On a chilly Tuesday night, a crowd of people bundled up in thick woolen scarves and now-out-of-storage-for-good winter jackets gathered in Yale’s Loria Center. By the time the last attendees hurried in, searching for errant, unoccupied seats, the audience had already begun to direct its attention towards the four-woman panel commanding the front of the room. Almost everyone in the audience sat between two other people. Whether strangers or friends, the room’s shoulder-to-shoulder stance suited the subject of discussion: the people, politics, and power of the ever-evolving #MeToo movement.
The four women addressing the movement composed a panel sponsored by the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism. The Fellowship, aimed at sharing insight and cultivating discussion on the role of media in contemporary culture, brings a multitude of distinguished journalists working across a variety of fields and mediums to the University. On the panel was Rebecca Corbett, Pulitzer Prize-winning editor for the New York Times’s coverage of the Harvey Weinstein scandal; Meredith Talusan, founding editor of Condé Nast’s first platform devoted to the queer community; Alex Wagner, CBS national correspondent; and Patricia Russo, Executive Director of Yale’s Women’s Campaign School. Introductions proved to reveal just a fraction of the four panelists’ endeavors, as they navigated conversation with moderator and Yale Poynter Fellow-in-Residence, Laura Pappano, with voices laden with experience.
The room heated up as soon as Pappano asked Corbett to explain the reporting process behind the Weinstein exposé. The words seemed to burst out of Pappano as she professed, “I am dying to know what it felt like to push the button and publish that story.”
Her statement echoed the audience’s curiosity. Side conversations came to abrupt halts. The article, published in the New York Times last fall, was one side of a two-publication race with The New Yorker to expose Weinstein’s decades-long use of non-disclosure agreements to silence women he sexually harassed. The story further emphasized a broader history of harassment in the entertainment industry, bringing the long untold (and sometimes even told, but unnoticed) narratives of gender discrimination in Hollywood to national headlines.
Corbett stated grimly that landing on the Weinstein scandal came after a year-long investigation of secret settlements rampant within the industry. Most prolific among these, the 45 million dollars paid out to silence six women with sexual harassment claims against former Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly. From there, the investigation turned to look at other instances of workplace sexual harassment, ones not necessarily confined to the high-earning strata in entertainment.
But, once confronted with rumors of Weinstein’s misconduct, Corbett said that she pivoted her team to take a closer look at the entertainment mogul’s obscured, but not completely hidden, transgressions. At this point, her reporters faced the challenge of working around non-disclosure agreements and building enough trust to convince women to go on the record.
Corbett recounted the reserved responses many women gave to her journalists. She quoted them saying, “‘Well I don’t want to talk about that, or, I don’t know whether I can do that.’” These responses, steeped in aversion, ultimately gave Corbett the conviction she needed to assemble the exposé. The reason why so many victims had difficulty going on the record was the same reason why their stories needed to be told. To her audience in Loria, Corbett made a crucial distinction between women not wanting to share and women not having anything to share. She stated, “it wasn’t people saying ‘Oh, there’s nothing there.’”
Beginning the panel by talking about the Weinstein article seemed apt, as the subject resonates chronologically with the resurgence of #MeToo. The hashtag exploded on social media soon after the New York Times and The New Yorker published their parallel exposés. The immediate visibility came hand-in-hand with a question brimming with implication: Why was it this case against Weinstein that made a phrase, already in existence, suddenly go viral?
The question sheds light on the mounting number of stories left untold and the dangerous exclusivity of social movements. Here, Pappano turned to Talusan, a Filipina-American who advocates for trans and nonbinary voices, to speak of the disparities prevalent in media. Talusan’s own writing exposes the risk of gender-based violence, contributing to high murder levels of trans women. Addressing the audience at Yale, she stressed the importance of not losing the voices already marginalized by society, deliberating, “we attend to [celebrities] more than, for instance, a transgender sex worker. But, from the perspectives of the people who are experiencing gender-based violence, the risks that especially trans women and gender non-conforming people undergo are structurally more extreme.”
The power of celebrity is not lost on Talusan and others close to the #MeToo movement. Famous people provide the attraction necessary to capture and subsequently sustain an audience’s interest. And, in many ways, the evolution of the movement and the spotlight trained on it brandish their own cinematic flair. Weinstein was once someone who made a career out of capturing spectacle on camera. Now, he is one of the scrutinized, high-profile sources of spectacle characterizing the #Me Too movement. By framing him and other celebrities center stage, the media grabs audience attention, but does so in a narrow manner mirroring reality TV. “We need to see beyond this initial attraction and include more voices,” advised Talusan.
Once Pappano, Wagner, and Russo started fielding questions, the discussion turned towards a different kind of celebrity — the political kind. The people gathered in the room had come clad, not just in their rediscovered winter layers, but also in renewed, post-pivotal-midterm optimism. Wagner, who spent the past two months on the road covering the midterms, reminded the audience to not assume an immediate, causal relationship between the #MeToo movement and women participating in politics. She nonetheless acknowledged that “both #MeToo and what we saw in terms of a pink wave in the 2018 midterms are inextricably linked to political events and specifically this presidency.”
The panelists referenced the backlash against Trump and his Access Hollywood tapes as a precursor to the record number of women elected into office this past week and the beginning of the national discourse on sexual climate America has today. Russo, the director of WCS, the Yale Law School affiliated program whose mission is to empower women to lead through politics, echoed Wagner’s observations. She recounted the influx of calls her office received in the wake of Trump’s election. While excitatory in nature, sighs punctuated Russo’s speech. She lamented over the fact that two thirds of the people who reached out to her post election were not even registered to vote and that, furthermore, women running for office face barriers nonexistent for, and I quote, “the fatass whiteboy running.”
The comedic lilt that many women adopt when talking about gendered power dynamics and workplace sexual harassment is a tone indicative of how conditioned they have become to its occurrence. Russo’s sighs and biting sarcasm were no exception. Corbett scoffed when describing how Weinstein’s lawyer reached out to the Times to say that he was sorry if he had made anyone feel uncomfortable. Wagner laughed as she answered an audience member’s question asking how Trump still has a job. The sentiment extends beyond the walls of this room — his is an era in which painful recollections of abuse come anywhere from the patient bed of a doctor’s office to the newsroom of a television network to the thousands of the other places where the media does not reach. Comedy has long been seen as a counter to tragedy, but the fact that this humor comes in light of substantial systemic problems cannot be ignored. It is a temporary defense against the inescapable realities of a society that marginalizes, and then keeps on marginalizing.
The past year has seen to an outpouring of emotion across the country. We’ve seen it in the 156 women who publicly testified against former Team USA gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar. We’ve seen it in the millions of people who participated in women’s marches. We’ve seen it in the flowers and notes covering Yale’s Women’s Table following the Kavanaugh trial. When confronted with the question of what the Me Too movement can achieve, Corbett voiced that, more than anything, #MeToo is a “vehicle for voices.” Today, survivors can connect with one another and share their stories more readily than ever before. Corporate backlash against perpetrators of sexual harassment, while by no means thorough, is stronger than ever. However, the four panelists agreed that systemic problems can only be solved by systemic change — that the media is not a court of law. While speaking, Talusan punctuated her many of her statements with the rhetorical, “you know?” In a room where the overwhelming majority of audience members were women, the resounding sentiment was yes. They knew.
#MeToo Evolving was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.