This is the speech written by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, two New York Times reporters, upon winning the Pulitzer Prize for their investigation and reporting about Harvey Weinstein and his history of sexual harassment. It is also an ode to their daughters and what they hope will change for their futures based on the story they uncovered. Below is the full speech and it is worth reading to the end. Enjoy.
Jodi Kantor:
This might seem strange to say, but two of the people we’re closest to in the world have no idea who Harvey Weinstein is, and they don’t know a thing about our reporting on him. When our investigation began, Mira Twohey Rutman weighed 12 pounds, had never eaten a bite of solid food, and had a mother who was still home on maternity leave. Violet Kantor Lieber, at a year-and-a-half, was a relative giant. She was just learning to go down the slide at the playground and liked grabbing phones so much that by the end of the summer, she had managed to accidentally Facetime Ashley Judd.
When these girls are much older, and mature enough to understand terrible violations, and humiliation, and pain, we are going to sit them down and tell them the story of our investigation, and our team’s work, and how all of us became part of something much bigger than ourselves. We will attempt to explain how one day we were working on an incredibly tough story, and then just a few days later, we started to see change happening all over the world.
Megan Twohey:
Here is what we’re going to tell them:
The easiest part will be telling them about the women who came forward, because those women will already be inscribed in the history books, their names synonymous not with humiliation or victimhood, but with courage, truth, and optimism that things can change.
We’ll tell them about Ashley Judd and Laura Madden, the first to speak out on Weinstein. One is a movie star from Tennessee. The other is a former Miramax employee who lives in Wales. But their motivations were exactly the same. As Ashley put it: “Women have been talking about Harvey amongst ourselves for a long time, and it’s simply beyond time to have the conversation publicly.”
Zelda Perkins and Ashley Matthau, both silenced by settlements, spoke out of a common belief that the law should not be twisted to erase abuse or muzzle women who want to help protect other women. In 2015, Lauren O’Connor documented stories from inside the Weinstein Company that sounded exactly like the ones women were telling us from 25 years before. Gwyneth Paltrow went from being known as Harvey Weinstein’s special star to being known as a special voice speaking out about what really happened in those hotel rooms. Rose McGowan, Katherine Kendall, Hope Exiner d’Amore, Cynthia Burr, Erika Rosenbaum: All of you are so different, and yet your stories about Harvey Weinstein are so similar.
Two distinguished writers named Salma Hayek and Lupita Nyong’o poured their memories into essays for the ages that The Times was so proud to publish.
Jodi Kantor:
What all of us on this team will remember about this year was the stream of constant conversations with women in so many industries who were finally ready to share what they had faced. Tonya Exum, a Ford factory worker in Chicago, endured sexual trauma while serving in the military, only to be groped and threatened on the Ford factory floor. After she reported it, her co-workers told her she was “raping the company.” Her colleague Suzette Wright spent 20 years yearning for an apology from Ford, which finally came after Susan and Catrin’s story was published, from Ford’s C.E.O..
Dana Min Goodman, Julia Wolov and Rebecca Corry, three of the comedians with stories about Louis CK, kept us laughing on the phone even as they took the risk of describing experiences that shook their careers.
After telling their stories to Katie Benner, the entrepreneurs Lindsay Meyer and Kathryn Minshew took further action, using their influence to fight for changes in the boardrooms and offices of Silicon Valley venture firms. Natalie Saibel, Jamie Seet, and Trish Nelson, employees of the Spotted Pig restaurant, all agreed to be photographed for Times, but only if they could be together in the shot — a symbol of their courage, and also their solidarity.
These women did not do anything to get harassed or assaulted or humiliated. They had every right to preserve their privacy, stay silent. Instead they took a leap of faith, and told us their stories, and as a result, all of our children will benefit.
Once Megan and I understood the essence of the Weinstein allegations, we realized that part of our job was to give the women a mountain of evidence to stand on: documents, internal emails, settlement records, human resources reports. Our goal was to break the he-said-she-said-cycle, and show how much evidence there was for what these women were telling us.
We didn’t want to publish a first story that set off debate about what had really happened. Our aim was to publish a story that would cause debate about how so many allegations had accumulated at all.
We want our daughters to understand that this work is not about celebrity, or even individual predators, but about our team’s discovery of what now seems like an entire system of silencing women and erasing their experiences. Settlements that prevent victims from warning others.
Nondisclosure agreements that intimidate witnesses. A massive failure by human resources departments.
Megan Twohey:
One thing that every child needs to learn is how to confront a bully. We want our daughters to learn from the best: Dean Baquet and Matt Purdy. Working under unimaginable pressure in an astounding news year, Dean and Matt made it clear exactly how we were to deal with Harvey Weinstein: firmly, fairly, and most of all, on the record.
Our two girls, Mira and Violet, know Rebecca Corbett as “Aunt Rebecca,” who has bought them toys and soft dresses since the day they were born. But one day we will explain that Aunt Rebecca is actually a titan of American journalism. She’s the person who pushed and pushed for The Times to publish the original N.S.A. investigation and kept the story alive by encouraging the reporters to just keep learning more. She was so deeply at one with the Weinstein investigation that in the final days she stayed in the newsroom until 3 a.m. to worry about every single choice of word. And even after we broke the first story, she kept pushing us — and Susan Dominus, Jim Rutenberg and Steve Eder — to probe the particular moral horror of the Weinstein story: How could someone have racked up 40 years of these allegations, and instead of stopping him, why did more and more people help him?
Our daughters will also know the heroic role of Rory Tolan, who deserves a medal of his own for high-stakes copy editing — the kind done under legal threat, in which one word out of place can trigger a lawsuit. The kind done at 2 a.m. The kind done just before the moment of publication, with Dean Baquet, Rebecca Corbett and Matt Purdy all leaning over his shoulder and reading off his screen.
Jodi Kantor:
In fact, as our investigation came to a climax, we felt a bit like everyone in this room was leaning over that computer, coming together to confront a bully and protect the vulnerable. David McCraw, the calmest man alive in the face of legal threats. Arthur Sulzberger, who has protected so many reporters from so many angry subjects over the years. Arthur, perhaps it’s fitting that your time as our leader closed with a confrontation with Harvey Weinstein, a first-class threatener, an ardent believer in his own influence, and a man who proved all over again the depth and constancy of your commitment to our journalism.
New York Times readers, New York Times subscribers, if you’re listening out there, we’re all going to tell our children that you did something historic too. Millions of you came together to pay for this work, to sustain not just this investigation, but all the work of this newsroom.
Megan Twohey:
When our daughters are really mature, we will show them Ronan Farrow’s articles on Weinstein. Those will be required reading in our households, and in many households beyond, for their sensitive, powerful depictions of physical and emotional pain.
We will tell the girls how their fathers, Ron Lieber and Vadim Rutman, and Violet’s older sister, Talia, poured their own love, faith, patience and sacrifice into this work. Vadim, Ron, Talia: You are the hugs that we come home to, our relief from this work, but also the reason we do it. Talia, you know that Jodi and I are journalists, not activists. But the two of us, and all of the other reporters around the country who worked on these kinds of stories, did so with the hope that girls your age will know nothing but dignity and decency in the workplace and beyond.
Jodi Kantor:
So that’s the way we’ll tell most of the story to Mira and Violet. But we’re still not sure what we — or they — will say about the most important part, which is the ending. Years in the future, when we describe to our daughters the abuses we wrote about, they may say: Oh yeah, that still happens all the time. It happens at my summer job. It happens on my campus.
Or will they be shocked at what will seem like a bygone era, and say: Did people really think that used to be O.K. back then? Mom, how could that have been allowed to go on? And really, you were there when things changed?
The answer to that question is not up to us. It belongs to the rest of the world now. The only thing that the two of us, and this team, can contribute is to keep reporting. And that’s exactly what we intend to do.
Thank you.
