When the Truth Becomes Legend, Print the Legend
Pulitzer Prize winning reporters will write whatever the hell they want.
“When we listen to a tale, we need to take into account the teller.”
Pardon the irony as it touches upon my entire reason for creating this Substack site but it’s difficult to properly assign the above quote to a specific person. I took it from The New Yorker writer Louis Menand’s review of Richard Cohen’s book Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past. But it’s Menand’s characterization of Cohen’s viewpoint on those who have created what many may think of as some of the more credible versions of history. But then that’s really only my characterization of Menand’s words. So pardon this irony as well.
Of course there’s nothing new about the idea that history belongs to those who write it. But we don’t have to go back to the distant historic past to see how that works. Our current realities and the ways in which published accounts of present day events fire around the globe in seconds, as well as the way carefully shaped narratives are taken in by the billions on the receiving end of news accounts, can tell us a lot of what we need to know about how history is written, who gets to write it, and how unreliable and self-serving establishment narratives served up to the public can be.
When the New York Times reporters who broke the Harvey Weinstein scandal won a Pulitzer Prize for their work exposing the Hollywood mogul’s grotesque history of sexual predation of young women in the entertainment industry, I was very happy for both them and what the Pulitzer meant for the continued momentum of the #MeToo movement. That was my genuine response to this good news. Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey, as well as Ronan Farrow at The New Yorker, had brought before the eyes of the world an unacceptably sordid history that the public might have suspected was occurring off-camera in Tinseltown, but was generally known to be factual reality only by the comparatively few who live or work in proximity to the industry.
As I’ve stated in another piece here on MeToo CONFIDENTIAL, the reality of sexual predation as it continuously victimizes vulnerable young people in Hollywood was something I’d become keenly aware of not long after I first arrived in Los Angeles, and knowing that every day women were being subjected to the kind of sexual harassment I’d heard about and seen for myself over the years was always a reliable source of acrimony towards Hollywood for me.
So I certainly welcomed the work of Times’ reporters Kantor and Twohey as well as that of Ronan Farrow exposing Weinstein and the many functionaries throughout the entertainment industry who serve as enablers to the kind of behavior that was routine in Harvey’s world.
But by the time the Pulitzers were announced, I’d already started to become concerned that a strong and pure devotion to the truth, the finding out of the truth and the exposing of it, at the New York Times, and by their prize winning Weinstein reporters, might not be as reliable as the promise of one of the newspaper’s great but long forgotten names from the past might suggest.
Just as a reminder, here are the words of the Times’ former publisher and owner, Adolph S. Ochs, echoing from way back in 1896, stating his goal “To give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interests involved.”
I’d sent numerous emails to the Times itself and to both Kantor and Twohey informing everyone that one of their subscribers, ME, to be exact, had actually called for a #MeToo response from victims of sexual predation on their own website a full five days before Alyssa Milano would post the idea from her Twitter account.
None of those emails – each handing over to the newspaper of record the stunning news (just in case they didn’t already know it) that the idea for one of the most significant moments in the history of women fighting back against their sexual tormentors had been first proposed in its very own online pages – NONE of those emails received a reply from either the Times or its reporters.
So in the days approaching the release of She Said; Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement, Kantor and Twohey’s book on their Weinstein investigation, I certainly wasn’t expecting to find my name or role in triggering the #MeToo movement mentioned in its pages. The authors had never contacted me. No effort that I know of was ever made to ascertain who I was and what my motivations were for making my #MeToo comment.
But nothing could have prepared me for what I would find on just the first pages of Kantor and Twohey’s book. The top of the second page alone, in fact, forever changed my perspective on the writers who had exposed Harvey Weinstein, the newspaper that employs them, and how each of their respective tendencies toward the choosing of fanciful politically tainted narratives over verifiable empirical facts might shape the accepted history of #MeToo forever.
In just the first paragraph of that second page of She Said, Kantor and Twohey dispense credit for #MeToo to themselves, humbly admitting that “Our work was only one driver of that change.”
Kantor and Twohey also very generously give credit to, “Pioneering feminists and legal scholars; Anita Hill, Tarana Burke, the activist who founded the #MeToo movement, and many others, including our fellow journalists.”
There’s no question that Kantor and Twohey’s work was a driver of the change that has taken place beginning in October of 2017 and an absolutely essential catalyst for the #MeToo movement to have occurred. So let it be written and recorded as such in the annals of history. No one can deny the truth in that statement and Kantor and Twohey deserve full credit for the great work they did in bringing down Harvey Weinstein and in helping to trigger #MeToo.
And just in case you missed their tooting of their own horn, or have a tendency to forget things from one brief moment to the next, the authors remind us again in the first sentence of the very next paragraph. “Seeing our own hard-won investigative discoveries help realign attitudes…”
But the rest of that paragraph is where Kantor and Twohey so willingly give up their journalistic souls. In what feels like the recalling of a shared newsroom moment, the authors reflect on their contemporaneous musing about why #MeToo should have happened at that precise moment in October of 2017, and why was it triggered on the basis of their Weinstein coverage.
“Why this story?” Kantor and Twohey ask. They go on.
“As one of our editors pointed out, Harvey Weinstein wasn’t even that famous. In a world where so much feels stuck, how does this sort of seismic social change occur?”
For those outside New York Times newsrooms, the questions of how or why the Weinstein scandal might have triggered #MeToo would have been perfectly understandable. Harvey Weinstein wasn’t THAT famous. But for that question to have been asked inside the Times, in the inner sanctum of that particular newspaper, and for that pondering question to appear in these reporters’ book two full years after #MeToo, is worse than simply journalistic malpractice. It’s something that should undermine the credibility of these reporters and stain the reputation of their newspaper forever.
Because these New York Times writers and their editors knew exactly how and why #MeToo happened in the wake of their Weinstein stories. They knew because #MeToo had been called for on their own website. And two years on from the start of the #MeToo era they’d seen my emails, my additional comments on their website, and, as many reading this could attest to, they had been subject to an endless barrage of tweets and screenshots, by me, asserting exactly how #MeToo had come to pass and what my role was in making that happen.
How could they then still be wondering aloud in a book published a full two years after the fact, why #MeToo would have happened in 2017, in the immediate wake of their breaking the story of Weinstein’s decades of misconduct in Hollywood?
So I would strongly suggest that these Pulitzer winning journalists knew full well that #MeToo did not come about as described by the fictionalized drivel on page two of their book highlighting, “the efforts of pioneering feminists and legal scholars.” And for these reporters to credit Anita Hill for #MeToo is patently cringeworthy. But moreover, the idea that anyone in a position of responsibility at the Times would not have been aware of me, aware of my comment calling for #MeToo, and fully cognizant that it would have been flat impossible for my comment not to have been the source of the viral #MeToo revolution that began in October of 2017 strains credibility well past the breaking point.
But to this very day, these assertions form the fundamental basis of the myth of how and why (and even when) #MeToo happened. This myth, by now as well established and as likely to be as widely accepted by the public as any truly factual historical account might be, is one that centers #MeToo as being the direct result of the actions of Tarana Burke, who had indeed coined the phrase in the context of sexual predation a decade earlier, but with a vastly and unmistakably different purpose and intent. And, of course, we can’t forget the decades of efforts contributed by Kantor and Twohey’s pioneering eastern establishment feminists and legal scholars in bringing about the #MeToo revolution.
This is all myth. It’s based on a central lie perpetrated by a newspaper whose newsroom staff knew full well the story they were selling to the public was untrue.
Yes, #MeToo was triggered by Kantor and Twohey’s work revealing the decades long sexual misconduct of Harvey Weinstein, and this is by now at least the third time in this piece that I have asserted it.
And I can so authoritatively credit their work because I am uniquely aware of the extent to which their breaking of the Weinstein allegations had triggered me and triggered my #MeToo comment, just as their reporting was simultaneously enthralling everyone even tangentially connected to Hollywood at that moment. I can’t emphasize enough the extent to which this was true in Los Angeles. For so many, I am sure, this story brought up our own experiences and perspectives, our own personal knowledge of the power with which Hollywood lords over this entire region.
#MeToo happened because some guy in Beverly Hills with years of accumulated experiences and decades of acquired knowledge about Hollywood read a New York Times piece authored by the actress Lena Dunham on the 10th of October 2017 titled “Harvey Weinstein and the Silence of the Men.”
That piece, coming on the back of a week of explosive revelations of sexual misconduct occurring essentially in my own back yard, pushed a button in me. In ME.
So Harvey Weinstein wasn’t that famous? I promise you, he was THAT famous in my world. Here in LA, Harvey was BIGGER than big. I’d been following the reporting and reading every published syllable on the developing Weinstein scandal as was everyone else here in Tinseltown. It reminded me of when Michael Jackson died. There was a pall over the city, there was shock and disbelief. But mostly the air was charged with electricity. The King is dead. What happens now?
But far removed from that down-here-on-the-ground context, the New York Times and its Weinstein reporters were asking, why now? Why Weinstein? The answers to those questions are nowhere to be found in the mythical but purely political fantasia described on page two of their book. #MeToo happened in October of 2017, in direct response to the unfolding Weinstein revelations, because that scandal mattered to me, the person writing these words you are reading right now.
The public exposure of Weinstein’s monstrous behavior, which I would have always considered to be just the tip of the iceberg in Hollywood, touched a nerve, a sore spot, in me, and that mattered enough to me that I put what I thought on that early caffeinated morning to be a corrective suggestion out there in response to it, in a very public place, the comments section of a Weinstein related piece on the New York Times website by a young actress bemoaning the silence of men in Hollywood surrounding the issue of sexual predation in her industry.
Kantor and Twohey have themselves taken credit for their role in triggering #MeToo, but they completely disregard the person who literally and very specifically called for that exact response from women on their own newspaper’s website. I was not one of Lena Dunham’s silent men! So I wrote the following in a comment to her piece on October 10th, 2017. It would be the first time that the idea of sexual assault victims should come forward publicly using the words ‘me too’ would appear anywhere. In the New York Times. Or anywhere else.
“Here’s what really needs to happen now. Every woman who has ever been presented with a career/sex quid pro quo in the entertainment industry should come forward and simply say, “Me, too.””
For five days my #MeToo idea germinated somewhere in people and places unknown until a two-person conga line on the 15th of October delivered it to the actress Alyssa Milano who then tweeted it to her fans. That’s how #MeToo actually happened. We may never know exactly what occurred in those five days between my comment and Ms. Milano’s tweet. It’s someone else’s job to uncover that information. This however is the essential step-by-step forensic trail of motivations, verifiable actions, and responses that resulted in the #MeToo movement blowing up the issue of sexual misconduct and victimization world-wide. It’s the factual history, not the fanciful myth that has been concocted around Tarana Burke and Kantor and Twohey’s pioneering feminists and scholars.
But where do they all go from here? How does the mighty New York Times admit that it did something so very wrong, that it presented the public with the absolutely wrong version of such a consequential and truly historic current event? But, also, how can it admit, at the same time, that it did it for the absolute wrong reasons, in a diametric contradiction of the promise that adorns its long history as this country’s newspaper of record? How would the paper endure such a revelation?
The Times’ continued ignoring of the fact that I called for #MeToo on its own website is an unforgivable breach of the oath by Adolph Ochs to always report the news without fear or favor. But how does it, as the most respected news resource in the world, admit that it knowingly reported a lie and maintained for years that lie to be the truth?
And how do you admit that you did all this because your current employees, your editors and reporters, your own current newsroom culture and caprices, had favored that lie over the truth, to the extent that you knowingly failed to report the factual news about #MeToo without favor, reported and actively promoted instead with great favor an alternative to the actual truth, and did it all in violation of any concept of professional ethics as well as to what is one of your newspaper’s most iconic figure’s promise to all who read even one word of its journalistic product?
“It will be my earnest aim that THE NEW-YORK TIMES… give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interests involved; to make the columns of THE NEW-YORK TIMES a forum for the consideration of all questions of public importance, and to that end to invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion.” - Adolph S. Ochs: April 18, 1896