She Said

In 2017, Harvey Weinstein was still one of the most powerful men in entertainment, even though stories about his behavior toward women had circulated for years. Reporters had tried and failed to pin them down. That year, New York Times journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey set out to learn what was true. She Said is their account of that investigation, from the first tentative calls to the story's publication.

The reporting was slow and difficult. Over months of confidential conversations with actresses, former employees, and other people who had been close to Weinstein's world, the two reporters uncovered allegations that had been buried for a long time. They also found the machinery that kept them hidden: private settlements and nondisclosure agreements that bound women to silence. The hardest task was persuading frightened sources to let their names be used. Once some agreed, the story moved toward a tense confrontation between Weinstein and the newspaper.

The book reads like a thriller, but it is also a portrait of the women who chose to speak, and of what it cost them. They did so for other women, for those who would come after them, and for themselves. Kantor and Twohey, who shared a Pulitzer Prize for this reporting, also show how a single investigation helped set off the #MeToo movement, and what careful, stubborn journalism can accomplish against entrenched power.