The New York Times' Sins of Omission
Their Weinstein reporters should have disclosed that, before co-founding Time's Up, Roberta Kaplan was Harvey Weinstein's lawyer. So why didn't they?
Previously, on #MeToo CONFIDENTIAL:
When New York Times’ reporters Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey were nearing the end of their investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, Twohey was following up on yet another possible Weinstein misdeed wherein the film producer might have funneled money raised at an AIDS charity auction into the hands of investors on one of his film projects.
With full knowledge that the pair were working on the infinitely more problematic story of his decades of sexual predation in Hollywood, Weinstein agreed to come to the Times building in person on September 19th 2017 to meet with Twohey and answer her questions.
Among the legal entourage that accompanied Weinstein to the meeting that day was the attorney Roberta Kaplan. Just months later, after Kantor and Twohey’s devastating series of articles would reveal the scope of her then client’s sexual misconduct, Kaplan would co-found the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund and assume the mantle of board chair of Time’s Up itself.
So begins the first part of our focus on Hollywood’s influence over politicians and political movements, as well as the press, with these three paragraphs revealing that the now former board chair of Time’s Up and co-founder of the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund Roberta Kaplan was, in fact, as late as September of 2017, a working member of Hollywood mogul and soon-to-be-convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein’s legal team.
Just to further refresh memories, 2017 was the year that #MeToo was born, just one month after this meeting at the New York Times building attended by Kaplan, Weinstein, Pulitzer Prize winning Weinstein reporter Meghan Twohey, and Times’ editor Rebecca Corbett, born out of the whirlwind of outrage that came in the aftermath of the Times breaking of the story of Weinstein’s decades long workplace sexual harassment romp through the many young women who were so unfortunate as to have made his acquaintance in pursuit of their dreams in Hollywood.
I apologize for these last two sentences. There’s a lot of detail and context that must be established for what follows to be fully understood by any of us. Let’s break things up now a little with a question. It’s a question I pose to you, the readers of this piece.
When, exactly, and by what means, did you personally come into possession of the knowledge that Roberta Kaplan, most widely known for her leadership role at Time’s Up, was, in fact, a member of Harvey Weinstein’s legal defense team only months prior to her ascent to the top of the made-in-Hollywood victim’s advocacy juggernaut?
Did you find out here on my Substack page when I posted the information back in September? Did you find out by way of my own tweeting the fact after I’d published it here? Or did you find out, as I did, in the pages of She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement, Ms. Twohey’s and her Times writing partner Jodi Kantor’s book on their heroic investigative reporting that exposed the vastness of Weinstein’s crimes and the lengths he and those working on his behalf would go to to cover up those crimes?
I should answer this question myself and state that I hadn’t previously heard Kaplan had worked as a lawyer for Weinstein, and certainly not so recently as to have her show up with him for a meeting at the New York Times’ building with reporter Twohey and editor Corbett at a moment in late September of 2017 when Harvey and his legal team would have been fully aware the newspaper was investigating his history as a sexual predator in Hollywood.
I clearly overlooked this fact in my reading of She Said and only came into an actual state of awareness of it after using the index of the book to run down some other piece of information regarding Kaplan.
But I don’t recall seeing Kaplan’s reputation ever bandied about on Twitter for her prior association with Weinstein. Did any of you come into possession of this knowledge by way of Kaplan being dragged on Twitter for very recently being one of Harvey’s lawyers? When and where? Because if it happened I certainly missed it. (Please let me know in the comments or by way of contacting me privately.)
I will tell you where you most certainly did not first hear that Kaplan had been working as a lawyer for Weinstein as late as the fall of 2017: You did not hear it from The New York Times.
An archive search of the paper reveals that there were no pieces published reporting or even mentioning this from the day of that meeting at the Times building in September of 2017, throughout Kaplan’s founding of the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund or her assuming the position of board chair of Time’s Up in 2018, through the brewing controversies associated with her leadership at Time’s Up and the direction and focus of the organization, and not a mention of this stunning item on Kaplan’s CV in the newspaper even throughout her eventual slow-motion nosedive from grace this past summer.
You also did not hear about what most laypersons would call Kaplan’s extreme conflict of interests from either Kantor or Twohey. A search of both of their Twitter histories shows no disclosure of the information on Kantor’s account and no mention of Roberta Kaplan at all, ever, on Twohey’s.
The information was found in their book, yes, but it was mentioned almost as an anything but tantalizing tidbit unrelated to the explosive sexual predation part of the Weinstein story. Moreover, never does the book, published in the summer of 2019, mention or discuss the discordant reality that just one month prior to their initial Weinstein piece being published, the subject of their investigation was legally represented in their meeting with him by the woman who was very shortly to become board chair of Time’s Up.
What could be the reason that this explosive entry on Kaplan’s work history should never appear in the pages of the venerable ‘newspaper of record’ nor be publicly revealed by one of its reporters or employees via social media?
This question becomes especially vexing when considered in the context of stories appearing on other media outlets as far back as March of this year reporting on significant internal strife occurring at Time’s Up over the organization’s apparent loyalty to its powerful benefactors over the less powerful but committed women who either worked for the organization or the unfortunate many who had been sexually harassed or assaulted by powerful men and had turned to it for help.
Prior good deeds do not excuse subsequent bad behaviors just as later public showings of good behavior do not erase prior misdeeds. In fact, when circumstances clearly indicate, the latter should always be viewed suspiciously by actual hard-nosed journalists. That does not appear to have been the case with the Times’s Pulitzer Prize winning Weinstein reporters.
But I’m not a professional journalist. Certainly there is much I don’t know about the many hidden ethical and even legal principles that guide the actions of journalists at the level of a Kantor and Twohey. There are holes in my understanding of what constitutes the responsibilities reporters and newspapers have to reveal information that is in their possession to the public.
This entire Substack effort of mine isn’t really what I’d like to be doing with my time. I don’t have a team behind me. I don’t have a seasoned editor guiding and overseeing my efforts. I don’t have fact checkers and proofreaders. I would prefer to be reading good journalism instead of trying to produce it alone from out here in the strictly amateur ranks. I would much rather be concentrating on studying and playing music and breaking that up now and then with my photography. Yes, I would certainly like to be recognized for conceiving of and calling for #MeToo and asked now and then what I think about how my original idea is intersecting with whatever various issues of the day touch upon that idea.
But my preference for this part of my life was never to be grinding out articles of retribution for what I consider to be a litany of egregious and dishonest behaviors and inactions by so many journalists and activists who have planted themselves and their fortunes under the #MeToo flag. But here we are.
So I can’t know the extent to which there was guidance from senior editors or management or the legal team at the New York Times that constrained Kantor and Twohey from sharing with the public the stunning information that Roberta Kaplan was so recently as September of 2017 employed as Harvey Weinstein’s lawyer.
Whatever the considerations or forces that resulted in that information not being shared with the public via the Times itself or by any of its reporters by way of social media, as both a public citizen and as a subscriber to the Times, I find this to be an egregious failure to live up to the paper’s vaunted motto to report the news without fear nor favor.
As the person who, in the context of October 2017’s revelations of Weinstein’s monstrous abuses of power as Hollywood’s biggest mogul, literally authored and called for the #MeToo movement as it exists today, on the Times’ own website, I am, however, not surprised that the newspaper or its reporters would defer from sharing this likely damning information about Kaplan with the public.
Still, in the era of cancel culture, we make sure that people are dismissed from jobs that have any bearing on the public good at all, and even many that clearly don’t, for things said or emailed or tweeted long ago.
So in the context of this unforgiving social justice battlefield it is somewhat perplexing that these two reporters, working so directly on exposing sexual misconduct and the networks of professionals in Hollywood who enabled it, would choose not to blow the whistle on a former Weinstein lawyer who instantly ascended to the highest position on the Time’s Up org chart. Why would Kaplan’s representation of Harvey Weinstein receive such hands-off treatment by the Times?
How were women, the countless victims and survivors of myriad sexual abuses, being served by the Times and its editors and reporters not disclosing to the public what should have been disqualifying information on Kaplan at any time over the course of the three years she was board chair at Times Up? Why would the Times so obviously prioritize protecting Kaplan’s here-to-fore sterling reputation over the needs of sexual abuse survivors to have this information about her in their possession?
In the Times article announcing Kaplan’s resignation from the Time’s Up board chair position, co-written by Jodi Kantor and Michael Gold, there is no mention of Kaplan’s having worked for Harvey Weinstein. Instead, the piece refers to Kaplan as a “prominent attorney” and, presumably on the strength of her legal career, says that the former Weinstein lawyer “represented the promise of Time’s Up.”
Instead of reporting Kaplan’s working for Weinstein to the public, even as her tenure as board chair was very publicly crumbling beneath her, what we heard about her career from the Times was only laudatory details. In another article co-written by Jodi Kantor after Kaplan’s resignation, the former Time’s Up board chair was said to have had a “singular resume” as an attorney, having played a key role in the battle for legalizing same sex marriage.
If that great civil rights and social justice victory was deemed worthy of mention by the Times at Kaplan’s darkest hour, then why wasn’t her representation of Weinstein in September of 2017 ever deemed worthy of a mention? Why was it never reported to the public at any moment at all during Kaplan’s reign over the organization that was created as Hollywood’s corrective response to sexual misconduct in its own industry?
When Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein sold the film rights to the book of their reporting on Watergate, All the President's Men, they sold those rights to Hollywood. They sold those rights to an entity that was, at the time, far removed from the centers of government and political corruption that formed the heart of their story. They didn’t sell the rights to their story to the executive branch of the federal government or to the Republican National Committee.
But in the spring of 2018, barely six months after their first Weinstein piece and the subsequent birth of the #MeToo revolution, to the fanfare of a prideful announcement in the Times, Kantor and Twohey sold the rights to the story of their investigation into Harvey Weinstein’s decades of sexual predation in the entertainment industry to Hollywood itself, specifically to a production company headed by Brad Pitt. The mega-celebrity actor, it turns out, is represented by Creative Artists Agency, the very Hollywood talent conglomerate that had played such a significant role in the creation of Time’s Up, and at the very moment in early 2018 when Roberta Kaplan was ascending to her leadership positions at that organization.
So restating for emphasis, just a short six months or so from the publishing of their nuclear bombshell series of articles on sexual predation in Hollywood, Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey signed away the film rights to the telling of the story of their investigation, via a contract the details of which have not been made public, to monolithic Hollywood, the very industry that was the subject of their investigative reporting.
To the public, it would have certainly appeared at that time that sexual misconduct as it occurs in high places was still the pair’s beat. And despite now being “under contract” to Hollywood, the two continued to report on the subject area they’d won a Pulitzer investigating by producing articles on Weinstein, Time’s Up, #MeToo, workplace sexual misconduct, and the scandal that eventually brought Roberta Kaplan down, that of her advising New York governor Andrew Cuomo on his workplace sexual harassment troubles. (And it should be pointed out that Kantor and Twohey would publish the book on their Weinstein investigation, She Said, over a year after signing their Hollywood production deal.)
Whether these Pulitzer Prize winning reporters thought of it this way or not, from the instant they signed those contracts and accepted payment, they themselves were no longer simply noble newspaper journalists, duly honored for their great and difficult work shining a light into the darkest corners of power and informing the public of what they found there. They would no longer be free of questions and the personal and professional taint of conflicts and contractual entanglements with the industry they were so recently reporting on. When they took Hollywood’s money, like it or not, Kantor and Twohey were from then on themselves compensated participants in the entertainment industry.
As I wrote in my previous piece here on Substack:
The image makers in Hollywood have succeeded in creating a singular perspective on their industry in the minds of most every person living on this planet. That perspective is one that sees Hollywood, and specifically having a personal or contractual connection to it in the form of either the creative validation the industry can represent, or the glamour and wealth it can provide, as the ultimate pot of gold that can exist at the end of anyone’s personal or professional rainbow.
Underestimating the power of Hollywood to influence and control the #MeToo narrative and thus defend itself against the corrective efforts of a movement born from a desire to curtail sexual abuses occurring behind its own doors is the greatest threat to #MeToo that it will likely ever face. This is and will remain a weak spot for anyone closely associated with #MeToo who has ongoing business in the entertainment industry or is desirous of establishing a Hollywood connection for themselves.
If we can’t trust that the members of our press are independent of the industries they are investigating because, in the midst of their ongoing coverage of issues and stories touching upon those industries, they themselves contractually become a part of those industries, then we can no longer have faith in the integrity of our working press. What we can know is that our working press has, in the parlance of the day, been captured.
This brings me to a second question for those reading this piece, and forgive me, it’s become rather a cliché, but where is the outrage? I mean literally. Surely many among those in the #MeToo space, other than myself, from the faceless activists to the famous survivors to the iconic leaders of this historic moment, would have noticed that Kantor and Twohey had reported on Kaplan’s representation of Harvey Weinstein in their book but had otherwise maintained complete silence regarding this information in both the Times itself or from their social media accounts. Surely this was noticed.
Hollywood is the enemy of #MeToo. Its power reaches into the suits and pant suits of professional politicians, penetrating the soft flesh of elected officials and that of their party infrastructure of underlings, into their hearts and heads and what was once, maybe, their spines, and eventually coming out of their mouths and off their fingertips. From presidents and vice presidents to every lawyer, adviser, and loyal party soldier.
A free press has always been our last hope in America against the threat of our country ever falling under the coercive influence of such extreme entrenched power. The New York Times, which I still subscribe to, was something we could hold up in veneration even taking into account the many times it has failed us, as the shimmering light of that mirage of a free press we so desperately want to believe will always be there to save us.
For me, that is no more. It’s over. Whatever blinders I myself faithfully wore in the past are gone now forever. The New York Times, its brilliant editors and Pulitzer Prize winning reporters, as well as the very core of its mission, have all clearly been captured; sold out now to some of the most powerful of powerful interests in human history.
And given the level of control these so powerful interests have over the entirety of the mainstream media and information landscape, as well as our entire political process, this latest example of our free press’s ongoing failure to continue functioning as a deliverer of truth to the people of this country, as well as to the rest of the world, should come as a surprise to no one.