L ifestyles /C ulture
Jodi Kantor Talks Weinstein, #MeToo at Temple
ME DIA
SELAH MAYA ZIGHELBOIM | JE STAFF
ATTENDEES PACKED
Temple University’s Mitten Hall
on March 14 to hear Jodi Kantor,
who broke the Harvey Weinstein
sexual harassment scandal,
detail how she and colleague
Megan Twohey investigated the
story that served as the impetus
for the #MeToo movement.

“The thing we concentrated
on, our investigative design,
“It’s easy to say from our
vantage point now, ‘Oh, that
was so many sexual harass-
ment stories ago,’ but that was
really a seminal story because
the history of this issue was
a history of lack of account-
ability,” said Kantor, who is
Jewish. “If you look at people
like Clarence Thomas and Bill
Clinton and President Donald
Trump, there were allegations
against all of these men and
they never really faced any
accountability for this.”
women’s phone numbers was
a difficult task, but the hardest
part was convincing the women
to speak on the record.

That Kantor and Twohey were
trying to prove there was a pat-
tern of harassment and cover-ups
helped convince some women.

Boardman noted during the
conversation that he, Kantor
and Weinstein were all Jewish.

“I must ask this: So along
the way, did Jewishness ever
occur to you as a connection of
the story?” Boardman asked.

“In fact, unfortunately, several
of the most prominent men
who have been swept up in
this are Jewish. Has that been
a cultural aspect, a cultural
exploration for you in any way
of this story?”
“What’s been very clear to
me through our reporting is
that this is a problem in every
culture, every community,
every walk of life,” Kantor said.

“Different communities have
their own anxieties and neuro-
ses about what happens when
somebody in their world is
accused of this. In the African-
American community, there
is so much angst about Bill
Cosby. He was an absolute
hero, and now with R. Kelly,
it’s very uncomfortable for a lot
of African-Americans to see a
black man who was so success-
ful accused ... and certainly
the Jewish community has had
some of the same reactions.” l
szighelboim@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0729
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Did you know?
David Boardman, dean of Temple University’s Klein College of Media
and Communication, speaks with journalist Jodi Kantor about her
reporting on Harvey Weinstein.

Selah Maya Zighelboim
involved getting as many differ-
ent kinds of evidence as possible,”
said Kantor, who won a Pulitzer
Prize for her reporting on the
topic. “We were not looking to
write a ‘he said, she said’ story, in
which — and I’m talking about
once we really understood the
material and we were hearing a
lot of things off the record — we
did not want to write a story that
felt like a contest.”
David Boardman, dean of
Temple’s Klein College of Media
and Communication, interviewed
Kantor at “Our #MeToo Moment
and Beyond,” which was co-spon-
sored by the Feinstein Center for
American Jewish History.

Kantor said her investigation
into Weinstein began after a
turning point in sexual harass-
ment history in April 2017, when
a New York Times article found
that Fox News and Bill O’Reilly
had paid $13 million over the
years to settle sexual harassment
suits against O’Reilly.

JEWISHEXPONENT.COM But the case with O’Reilly
proved different. The journalists
were able to show a trail of money
that proved the case and, two
weeks later, O’Reilly was fired.

That’s when The New York
Times editors began asking if
there were other powerful men
who had covered up inappro-
priate treatment of women —
a question that seems quaint
today, Kantor said. They asked
Kantor who should be investi-
gated next, and after some dig-
ging, she suggested Weinstein.

During the talk, she explained
how she and Twohey went about
trying to craft the story, and how
they navigated some of the chal-
lenges in reporting it.

They decided, for example,
that they needed to reach the
women who had been harassed
or assaulted directly, without
an intermediary like a publicist
or an agent. They didn’t want to
risk the intermediary putting
a stop to the story. Getting the
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