On October 5, 2017, an article was published in The New York Times.
The 3,300-word investigative bombshell, written by journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, detailed substantial allegations of sexual misconduct against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.
The article sent shockwaves around the world and created a ripple effect, a significant moment in the evolution of the #MeToo movement.
Kantor and Twohey would later write a memoir called She Said, which has now been adapted into a movie starring two-time Academy Award-nominee Carey Mulligan as Twohey and Zoe Kazan (The Big Sick) as Kantor.
Patricia Clarkson, Samantha Morton and Mike Houston also star in the groundbreaking journalism thriller which will be in Australian cinemas from November 17.
Watch the trailer for She Said. Story continues below.
She Said tells the true story behind the article and follows Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters Kantor and Twohey as they work tirelessly to track down documents, hidden details, talk to survivors, and eventually break one of the biggest news stories of the century.
“I remember, of course, because it’s not that far in the past, the ripple effect of that story and how it met up with other cultural forces to create what feels like the beginning of a seismic cultural shift,” Kazan told Vanity Fair. “We all know how it ended up, but this [movie] is about the job of journalism and what that job entails, and the bravery of the survivors coming forward.”
Kantor and Twohey met in 2016, when Twohey arrived at The New York Times from Reuters. Kantor told Vogue she first noticed Twohey when she broke some of the first allegations about Trump while pregnant.
"So I brought a bag of maternity clothes to the office for Megan, hand-me-downs from a group of Times colleagues. She left the bag untouched at her desk. I was like, 'Who doesn’t take the clothes?' There was something a little guarded about her, a little reticent," she wrote.
When she started working on the Weinstein investigation, Kantor called Twohey for advice. Twohey had recently given birth to her daughter and was experiencing postpartum depression.
"There’s a scene in the film where Carey is sobbing to her husband, not quite able to articulate what’s wrong. It plunged me back to a day in early motherhood when I asked my husband to come home from work because I felt too shaky and scared to be alone with the baby," she writes in Vogue.
The call from Kantor made Twohey realise how much she needed to get back to work. "In the film, there’s something about the way Carey yanks open the door to the newsroom on her first day back from maternity leave that captures exactly how I felt."
The two teamed up together and started working through the investigation, reaching out to some of the biggest names in Hollywood and asking them whether they would go on the record. Over the course of their investigation they spoke to Gwyneth Paltrow, Rose McGowan, Ashley Judd, Salma Hayek and many more women who had been sexually harassed and assaulted by Weinstein going back decades.
It was the drive out to Gwyneth Paltrow’s house in the Hamptons that really cemented their working relationship and friendship.
"On the drive back to the city, we shared a junk food binge and our own dead-honest observations about the Times, marriage, motherhood," Kantor writes in Vogue. "Have you ever met a woman you assumed was different from you, then realised you had a common core? That was us."
On October 5, 2017, they published that first article. After that many more women came forward to tell their stories and two more articles were published.
Weinstein was later sentenced to 23 years in prison on charges of sexual assault and third-degree rape.
Kantor and Twohey's first clue that their story might be made into a movie actually came from Weinstein himself. In 2017, before their investigation was even published, Variety got word about what they were up to and reached out to Weinstein for comment.
Weinstein pretended to know nothing about it. “The story sounds so good, I want to buy the movie rights," he said.
When Kazan and Mulligan signed on to play Kantor and Twohey, they spent a lot of time with the reporters not only to see what they were like as reporters, but also to gain insight into their personal lives.
Mulligan, who had also been diagnosed postpartum depression after having her first child in 2015, was able to easily connect with Twohey's character.
“I felt like she really spent a lot of time with me, and studied me and my family in a way in which she was able to not just portray a sense of me, but to portray this really personal and even difficult time in my life, in a very accurate and respectful way,” Twohey told Vanity Fair.
And Kazan could relate to Kantor's experience as a working mother, trying to juggle work obligations with family life.
She Said is a thrilling movie about a moment in history that changed the world for the better. But it's also about the two women who bravely stood up to the establishment, and stopped at nothing to make sure other women finally got the chance to speak up and tell their stories.
As Mulligan explained to her daughter when she asked her what she was working on, She Said is no ordinary story.
"Well, it’s about these two women, they’re journalists, and they tell stories," she explained. "But what’s amazing about the story that they told is that it sort of changed the world."
She Said is a story that shattered decades of silence around the subject of sexual assault in Hollywood and altered American culture forever. Watch in cinemas November 17.
Feature Image: Universal Pictures.