Shattering the Silence: the Female-Led Investigation that Brought an Infamous Predator to Justice
For a dam wall to burst, it takes someone to create the first cracks. Meet Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor: the two journalists whose dogged reporting led to an outpouring of #MeToo stories - and a global reckoning.
good.film
2 years ago
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What’s She Said about?
New York Times reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor break one of the most important stories in a generation — a story that helped catapult the #MeToo movement ignited by social activist Tarana Burke into the public consciousness, and shattered decades of silence around sexual assault in Hollywood.
What social causes does She Said explore?
Female Empowerment, Sexual Violence
What’s the key social insight within She Said?
The common thread that’s shared between nearly all of Harvey Weinstein’s assault victims is the fear of speaking out and being destroyed. For those that did share their experiences publicly, their cries seemed to fall on deaf ears. She Said portrays “the machine” of sexual assault: how easy it is for powerful men to keep their acts covered up, the courage and sacrifice it takes to expose them, and the determination of two women journalists that proved to be the tipping point.
It’s merely ink on a page. Or blinking pixels on a screen. But the power of investigative reporting can forge those little black squiggles into a weapon that can shatter empires.
We’ve seen that power wielded on screen before. Take All the President’s Men, or Spotlight: both stories about intrepid newspaper journalists that exposed a network of lies and abuse. Always puppeteered by people in positions of immense power, abusing their privilege.
The ingredients are the same in She Said, but this time the empire is the showiest of all: Hollywood. The puppeteer? Harvey Weinstein. Oscar-winner, tyrant, and one of the most influential, aggressive and powerful film producers of the modern era.
There had been hushed whispers about his behaviour since the 90s: models being sleazily groped; actresses promised juicy roles in exchange for naked massages, and worse. Others, like actress Rose McGowan, claimed for years that Weinstein raped her at the Sundance Film Festival in 1997 - then paid her a settlement in exchange for her silence. Used, then discarded. McGowan describes Weinstein’s predation like a conveyor belt of assault: “There’s an entire machine. A supply chain. If white men could have a playground, this would be it.”
But whispered phone calls alone don’t make a story, and rumours don’t bring justice. For that, you need an entity like The New York Times. Their 2016 investigation began as a broader expose of workplace sexual harassment - a white-hot issue that had been gathering voices online for a decade, and made louder by a Black social activist named Tarana Burke. She wanted to promote "empowerment through empathy" amongst women of colour who had been sexually abused. The phrase she started using on MySpace, back in 2006? “Me Too.”
The stories were there. The voices were deafening. But it would take two journalists, standing on the shoulders of activists like Burke, to get those voices on the record and bring them to light. That’s the task we follow in She Said, honing in with laser focus on some of the most predatory behaviour of all: by Harvey Weinstein, co-founder and CEO of Hollywood production company, Miramax.
Aiming the laser was Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan), who had investigated workplace culture before. Her reports into Amazon, Starbucks and Harvard Business School led to real policy reform as a direct result of her articles. She quickly teamed with fellow Times journo Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) with the pair realising that the abuse Weinstein left in his wake was “like an ocean of wrongdoing… if this can happen to Hollywood actresses, who else is it happening to?”
She Said is available to rent or buy in Australia on all major streaming platforms.
How does She Said explore Female Empowerment?
To navigate that ocean, director Maria Schrader and screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz introduce us to two unflinching co-captains. Together, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey begin trawling for the evidence they need to capture their white whale - Harvey Weinstein. To stretch the metaphor: these seas are rough.
In their search for the truth, Megan & Jodi are hung up on by Weinstein’s victims, and intimidated by his enablers. Doors are slammed in their face; threats are yelled on speakerphone with their children in the next room. Once, a padded bag is mailed in - filled with human waste. Another husky call threatens to rape Twohey and dump her body in the Hudson River. This is not just any investigation.
The reporters quickly realise that their abuse pales beside the threats that the victims face from the Weinstein machine. His “system” breeds an environment of silence - and fear. “The only way these women are going on the record,” they agree, “is if they all jump together.”
With a clinical, real-world approach - no swelling Hollywood soundtrack or male-model husbands to be found here - She Said shows us the months of groundwork and mountains of testimonials that Kantor & Twohey bravely wade through to get those women to make that jump, and cement their investigation. Seeing their painstaking process - extracting the truth, like one impacted tooth at a time - we realise how deeply invested these abusers are in keeping it hidden.
The system is skewed to protect and enable the perpetrators, NOT the victims - because of course it is. Police reports ‘disappear’, memories suddenly ‘cloud over’ and victims’ reputations are brutally twisted and tarnished. Female accusers are painted as liars, supposedly damaging successful men's reputations on purpose - either for fame, or just for kicks.
Midway through the film, as Megan and Jodi’s investigation starts to make industry waves before it’s published, Harvey Weinstein’s well-paid female adviser revoltingly tells him “you should be the hero of this story, not the villain”... proving that for some, neither gender nor morals can get in the way of a great paycheck.
She Said is also one of the best depictions we’ve ever seen of working motherhood. Jodi and Megan aren’t just juggling bags of shit and phone calls with Gwyneth Paltrow in their 9 to 5… they’re doing it while they’re pushing prams, distracting their toddlers and holding their husbands hands at pregnancy scans.
Even better, they’re not shown as Hollywood ‘supermums’, whipping up a fresh batch for the school bake sale while banging out the final copy for a deadline. They’re real women, with real lives, and they’re shown that way: with baby-hair, frazzled partners and post-partum depression all playing their part. It’s a refreshing (and respectful) take.
What’s the key scene in She Said?
There’s no shortage of arresting scenes in She Said. Helping that is star wattage: Gwyneth Paltrow provides her own voice in a pivotal phone call (from her own bathroom, unnerved and alarmed when Harvey shows up to her house), and Ashley Judd plays herself in two scenes that prove critical to the women’s investigation, explaining that Weinstein “blackballed my career because I refused him.”
As a standout scene, it’s easy to point to the chilling replay of real audio, captured with a concealed microphone, where we hear Harvey verbally plead with an Italian model to enter his hotel room (the model, Ambra Gutierrez, agreed to wear the mic as part of an NYPD sting). As we hear Gutierrez repeatedly tell Weinstein “no, no” and “I don’t want to. I’m feeling very uncomfortable”, Weinstein alternates between repeated threats about losing opportunities to advance her career, and promises that he won’t assault her (“I swear on my children”).
Director Maria Schrader chooses to overlay the audio with slow tracking shots of hotel hallways - high-end, carpeted spaces that would normally imply the thrill of luxury. Here, they’re imbued with a dread akin to Kubrick’s hallway tracking shots in The Shining.
But the real power within She Said arrives in the scenes where Kantor and Twohey track down and interview the women who Weinstein assaulted as young assistants, decades earlier. They were all at the beginning of exciting careers, breaking into an industry full of promise. The recurring feel is that the futures of these women were utterly stripped from them.
There’s the production assistant in Queens, who shakes as she tells Twohey at her doorstep “I’ve been waiting for this for 25 years.” There’s Rowena Chiu, Harvey’s former personal assistant, who divulges that on a business trip in Weinstein’s hotel room, “I’d worn two pairs of tights to buy me some time if I ever needed it.” And there’s Zelda Perkins (a steely, brilliant Samantha Morton, in an absolute single-scene stealing role) who tells the women that after she stood up to Weinstein’s advances, “I had no chance of ever working in film again. So I work with horses.”
The emotional highpoint of the film comes when Kantor, having flown halfway across the globe to Wales, sits down with Laura Madden (played by Jennifer Ehle). She’s the only Weinstein assistant that was never forced to sign an NDA, and although she’s getting threatening phone calls herself, Madden is legally free to speak on the record.
Poignantly, she’s also battling breast cancer, and wills herself to tell her story while she can - so that her experience might mean other women, like her daughters, never have to go through it. Describing how, aged just 21, Weinstein’s assault affected her future, Laura tells Jodi: “I feel like it dictated a certain direction my life took. It… sort of marked me and all my decisions. It was like he took my voice that day - just when I was about to start finding it.”
What do the reviews say about She Said?
- “Pulsing with emotional and social depth... given that She Said is a familiar story, it’s remarkable it can still be insightful and surprising.” ~ Wenlei Ma, news.com.au
- “She Said feels not just important, but urgent.” ~ Kimberley Jones, Austin Chronicle
- “You watch. You listen. You learn. A reckoning, regarding the maltreatment of women, happens right before your eyes. Astounding.” ~ Dwight Brown, Dwight Brown Ink
- “In Maria Schrader’s artful and incendiary She Said, we’re reminded of something that makes for one hell of a movie: it was women who did it.” ~ Kate Erbland, IndieWire
Fully on board, or disagree big time? We’d love to hear your take. Leave a review to share your thoughts with the good.film community!
So… why should I watch She Said?
For satisfaction. We don’t think it’s a spoiler alert to say: they got him. Towards the climax of the investigation, Harvey Weinstein himself barges into the New York Times offices, flanked by minders and handlers. He’s there to give a right to reply, and the reporting team and their editors sit with Weinstein & crew around the boardroom table as he thunders and spits his “outrage”. As the camera slowly zooms past Harvey’s shoulder towards Twohey, the look on Carey Mulligan’s face is impassive, staring - nearly cold. But her eyes say it all: “we got you, you evil bastard.”
The month following the New York Times story, 82 women accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault. In February 2020, he was convicted of rape and sexual assault in New York, followed by further convictions of rape and sexual misconduct in Los Angeles in 2023. His consecutive prison sentences equate to 39 years behind bars.
Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor spent hundreds of hours with the women who Harvey Weinstein assaulted and whose futures he destroyed. In nearly every case, they were frozen with fear. It was palpable. She Said is more than just a journalistic story: it’s an account of that shared frozenness being slowly and supportively thawed by two determined women. Reporters who know that no matter what they write, they can’t change the past - but they can help create a better future for women everywhere.
In 2018, a further New York Times piece found that over 200 “prominent” men were sacked after public allegations of sexual harassment. Nearly half of their replacements were women. Feminist author Gloria Feldt wrote about the changes many employers were making in response to #MeToo, highlighting “real change, including equal pay and a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment.”
The Washington Post analysed the impact further, finding that there were “a significantly smaller percentage of women having experienced sexual coercion or unwanted sexual attention at the office” in the year after the article was published.
In 2022, in a watershed moment, the US Congress approved legislation meaning that “anyone who is sexually harassed at work can seek legal redress.”
So the next time someone questions if a handful of people can change the world - activists like Tarana Burke, or journalists like Jodi and Megan - show them the on-screen coda to She Said:
Kantor and Twohey’s work helped ignite a worldwide movement against sexual misconduct.
The number of women across the globe who stepped forward and shared their own stories publicly, many for the first time, is impossible to count.
Their accounts led to workplace reforms, changes in the law, public and private reckonings over sexual harassment and violence, and debates that continue to this day.
