The Breach 307: Rebecca Traister on the So-Called ' Effect'

Lindsay: Welcome to The Breach, your deep dive into authoritarianism and corruption in the era of Trump. I'm your host, Lindsay Beyerstein. The Breach is a production of rewire.news, your home in the web for cutting edge news and commentary on reproductive health and justice. Before I start the show, I have a very exciting announcement. Rewire's first original documentary "Care in Chaos" won best documentary short in the Nevada International Film Festival. I co-directed the movie with Martyna Starosta and The Breach's executive producer, Marc Faletti, was also the movie's executive producer, sound man, graphics guy, and all-around champion. It's the story of two abortion clinics under siege by protesters. You can watch it in full on Rewire's website.

Our guest today is award-winning journalist, Rebecca Traister. She's here to talk about her latest piece in New York magazine, a deeply personal and urgently political meditation on the so-called Harvey Weinstein effect, and what it means in Trump's America, where a self-confessed sex predator sits in the Oval Office. Rebecca, welcome to the program.

Rebecca: Thank you so much for having me, Lindsay.

Lindsay: Can you start by detailing your own encounter with Harvey Weinstein back when you were working for Talk magazine?

Rebecca: Yeah, it was actually when I was working for a weekly newspaper called the Observer. Well, my first encounter with him actually, you're right. I had been an assistant, a secretary to one of the executive editors at Talk magazine which was a magazine that Harvey Weinstein co-owned, or actually maybe he financed it entirely, I can't remember. But he was the money boss, but he wasn't a daily presence in the office.

Then, my job after that when I was 25 years old was as a fact checker and junior reporter at the New York Observer which was a weekly newspaper and my beat there was to cover the film industry in New York. At that time, the giant in the film industry in New York was Miramax movies and its sister company, brother company Dimension Films. This was in 1999, 2000. So I guess, maybe, I was 25 in 2000.

The first big piece that I reported was about one of the Dimension movies that the company was not releasing even though it had a lot of marketable stars at that time. And the story was that maybe Harvey was not releasing it because of his involvement at that point in the Al Gore-Joe Lieberman presidential campaign of 2000. I reported the story and it was really the first big reported story I'd ever done as a young person, a young reporter, and I couldn't get Harvey to call me back which wasn't unusual. I was just a young reporter and my editors at that time at the Observer suggested that I go to a party that he was hosting, the night before the 2000 election, so a Monday night.

At that point, it was very ... And it still is, people have public events book parties, movie premiers, all kinds of things happening in . Harvey was hosting one, and of course, the press was invited and they said, "Oh, well, you'll just go with the gossip columnist for the Observer. You'll go as his plus one and you can find Harvey there and ask him directly about the movie so you can get his comment." I did that. The gossip columnist at that time was a slightly older reporter and he happened to be my boyfriend.

We went down to the Tribeca Grand and I grabbed Harvey. I had my tape recorder and I introduced myself as a reporter from the Observer and told him about the story I was working on and asked him for comment. He gave me a sort of non ... He said that's my brother's movie. I have nothing to do with it. Great, he wouldn't say anymore but I had my comment. I could put in my piece that I had let the boss, the man making decisions, know about my story and what I've reported and this is what he'd said in response.

I went off to go put my tape recorder away, and then he grabbed me and said, "You know, you can't use that. That wasn't on the record." I said, "Of course, I can, Harvey." I was very young and scared. I don't know why I had the wherewithal to say this, but I did. I said, "Of course, you didn't say it was off the record."

Lindsay: You put a tape recorder in his face.

Rebecca: Yes, and I identified myself as a reporter. It was a totally bogus thing that he was then saying it was off the record. And he hadn't even said anything revealing. I mean, it was the most non-effusive ... He offered no insight. It was a totally innocuous line that he'd given me.

But I think he'd been surprised to be asked a real substantive question. It was supposed to be this promotional book party. I don't think he was expecting it. I don't think anybody in his office had told him that I was reporting the story even though I've been in touch with them to try to get comment from the company. And so, I think he was taken aback and he tried to pull this thing where he said all that was off the record. I resisted and said no. I'd identified myself and put my ... I had my tape recorder and he'd offered me a comment and he couldn't retroactively take it off the record. He was a public figure. He knew how these things worked.

He started shouting at me and poking his finger in my shoulder aggressively. He started shouting and he's a huge man. Harvey, at that time, was just a massively tall, broad, huge guy. He started just screaming, screaming so loud the entire party could hear. It wasn't any kind of secret thing. There must have been a hundred people there and many of them, dozens of them, members of the press since this was a press event.

He started screaming obscenities at me, how did I get in the party, who let her in. He said ... And my ex-boyfriend and colleague, and I have tried to go back in pieces together. For a time, I had it on tape and I just lost the tape in the 17 years, in the intervening 17 years. I never thought I'd lose it, but you know, a couple of apartment moves will do that to you.

So I can't recall exactly ... The lines I remember are, he said, "Who let this cunt into this party? This is a cancer party.” It was a party for Karen Duffy, the former MTV VJ's book about recovery from a disease," and I don't even think it was cancer, to be honest. I think it was, I can't remember what the disease was, but he kept saying, "This is a cancer party. This is a cancer party. Who let that cunt in?" Then, he yelled further, "This is ridiculous. This is what's wrong with this town, that people can just come in to these parties. I'm glad I'm the fucking sheriff of this fucking piece of shit fucking town." He's screaming this obscenity at me, spitting. His spit is hitting my face. He's pushing me backwards with his finger on my shoulder.

At that point, my colleague, Andrew, comes over and interrupts and calms him down by saying, "Look, talk to me about this book. I'm here to cover this party. She's my colleague." He calms Harvey down, and Harvey gives an interview about Karen Duffy's book. Then, at that point where I get my bags, I'm ready to go. At that point, Andrew says, "I think you owe my colleague an apology," which strategically in retrospect was an error on his part. Harvey then explodes and starts screaming at Andrew and pushes him down a couple of steps. It's a multi-tiered party space.

He pushes him down a couple of steps. Andrew was holding a tape recorder. Andrew falls backwards, hits a woman in the head with a tape recorder as he falls. She collapses. Harvey then starts screaming that he hit a woman. This man hit a woman, and Harvey then takes Andrew out onto the sidewalk and puts him in a headlock and tries to beat him up. At that point, there are lots of photographers and flashes going off, but I've never seen a picture of it. Harvey, at that point, had so much power over the press. He had reporters on his payroll, hired them as consultants, gave them movie deals for their books, or book deals because he had a publishing house.

He also just had a tremendous power to spin and to ... By the end of that night, I think those pictures didn't exist. I've never seen a copy of one of those pictures even though the image would have been worth so much money, this big movie producer with a young reporter in a headlock.

That had been my experience. It was obviously nothing to do with , but it was a massive abuse of power and a very public and brazen one. That informs my view of him and after, the other thing about that experience is because I had it and in fact, it was reported on though not particularly critically. And Harvey was permitted to spin it in a way in which I was the aggressor. I had barged into the party and shoved my microphone in his face, or shoved my tape recorder in his face.

Because people reported on it, other people who'd experience other kinds of abuse in his hands began to get in touch with me. I wound up hearing over the years all kinds of whispers, rumors and in some cases, reports of the sexual abuse. I had tried to help any reporters who are pursuing the story and it's clear, many reporters had been pursuing the story over the years, though it was incredibly difficult to get it until recently.

Lindsay: Did you ever think about taking that on yourself, about reporting it out?

Rebecca: Did I think about it? Yes. But never in a way where I thought I was going to do it for a couple of reasons. First, my editor at that time had really drummed into my head that I was not to become the story, that the fact that I'd had this very public altercation with him, I was not to ever write about it. I was really, at that time, I think the view is I was not to talk about it. I'd been instructed not to answer questions of reporters. It was a different time journalistically. It wasn't the same sense of we should all be offering our firsthand experiences. Also, it was really drummed into me that I had, because of my experience with him, I had to be very careful about how I wrote about him. That doesn't mean to be nice to him or not nice to him, just to keep myself out of the story.

That part, I think in the early years, suggested to me that I was never going to write about this. But then the secondary part is that I've watched some of the best reporters, and David Carr is one who has been mentioned. He started a couple of years after that to work on his piece or maybe even in the next year to work on his piece about Harvey, and he tried very, very hard. I spoke with him about it and I tried to help him as best I could. And I heard about his efforts.

David Carr is one of the best reporters in the business. He had tried extremely hard to report this about Harvey, and he hadn't succeeded. That contributed to my view of this story as somehow Sisyphean. There are a couple of parts to that. One is that I had experienced Harvey's tremendous power firsthand, both the mountain of a man spitting in my face, it was terrifying. He was impermeable. My impression of Harvey was you couldn't beat him.

That's a very specific Harvey part, plus then, the systemic reality, which was, I watched as he shut down the whole story. I had been in public. My totally non-sexual story of power abuse with Harvey Weinstein had been the most public thing possible. A hundred people had seen it, and yet, it had never been reported as it happened. He had still managed to spin it. The idea of trying to get a story that was, and of course, stories of and sexual harassment are always harder to report because often, there are no witnesses. It's just he said, she said. Or, in some cases, he said, he said.

The idea of trying to do that seemed impossible to me. And then there's the broader stuff, I knew that he'd worked out non-disclosure agreements with people. I talked to, again, the reporters who'd bumped up against this stuff that there were people who were legally bound to not say anything, who faced tremendous professional and economic penalties if they dared to go on the record, it felt journalistically like an impossible story to get.

Then also, we have to remember that we have been living this moment, it seems like, "Oh, of course, everybody would care about this," but we have been living in an era in which, for example, my former colleague, Gabe Sherman, reported on ' harassment of women and no one cared. Bill Cosby's stories of assault had been widely reported, publicly reported and some cases on the record, and he was still getting lifetime achievement awards.

We have not been living in a world in which there was any reason to believe that a story like this was going to be taken as seriously as it's taken now. And so, all those factors together, I think, led me to believe that that was not a story that I was ever going to get. And I really admire ... As I said, I worked to help somebody at my own magazine at New York last year who was pursuing it. I knew that other reporters this summer were pursuing it and I was very hopeful that this might be the moment that the dam broke and it was. I have nothing but admiration for and Megan Twohey, and for the work that they did and finally getting the story. But it was not a story that felt even remotely gettable to me for a very long time.

Lindsay: What did that do to your sense of power in how the world works as this very young reporter who's just gone through this terrifying, extremely public experience and then came up against the realization that nobody cared, that you're effectively all alone in this?

Rebecca: It didn't alter my sense much at all. I mean, it reaffirmed what I generally believed to be true already, about how power worked. It wasn't a surprise to me ... It was a surprise to me only about the internal dynamics of my own institution. I was frustrated, for example, that I was told by my bosses not to talk about my view of what happened and I understood why they said so. They said, "This is your beat. Harvey is your beat. You don't want to be part of the story," so I obeyed.

But they didn't, and also my colleague, Andrew Goldman, gave some comments. The result is that ... I was dismayed about the fact that nobody offered the professional explanation. It would have been so simple to say, "We are her editors and we sent her to that party," which was the only spin that Harvey had was that I'd broken into this party and practically assaulted him. It was really tremendous and you can see that reflected in the New York Post coverage at that time. I believe even covered it at that time. It was Harvey's view that I had busted into this party in a way that was unprofessional.

All I needed was my bosses to say, "We sent her there. She's a journalist. She had every right to be there. She was pursuing a story. She called his office and we sent her to the party because we needed her to get a comment." That's all that needed to happen. That is the thing that did not happen. Instead, they focused on the gallantry of my colleague and my then boyfriend as the white knight and I was the damsel in distress and that irritated me. That surprised me on a small scale personal way and that's something I later talked to my bosses at the paper about and explained to them.

But the reaffirmation that Harvey had all this power meshed with what I was learning as a young woman in media, and with what I was reporting as somebody who was reporting on entertainment and media businesses that these men, and they were mostly men who had this kind of professional, economic, media, social and sexual grip on power, that that power was really untouchable. It didn't shock me or surprise me. It reinforced to me a view of the structure that was already becoming clear to me as a young woman.

Lindsay: You went on to become a journalist specializing in feminist issues and issues of sexual power. How have you seen the landscape change over the years?

Rebecca: Well, there's the rebirth of a feminist media which happened not long after ... When I was in my late twenties, I think in the wake ... Actually, I believe of the 2004 election, I think is the moment at which there was an explosion. Of course, there was always a feminist presence on the internet and it was building through the 90's. There was feminist presence through the 90's as far as riot girls and zines but as far as broader, more mainstream media, there had been this very fallow backlash period through the 80's and 90's between the scholarship and journalism of the 70's, the mainstream , the radical feminist movement, the civil rights and black power movements which of course also concerned themselves a gender at various points and then there had been this really fallow backlash period of the 80's and through the 90's where feminist conversation had happened on the margins. There were a few mainstream journalists who I looked up to tremendously including Katha Pollitt who wrote through that period, but for the most part, mainstream had been very seriously muffled.

And then after the 2004 election, this is my reading of this and other people may defer about the timeline, in part because so many women got involved in the Netroots activism around the 2004 election, many of them around the campaign. And then encountering some sexism within the left, they split off. And also frustration with historically mainstream feminist organizations, whether it was NOW or Planned Parenthood, and they began to seed the feminist internet in a more mainstream way and journalists at mainstream publications began to cover feminism. I certainly did around 2004 as my beat.

There was an explosion of feminist media that took the form of entirely new publications being spun off of. For example, Jezebel being spun off of . At Salon where I worked at the time at my job after the Observer, we started something called Broadsheet. The Observer itself, which have not historically had anybody writing about feminism, hired a couple of women who began to write from a feminist's perspective. Ariel Levy working at New York Magazine, she's now with The New Yorker. There was an explosion of women thinking about and writing about feminism, the launch of Feministing which is a very influential site.

That changed and you've seen it flower in lots of ways in popular culture. Beyonce citing Chimamanda and standing in front of the feminist sign at the VMAs a few years ago. The explosion of feminist television ... Well, I shouldn't say explosion. The flowering of some feminist television. You've seen it expressed in pop cultural ways. What's happening right now is something that I feel is very different from the past decade and change of feminist resurgence. I think that past decade, which I've been a part of as a journalist, has been about reborn feminism that still lives within, basically, controlled popular structures within journalism, the media, entertainment.

That's not to downplay it, I think it's crucially important but it's also controlled and packaged. Again, I'm both referring to my own work here and not exactly being critical. What's happening right now is something that I see as much more unbound, as much more out of control, as much more mass, and driven by a kind of raw rage. And my reading of it right now, though it may change, is in part because the structures that we built, the systems that we have are not transmitting or able to contain the anger and the frustration that women are feeling.

The chief example of that is the election of 2016. What happened is there was a moment where the revelations about as a sexual harasser and predator and a confessed predator who said on tape that you can just grab women by the pussy if you're famous enough and then who more than 20 women accused of assault or harassment before he was elected.

In the wake of that, there was also an explosion. Remember, there were hashtag campaigns, social media uprisings. Women were really angry. I remember friends and colleagues telling me about how in the weeks before the election, they were so angry about what was being revealed about this man who was a Republican candidate for the presidency that they were turning on men who called them on the street and saying, "Not anymore. You can't do this anymore." Thousands of women contributed to the hashtag campaigns saying the first time that they were assaulted. It was a real moment of revelation. I had man explained to me at that time that they had no idea how pervasive this was.

Then, came the election and a couple of things about it. First of all, obviously, Donald Trump won anyway, but the other thing about it was more women voted for his opponent. There was a way in which the brokenness of the system and the way the system, in this case, the electoral college, is designed to disempower those who already have less power and in fact, that is what the electoral system was designed to do, was to offer more power to slave states.

In this case, managed to reverse the impact of what was the popular vote and the raw democracy of the in which 3 million more people voted for over Donald Trump and yet, the terrible man got the biggest job even having not received the most votes. I think it was an example of the absolute failure of the systems that we have in place to reflect the will of the people but also to contain or effectively do the work of the people who are objecting to power abuses.

I think that that reckoning with the fact that the electoral system we had in place couldn't contain the rage is leading to this kind of expression of rage, which is much more out of control, unpackaged, dangerous. People are putting together shitty men lists, lists of men in the media, people are making ... I have very mixed feelings about these kinds of things. It's very dangerous by some measures, this idea that anonymous claims can be made against anybody without journalistic or a legal support and that anybody's name can be tarred.

This is a crazy moment but it's also, I think a radical moment because that kind of rage and action outside of the system tells us that there's an explosion that is so hot and so furious and that is now working outside of the system and erupting outside of systems we have in place because the systems have failed.

Lindsay: Do you think that there's real danger that this could spiral out of control, that this could become denunciations?

Rebecca: Yes.

Lindsay: Useless denunciations, revenge, weaponized by the alt-right to discredit feminism?

Rebecca: Of course. I have so many fears in so many directions this moment and I wrote a piece that details my many conflicting feelings about this moment because on the one hand, I want to emphasize that I find this moment extremely exciting. It's the first time in my memory that anybody has taken women stories about this stuff truly seriously and that, in fact, the explosion and proliferation of those stories is making people reconsider their own actions, their participation in the system, men and women, the way in which they have engaged in these abuses even if they didn't commit them directly though the ways in which the inequity is highlighted here are structural.

This is the first time in my life I've ever heard men and women thinking in new ways about this and it's a product of being hit with this lava of anger. At the same time, it is extremely terrifying. We are living in an era of fake news, of extreme partisan discourse, of weaponized false information. I am anxious about anonymous accusations even though I understand as a journalist why many accusations have to be anonymous. I am nervous about lists that people make. I am nervous about the muddying of categories. So far that hasn't happened, I can say, and this will probably be heard by listeners a week after we have recorded it, so maybe by the time you're listening to it, this will be different, but as of the day that I'm saying this, I haven't yet heard of any of the stories that have plausibly been shown to be false.

This is a worry that's about what could happen, not about what's happened so far. I also haven't yet seen action taken against those who have been accused that seems out of bounds with what they've been accused of. For example, there have been any number of men who have been accused of behaviors but not, for example, have not lost their jobs. There are a couple of stories of people who were accused -- the behavior was mentioned to the person and then the accused changed his behavior. That's the best case scenario story in all of these.

So far this hasn't happened because of course, I worry that it will. At any moment, it could today. It could tomorrow. It could six months from now. Yes, people can start making these accusations about anybody. It can be weaponized by the right wing and of course, the people who are being accused right now, many of them are on the left and that's an important part of the story that the left has to reckon, the progressives have to reckon with the fact that there is sometimes violent and criminal sexism within their own ranks, and that's an important part of what we're wrestling with right now.

But, of course, in this environment and with this level of distrust about news and media outlets, of course, I'm waiting for the moment in which this is weaponized by the right. Or, I'm waiting for the moment in which someone overreacts or misinterprets or takes what turns out to be a false charge too seriously and an accused man presumably gets punished unduly for something he probably shouldn't have been because what will next, and it's already happening to some degree, is that instead of the story being about men, powerful men who have been accused of abuse or harassment as the danger to women.

It will get reversed, funnily enough, as Harvey's spin on my altercation with him many years was reversed in which the women become the aggressors. They're the threat. They might tell a bad story about you. They might misinterpret a work lunch. They might misinterpret a gesture, and they become the threat. Of course, that both will create a backlash in which women are the punishing harpies out to get men, which has always been the storyline that relies on. Women as fundamentally sexist, fundamentally humorless and also fundamentally man-hating when, of course, this is not at all about hatred of men. It's an objection to power.

Lindsay: All the way back to the Salem witch trials. If you think about it, men had been ruminating about these fears about women and how women are going to slap back at them one of these days in one way or another. Sometimes, the motif is magic and witchcraft and, sometimes, it's sexual harassment allegations.

Rebecca: Right, and that happens so far, the momentum on these stories has been ... First of all, there are so many stories to be told that was coming out and it's so upsetting and in many cases, so persuasive that it hasn't fully turned yet but you can sense, everybody wants it to turn back to how it's comfortable and I'm saying this about both men and women. I've seen many women in my social media spheres worrying that this is turning to into a witch hunt that, that this is ... And that's always the term that's used.

Yes, that's going to happen at any moment and then of course, there are professional repercussions for women after that because as long as men still have the power but then they are told to be wary of the women who might come and misinterpret their innocent gestures as harassment, women will in very subtle ways and some not so subtle ways probably start to suffer. There will be less mentorship of women by men. Perhaps women will be hired less or sent on work trips less frequently.

Those kinds of implications are long term down the road implications and they're going to be in place as long as men have a disproportionate share of the economic and professional power which they continue to do. Yes, this is a moment in which there are so many contradictory things happening that it is both thrilling and horrifying and I feel all those ways about it.

Lindsay: What kind of structural changes could happen to channel this immense energy for the good into permanent change?

Rebecca: Well, the biggest structural change, and the only thing about which I have any long-term hope, is actually acknowledging how much of this stems from white patriarchal power structure, and working to actually reverse that power structure -- which of course, is also the hardest and most long-termed project. In the piece that I wrote about this, the long piece that I wrote about this, I actually cite the elections that recently happened, the 2017 special elections in which you saw so many women, many of them angry women, winning elections against in many cases, their actual sort of male oppressors. Danica Roem, who won her special election, she's a transgender candidate who won the special election against a white man who had put forth one of the anti-trans bathroom bills.

Lindsay: Billed himself as a homophobe-in-chief.

Rebecca: Yes, homophobe-in-chief and she beat him. She replaced him and that is also true. There's a woman in New Jersey who is angry after a white male lawmaker made fun of the women's march and said, "Well, why aren't those women home cooking dinner?" She ran against him and she beat him. She took his seat. I write in my piece that that's not just retaliation. That's replacement. And that is actually, if you look at the power structures, political, professional, economic and you say, "Actually, what we need to do is end the power imbalance that permits this kind of behavior to persist over centuries."

That is going to be the only solution, but that is years in the making. Certainly, there are a lot of women running for office in 2018, but this is not going to be solved in one year or one election cycle or just by looking at electoral politics. This is only to be solved when it reaches to every company, and also when it reaches beyond the elite professions. Because this is something I also am concerned about, about this moment. Not to take away from the horrifying stories that we're learning about so many of these men, but mostly, we're learning about them about very powerful men in very high earning and elite professions. What we're not hearing about, for the most part, are women who are working in factories, in warehouses, in restaurants, in the service industry, the tip service industry, where harassment is perhaps at its worst.

I saw that 700,000 farm workers have made a statement in support of the women of Hollywood. We need to get the women of Hollywood to act in support of the women farm workers. There are all kinds of voices who are not yet present in this conversation and I think that's another crucial thing that we need to address and we need to address the gender power imbalances, the economic imbalances that leave women susceptible to this kind of treatment and with limited resources in terms of fighting against it. Those have to be reversed in every profession, in every workplace and that is generations worth of work ahead of us and it's what we need to do. But it's not something that's going to be fixed in the next six months, 18 months, 18 years.

It's what we have to continue to work toward and if there's something that can come out of this moment, it is, I hope, a reckoning with how dramatically unjust those power imbalances are and that helps to undergird everyone's work toward reversing those power imbalances, or not reversing them but getting to something resembling actual . I don't need women to have the disproportionate share of power. I need women to have an equal share of power.

Lindsay: That's all the time we have for today. Rebecca Traister, thank you so much for coming on the program, and can you tell our listeners where they can read your huge new sexual harassment piece?

Rebecca: Yes, it's in New York Magazine and I believe it's headlined, Your Reckoning and Mine.

Lindsay: That's wonderful. Thanks so much for coming on the program.

Rebecca: Thanks for having me, Lindsay.

Lindsay: Now, it's time for recommended reading, a handpicked selection to deepen your understanding of our current political moment. This week's selection isn't about Trump per se, but it moved me deeply and I want to share it with you on this episode about violence against girls and women. It's an issue we've got to keep talking about and caring about even as the Trump administration demonizes migrants and tells us it's okay to turn our backs on the world's most vulnerable people.

The piece is called Two Dozen African Girls Dead at Sea, and the author is Tariro Mzezewa of The New York Times Op-Ed section. It's about the 26 teenage girls whose bodies were found floating in the Mediterranean earlier this month. The victims may never be identified but they are thought to be victims of sex trafficking from Nigeria. Since the 1980's, tens of thousands of Nigerian women and girls have been trafficked to work in the Italian sex trade and countless numbers have drowned in the attempt. Mzezewa argues that it's not just the Libyan traffickers who are to blame for the carnage at sea, but also the Italian government for policies designed to thwart migrants, including measures to prevent humanitarian groups like Doctors Without Borders from undertaking sea rescues. That's it for recommended reading.

The Breach is produced by Nora Hurley for Rewire Radio. Our executive producer is Marc Faletti. Our theme music is Dark Alliance performed by Darcy James Argue's Secret Society. And, I'm your host, Lindsay Beyerstein. Follow Rewire @Rewire_News for the latest on the issues that matter most. See you next week.