In 2017, Jodi and Megan began investigating Harvey Weinstein. He sent a team of spies after them.

"Watch your backs... I don't trust Weinstein." 

That’s the advice Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey received from Dean Baquet, the former executive editor of The New York Times, when they started looking into Harvey Weinstein.

The journalists were uncovering decades of sexual harassment allegations against the Hollywood film producer in a bombshell investigation that would propel the #MeToo movement and later be re-told in the new film She Said. 

Watch the trailer for She Said. Post continues below. 

As a powerful and influential figure in Hollywood, Kantor (played by Zoe Kazan in the film) and Twohey (Carey Mulligan) were warned Weinstein would likely resort to "unsavoury tactics".

But it wasn't until after they published their 3,300-word investigative piece that they realised the depths he went to. 

"What we found out afterwards was that the tactics were far worse than anything we could have imagined," Kantor told Mamamia.

Over the course of the six-month investigation, the pair faced legal threats and intimidation tactics. 

"He hired a team of private Israeli spies to try to choke off our investigation," Kantor explained. 

And it didn't stop there. 

One of Weinstein's agents allegedly posed as a women's rights advocate to approach Kantor.

"[She] came to me and… she kind of intimated that she was going to offer me a lot of money to speak at a conference... and I just brushed her off."

As the investigation drew closer to publishing, Weinstein got in their faces.

As depicted in She Said, the now-70-year-old barged into The New York Times office at the 11th hour, with a team of powerful attorneys and documents full of threatening information against the women who had come forward.

Twohey led him into a conference room as "he made one of his last-minute last-ditch attempts to try to stop the investigation."

"They had these folders with information and photos that they thought were going to be damaging to some of the women who were depicted in our story," Twohey told Mamamia. "That was just one of many underhanded tactics that he had used to try to stop this investigation."

Fortunately, it didn't work.

"The more that we glimpsed of it, the more motivated we were to publish the story and to expose the truth about him," Twohey said. 

Twohey says Carey Mulligan summed up her feelings in that moment perfectly in her depiction in the film. 

"Watching Carey's face in that scene as she depicts my reaction to these people, there's no hint that she's intimidated, there's no hint that she's scared," she said. 

"At that moment, we had the facts, we had these brave sources, and we had the support of The New York Times as an institution, and there was nothing he could do to stop us."

On October 5, 2017, Kantor and Twohey's article was published. "Harvey Weinstein paid off sexual harassment accusers for decades," the headline read. 

In the piece, Kantor and Twohey detailed substantial allegations of sexual misconduct against one of Hollywood’s most powerful men. 

One of the women who came forward was actress Ashley Judd.

The now 54-year-old claimed Weinstein invited her to a breakfast meeting in a hotel two decades previously when she was a young actress. 

After being told they would be talking in his suite, Weinstein reportedly asked her to give him a massage and to watch him take a shower.

"I said no, a lot of ways, a lot of times, and he always came back at me with some new ask," Judd said in the article. "It was all this bargaining, this coercive bargaining."

In the film, we watch as Judd, who plays herself, opens up about her experience to Kator and eventually goes on the record before they publish.

It was that moment in the film that rung the truest for Kantor. 

"I think the movie captures what felt to me like the consequential reality of the moment, the trust she was placing in us, the feeling that a woman was putting her career on the line for the sake of other women," she explained. 

"And on Zoe's face, I can see the layers of my own reaction and the gratitude, the trying to be professional, and really believing for the first time that the investigation was going to work."

As more women came forward to tell their stories, Kantor and Twohey, who won the Pulitzer Prize for their work, went on to publish two more articles.

Five years on, the impact of the landmark investigation and the shock waves it sent around the world continue to be felt today through the #MeToo movement.  

Weinstein was later sentenced to 23 years in prison on charges of sexual assault and third-degree rape. The 70-year-old, who has pleaded not guilty to 11 charges of alleged rape and sexual assault, is currently facing a new trial in Los Angeles.

As people watch the film, Kantor hopes they will walk out remembering who came out on top. 

"Why I hope the film is inspiring to people is that the tactics didn't work. These dirty, underhanded manipulative techniques... were no match for this small group of brave women who decided to tell the truth about Harvey Weinstein."

She Said is out in cinemas on November 17. 

Feature Image: Getty/Mamamia.