The Daily - Sexual Harassment's Toll on Careers

Episode Date: May 3, 2018

In a case that highlights the economic consequences of sexual harassment and retaliation, Ashley Judd is suing Harvey Weinstein for the damage he did to her career after she rebuffed his advances. And in the second part of the episode, three women who pioneered the language of consent reflect on being far ahead of their time on the politics of sex. Guests: Jodi Kantor, an investigative reporter at The New York Times; Juliet Brown, Christelle Evans and Bethany Saltman, who helped to establish an affirmative consent policy for sex at Antioch College in 1990. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, a Hollywood actress is suing Harvey Weinstein, not for sexual harassment, but for the damage he did to her career when she rejected him. And three women reflect on being so far ahead of their time on the politics of sex. It's Thursday, May 3rd.

Tonight, actress Ashley Judd sitting down for her first TV interview after filing a new lawsuit against Harvey Weinstein. sitting down for her first TV interview after filing a new lawsuit against Harvey Weinstein. I remember the lurch when I went to the desk and they said, he's in his room. And I was like, oh, are you kidding me? And in a pattern so many women say happened to them too. She says the man inside began insistent pressure. Jodi Kantor, remind us what Harvey Weinstein was accused of doing to Ashley Judd.

What was the original claim she made? About 20 years ago, Ashley Judd was an ingenue. Her career was on the rise. And Harvey Weinstein invited her for really two meetings, but one that was much more upsetting to her at hotels in Los Angeles. It was at the Peninsula Hotel, and she was going for what she thought would be a business meeting with him. And instead, he tried to move in on her and make almost a series of sexual bargains with her. You know, will you do this with me? Well, if you won't do that, will you do this other thing with me? And that it was almost this like sort of escalating series of offers, all of which she says, this sort of escalating series of offers, all of which she says she said no to.

And the way she tells the story is she felt like she had to get out of the room without making Harvey Weinstein uncomfortable because he had so much power over her career. There's this constant grooming negotiation going on. I thought no meant no. I fought with this volley of no's, which he ignored. Who knows, maybe he heard them as maybe, maybe he heard them as yeses, maybe they turned him on.

So after Ashley Judd rebuffs Harvey Weinstein, what happens to her career? Well, her career is proceeding along, but the question is, are there opportunities she's not getting? Because what Ashley began to suspect along. But the question is, are there opportunities she's not getting? Because what Ashley began to suspect was that Harvey Weinstein was badmouthing her. And badmouthing her how? So weeks after we broke the Weinstein story and Ashley became much more public about what had

happened, the director Peter Jackson, who directed the Lord of the Rings franchise, came out and basically said that Harvey Weinstein had called Ashley Judd a nightmare, said that she was terrible to work with. And according to Jackson, Weinstein said, we cannot work with her. And it was really a light bulb moment to Judd because she had a sense that Weinstein had said negative things about her after she rebuffed his advances, but she was never really sure of, you know, the full story. And so when Jackson came out and said, you know, essentially, yes, Ashley, you know, he said terrible things about you and I believed them and I'm so sorry, it was really an aha moment for her. I was being invited to consider which of the two roles I preferred. And then all of a sudden, poof, I was being maligned and defamed. Harvey Weinstein lied

about me and interfered with my economic opportunity and blocked me from being cast in Lord of the Rings. And do you remember that Weinstein's version of these events is very different? He has denied these accounts. And I think we'll find that in this court case, he specifically disputes what Ashley Judd says about this turn of events. And I mean, I've seen the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Everyone's seen the trilogy. It was a huge blockbuster and would have represented a huge opportunity for Ashley Judd if she'd been cast. That's part of why this is such a dramatic test case, because it's not just any acting gig. Ashley Judd is essentially asking, hey, if this hadn't happened and if I

hadn't been retaliated against, would I have had a significant role in one of the greatest blockbusters of all time? So she's making legal claims of sexual harassment and defamation and essentially of unfair business practices. This lawsuit is sort of operating on two levels. On one level, she's making this very specific claim against Harvey Weinstein for economic loss in conjunction with all the events we've just discussed. But she's also saying on a more symbolic level, hey, you can't do this. You can't treat me this way without some sort of penalty. She's trying to make this bigger point, which is how well does the law really protect women

against retaliation? And is there any redress from the economic consequences of harassment? The criticism here is that the laws that protect women from harassment are pretty weak. They're full of loopholes. It's very hard to win a sexual harassment lawsuit. We've seen case after case in which the plaintiff describes what sure sounds to the common ear like harassment, and yet their law doesn't necessarily recognize it as such. And a huge question here is, is the law responding to the Me Too moment, or is it just sort of business as usual in the courts? Are people more sensitive to these issues and to the harm that they can cause? And so I think we're going to be seeing that play out in the law for years to come because

the law is very slow to change. But part of what's happening here is that Ashley Judd, who was a leader on this issue from the beginning, is kind of taking up the fight again. And she's saying, I'm going to push and I'm going to provoke the law to try to respond to this issue. Right. And so in a sense, she's asking, are the laws sufficient to really account for the real impact of sexual harassment? Exactly. This is far from a legal slam dunk,

but it's part of a quest to make a larger point about what harassment is really about. You've described this as a bit of an unusual test case. Is there an argument on the other side that there's any kind of danger in making backbiting and trash-talking a more serious crime than it might normally be? Even though in this case, obviously, it's tied to a very serious charge of sexual harassment, given that the law is all about precedence and what might happen down the line.

Is there a debate going on about that? I don't think there's a debate yet because this lawsuit is so new. It was just filed on Monday. But if it shows signs of progress, I think, you know, it's very easy to imagine exactly the kind of debate that you're talking about. It's also easy to imagine a lot of excitement because for a long time, women have felt like there's just not enough accountability for sexual harassment. Jodi, thank you very much. My pleasure. We'll be right back. So can you do me a favor? Like, I want to do this story from beginning to end, but can we just go back and will you set the scene of the 90s? Can you describe Antioch? Yes. Antioch was a very interesting place in the 90s. Christelle Evans attended Antioch College in the early 1990s.

I was 17-year-old coming to campus, and I remember my mother leaving. I look out, and there are two people dancing around in the rain naked. I'm like, where in the world did my mother leave me that people dance around in the rain naked? That was not part of any community that I had grown up in, anything that I was even remotely familiar with or heard of before. My name's Juliet Brown. I went to Antioch from 1989, the fall of 1989. Yeah, my name is Bethany Saltman,

and I went to Antioch from 1987 to 1992. And I went to Antioch from 1987 to 1992. Antioch had this activist, revolutionary history. Being on the cutting edge of politics, of social change. Antioch was the first place I was at where you could openly be lesbian, gay, bisexual. I didn't know what transgender was until I hit the Antioch campus. Very sex-positive culture. We had co-ed bathrooms.

People were really into sex, had tons of sex. It was not a prudish place to be by any stretch of the imagination. Very free, very open, and I like that. And then there was finding out that two women had been raped on the campus. I had heard that someone was raped on campus. And nothing had been done. So we decided that we should talk to other women on campus. And so we called a meeting to discuss sexual assault on campus. And I remember even being kind of on the fence

about whether or not I was going to go to the meeting. I had never really gone to the Women's Center. I was not a joiner. And I said, I'm going to that meeting. We weren't prepared for the outcome. There were so many women in the room that night. They just came pouring in. There weren't enough chairs for them.

One of the women told her story. And I was really moved by this person's story of being raped or sexually assaulted and feeling like nobody was helping her and no one was paying attention. People were upset, and there was anger, and then there was, okay, what do we do about it? And I just kind of threw myself into it. And because I was a writer, I volunteered to help draft a policy that we were going to take to the administration. We never heard of any other college or university doing what we did or having a policy. I remember sitting up with my typewriter, like listening to what other people had to say,

and then fixing it. I mean, this was something drafted from the ground up. And then, you know, throwing it out, and then trying again, putting in the paper. We weren't looking at anything else other than what we wanted to see happen. And so the atmosphere was exciting, kind of dangerous. We wanted to see a process. It was thrilling, really. But it didn't take long for us to figure out that we had to define consent. Because in order to define what rape and sexual assault are, you have to talk about the consent and lack of consent.

We wanted people to understand that breaking someone's consent in even the smallest of ways was connected to the most violent of assaults. You know, the way people had conventionally considered consent, which was that you have to just make sure that the person doesn't say no. And flipping that on its head and saying, actually, you need to make sure that someone is saying yes. How do you have sex at Antioch College? Very carefully. It's something that only a bunch of intellectuals on an American college campus could think is practical. Media from all over the world descended upon the campus. Well, if Antioch College has its way, campus smooching will involve so many questions and answers, you might want to bring your lawyer along. These are the rules.

It seems awful, doesn't it? That was considered outrageous because it, like, de-sexes the whole thing. I think people want to have fun when they have sex, and they envisioned this as an attack on their ability to have fun, an attack on sex. Believe me that many men at many colleges if that's going to happen are

going to lose their action. They laughed at us not just locally in Ohio not just nationally in the country but internationally. We were the laughing stock. I'm laughing because I just, knowing about human relationships, knowing about the libido, knowing about the desire to be with another person, this is going to be ridiculous. I was standing in our bookstore when someone from SNL called, and they said, can we get one of your football jerseys? And we laughed. We don't have a football team.

But the joke was on us. If it all sounds like the stuff out of a Saturday night live routine, it is. Live from Antioch College in Antioch, Ohio, it's time to play. It is. It's. Daybreak. With your host, the Dean of Intergender Relations, Dean Frederick Whitcomb. May I kiss you on the mouth? Yes, I would like you to kiss me on the mouth. May I elevate the level of sexual intimacy by feeling your buttocks? Yes, you have my permission.

May I raise the level yet again and take my clothes off so that we could have intercourse? Yes, I am granting your request to have intercourse. And I sat down, I said, let me look at this. And I just started to cry. It was very hurtful. It was very hurtful. Something that we had worked on. It's like our, I keep wanting to reference it to being our baby. And I think that's because I think of it as something that we birthed, was something that we worked on so hard to help people, was being made fun of in just really disturbing and disgusting ways to me. When the policy got lampooned on Saturday Night

Live, I just was so embarrassed and felt like, I felt embarrassed about my desire to be empowered. I felt embarrassed about my desire, I think, to feel heard. I felt like I had put too much of my heart into it and that I felt too strongly, you know, that feeling of like I was too much and that I wanted to be heard. And that I, it wasn't, it was a very unladylike kind of position. And I felt humiliated. I ended up leaving school. I quit because I was exhausted. It's 2018. Marijuana is finally allowed and sexual harassment finally isn't. The number of women now accusing Harvey Weinstein of some kind of sexual misconduct is more than 20. The story has touched a nerve with people all over the world and they're speaking out using the hashtag MeToo. At the core of so many cases, the question of consent.

The issue of consent becomes a hot topic nationwide. Consent. That's a tough one, isn't it? Non-verbal, it's very tricky. You're asking a lot. Non-verbal is just too vague. I think you have to be verbal. The phrase yes means yes replaces no means no on college campuses across California. That shifts the focus from no to yes. Consent requires affirmative consent. Meaning silence no longer counts as consent.

Part of enjoying that world is setting a higher standard for sex than just not rape. And women get to talk about it if men don't live up to those standards. Empowering women to be louder about their desires and about their boundaries. I try not to have this thought, but we had that conversation back then. They're finally catching up with us. We had that conversation back then. They're finally catching up with us.

It's very upsetting to me to think that we were doing this 25 years ago and now maybe colleges are thinking about talking about consent. You know, so it's it's upsetting to me, but it's also heartening. It's heartening to think that, okay, okay, so fine. It's been 25 years, but at least something is happening. Do I feel vindicated? I would say, no, I don't feel vindicated. Like, you all finally caught up to us. No, I'm glad we are in the discussion. What we started back then is in the discussion.

Special thanks to my colleagues, Samantha Stark and Cassie Bracken, for reporting this story. Here's what else you need to know today. On Wednesday, White House lawyer Ty Cobb stepped down from the White House legal team and from his role as the point person in dealing with special counsel Robert Mueller. Cobb is the latest lawyer working on the case to leave the White House or threaten to leave as the legal team debates how much to cooperate with Mueller and his investigators. Cobb will be replaced by Emmett Flood, a longtime Washington lawyer who represented Bill Clinton during his impeachment. And... That money was not campaign money. Sorry, I'm giving you a fact now

that you don't know. It's not campaign money. No campaign finance violation. So they funneled it through the law firm. Funneled it through the law firm and the president repaid it. They funneled it through the law firm. Funneled it through the law firm, and the president repaid it. Oh, I didn't know he did. In an interview on Fox News Wednesday night, one of the president's newest lawyers, Rudy Giuliani, said that Trump had reimbursed his longtime aide, Michael Cohen, for paying $130,000 to an adult film actress, Stephanie Clifford, to prevent her from discussing an alleged affair with the president.

That contradicts Trump's previous claim that he was unaware of the payment and contradicts Cohen, who said he used his own money to pay Clifford. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.