She Said
By Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey
Penguin Press, 310 pages
When journalist Shiori Ito told police in Tokyo of her claim she was raped by a TV reporter in April 2015, police issued an arrest warrant, but they suspended it in June that year, according to media reports. Then in July 2016, prosecutors dropped the case. It's what she did next that made Ito into Japan's symbol of the #MeToo movement: She spoke up.
At a press conference in May 2017, she spoke about the alleged rape. Then she filed a civil lawsuit against the alleged perpetrator in September 2017. A trial is ongoing.
Days later, on Oct. 5, 2017, New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey's first article on a slew of sexual harassment and other accusations against American film producer Harvey Weinstein was published. In the article's wake, Weinstein's company collapsed, the #MeToo movement gained momentum, Time's Up activists rose up during the movie awards season, and others were accused like Weinstein, who is awaiting trial on sexual assault charges. Kantor and Twohey won a Pulitzer Prize.
Their book, "She Said," is more than just a behind-the-scenes account of how the two gathered information, contacted sources and broke the story. It's a fascinating look at the decision-making of those sources who chose to speak out and those who did not want to be on the record.
Weinstein's outsize influence in the film industry stemmed from the time he and his brother ran Miramax, the studio that produced Oscar magnets such as "The English Patient," "Pulp Fiction" and "Shakespeare in Love." This last title won Gwyneth Paltrow a best actress Oscar, and she is a key source who, for reasons detailed in the book, did not at first speak on the record.
Fellow actress Ashley Judd did go on record in that first article on Weinstein's longtime pattern of alleged sexual harassment. "[T]hat his accusers were famous women ... proved this was a universal problem," Kantor and Twohey write.
A range of emotions come forth when reading the accounts of what the accusers said Weinstein did and the stories of those who protected him. Like me, other men should read this book.
The pulse-pounding, detective-story narrative of "She Said" naturally falls into a lull after the article is published. The last few chapters focusing on Christine Blasey Ford's sexual assault claim against then U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, however, are notable for showing what had and hadn't changed.
The epilogue is the masterstroke of this book. The reporters asked some key sources to meet, and Paltrow hosted the group in January 2019.
At this get-together, former Miramax employee Rowena Chiu, who had not spoken on the record for the articles, said: "There are very few ... Asian voices that come forward with this kind of story. I think certainly within the U.S. we have a whole culture around a model minority that doesn't make a fuss, that doesn't speak up."
Another former employee, Laura Madden, one of those who spoke on the record in the first New York Times story, summed up the meeting by saying, "The point is that people have to continue always speaking up and not being afraid."
That includes people in Japan, where both women and men have to speak up to make sure issues such as sexual harassment and rape aren't silenced.
-- By Yung-Hsiang Kao
Japan News Staff Writer
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Read more from The Japan News at https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/
