me on November 29th at the offices of The New York Times for Variety. Out now!
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New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, who broke the story of Harvey Weinstein’s alleged sexual misconduct, talk about the obstacles Weinstein created to prevent their investigation. Their book is She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement.
On Gwyneth Paltrow’s critical role in reporting the story
Jodi Kantor: So to our surprise, Gwyneth Paltrow had a really powerful story of sexual harassment by Harvey Weinstein and of being threatened when her first really important roles were on the line. Early on in the investigation when almost nobody in Hollywood would talk to us she did – and she even tried to help us find other women. But she was very scared to go on the record.
It became clear in the course of the investigation that Harvey Weinstein was obsessed with the question of whether or not we were speaking to Paltrow. He showed up at a party at her house early. She called us from the bathroom completely panicked. In the sort of series of final confrontations about the story that took place at The New York Times Weinstein kept hammering us, “Are you talking to Gwyneth? Is Gwyneth in the story?” And at that point she was still at a totally secret source, and we couldn’t figure out why he was so obsessed with something that wasn’t even part of the story.
The answer only became clear over a course of weeks and months after we broke the story. As more and more Weinstein victims came forward, they said publicly they told us – and they even told Paltrow – that what Weinstein had said to them in the course of harassing or assaulting them was essentially, “Don’t you want what Gwyneth has?” Meaning he was implying to them that she had slept with him and that this was the bargain of sex for work. If you go along with this you can have the Oscar, the wealth, the fame, the golden girl status.
So essentially two things happened: First of all, Paltrow was very, very upset to learn this. Not only had she never sexually succumb to Weinstein, but she was so horrified to find out that she had been used essentially as a tool of predation. She spent a long time on the phone in the fall of 2017 with other Weinstein victims coming to terms with the way he had used her and with feeling like she had somehow been used as an accessory in this. But then the other thing we finally realized is that this was probably why he’d been so obsessed with whether or not we were talking to Paltrow. Because as soon as other women heard Paltrow’s story and heard that she had never given in to him and that she had refused him, then they would understand so much more about his psyche, the way his scheme worked, and that it would all fall apart.
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