With their explosive story on Harvey Weinstein, New York Times reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor planted a land mine in the cultural psyche and set it alight. Now the landscape is divided into two distinct segments: before the Weinstein story broke, and after. New rules govern how professionals behave in the workplace; how media outlets respond to allegations of abuse; how those in power comport themselves in public. But to publish their story, Twohey and Kantor had to pursue scraps of whispers, and convince very unwilling sources to speak out against one of the most powerful men in Hollywood.

Their book, She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story that Helped Ignite a Movement, out today from Penguin Random House, tells the inside story of that process, which involved knocking on strangers’ doors, digging for records, and swapping texts and emails with people like Gwyneth Paltrow and Rose McGowan. And all along, Weinstein and his team were working to undermine them, sometimes tangibly, sometimes in ways more circumspect. In addition to a trove of new documents and new details on sources, the book examines the systems that worked to protect the disgraced producer, and delves into the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford. “We wanted to devote more time to illuminating that secret system that’s hiding in plain sight,” Twohey says. Adds Kantor, “In a way it’s such a relief to finally tell people about everything that happened.”

Vanity Fair: When you made the decision to expand your Weinstein reporting into a book, what sort of story were you hoping to tell?

Megan Twohey: Our article in October 2017 really felt like it was just the beginning. We had been able to connect some of the dots about Weinstein, but there were still so many pressing questions. There was the question of the backstories of the women who came forward, the wrenching decisions they faced. There was the question of the machinery in place to silence those women and try to block our investigation. We had been able to figure out some of the elements of that machinery, but with this book, we were able to figure out so much more, including the role of Lisa Bloom, the prominent feminist attorney.

We also wanted to go into the question of complicity. One of the most pressing questions when it comes to these predators is: Who were the individuals and institutions that glimpsed that wrongdoing over the years, and what did they do about it? Harvey Weinstein ran two major companies, Miramax and then the Weinstein Company, and we wanted to do more to illuminate what they knew, when they knew it, and what they tried to do about it, including his brother, Bob.

Jodi Kantor: We wanted to use the tools of investigative journalism to tell the story because when you’re reporting a story, you’re trying to piece together information, but you’re also seeing bigger things. You’re seeing a whole system. Investigative journalism offers a natural process of discovery, so we thought we could re-create that in the book.

We’re also approaching the third anniversary of the Access Hollywood tape, the second anniversary of the Weinstein story, and the first anniversary of the [Brett] Kavanaugh hearings, and those are sort of the three poles of the book. It was our way of saying, We’ve all lived through this extraordinary story together, but there’s more to be learned about what really happened here. We wanted people to feel the nuance, the contradiction, the dilemmas, the pain, the solidarity—all of those feelings that the investigation involved, we wanted to share them in full.

What was it like to write about yourselves in third person?

Twohey: Well, Jodi and I have now been connected at the hip for over two years. If we’re not actually physically in the same space, sitting next to each other for hours on end, we’re writing each other countless text messages and emails. So in some ways, it felt like an extension of our reporting and working relationship to then commit it to the page, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a little weird to try to figure out [how to do that]. We can finish each other’s sentences, but how do you put us down onto the paper together?

Kantor: What we intend to do is invite readers into this partnership and say, We have been puzzling over this stuff for two years. Come with us. Look at what we saw, and we’re going to show your clues. Come into this process with us of both trying to figure out what happened, and trying to figure out what it means for the rest of us.

Twohey: And it was exciting to do that. We were also able to bring in a lot of the reporting we did on Weinstein that was confidential and off the record. There were off-the-record meetings, there were secret source meetings, and we worked really hard to get that information on the record so we could take readers into the moment Harvey Weinstein shows up in the lobby of the New York Times 24 hours before publication. To bring readers into the secret meetings that Jodi had with Irwin Reiter, Weinstein’s longtime accountant who actually turned out to be one of the deep throats of the investigation. That was really satisfying.

Kantor: In a way it’s such a relief to finally tell people about everything that happened.

You mentioned Lisa Bloom, the attorney who’s now defending women who claim they were abused by Jeffrey Epstein. Can you describe the memo she wrote to Weinstein, which is printed in full in the book?

Twohey: Lisa Bloom is obviously one of the most prominent feminist attorneys in the country, and in 2016 she crossed over to the other side to work for Weinstein. She says today that she made that decision because she wanted to help him apologize to women, and that she was only aware of him making inappropriate comments to women. These records we obtained show a much different story: that this was somebody who was aware of some of the serious allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault against Weinstein, and that she signed up for a much darker role. She spells out in this memo, which basically says, These are all the underhanded tactics that I’m going to use to undermine your accusers. She’s essentially saying, All of this work that I’ve done with victims, I’m now going to harness that and work against them on your behalf. It was a pretty jaw-dropping moment. And we were grateful to have the opportunity to shed a little bit more light on how she’s operated in the past.

Lisa Bloom is part of a whole cast of characters who worked to protect Weinstein that includes people like David Boies, who’s now defending an Epstein accuser, and Lanny Davis. What was it like to interact with that machinery?

Twohey: These people are everywhere!

Kantor: They’re on TV all the time.

Twohey: They’re going in and out of the major stories of the day all the time. In the reporting of this book, we wanted to go in depth with the stories of women and other sources who came forward, but we also tried to go in depth on the people by Harvey Weinstein’s side. We knew what was happening on our side, but what was happening on the other side? What was going through their minds? The Weinstein Company board held a couple of emergency meetings to deal with our story, and we were able to reconstruct those meetings where David Boies is having to tell everybody, This is going to be bad, but let’s not have this turn into a circular firing squad. Basically begging people to stick together knowing that the truth is about to come tumbling out. Our goal was an X-ray look at how power really works, and the abuses of that power, and how people choose sides.

Obviously your reporting on Weinstein blossomed into an entire social movement. What do you think #MeToo has accomplished thus far, and where do we go from here?

Kantor: Like everyone else, we have been staggered by the size and durability of this. It doesn’t even feel like a news story anymore—it feels like a way of being. Of course, the Epstein story brings up a lot of the same questions as the Weinstein story: How could this have gone unaddressed, or inadequately addressed, for so long? How could so many people have been complicit? What is behind this seemingly prestigious world that is clearly masking something much darker?

You can’t solve a problem you can’t see, and all of us collectively are still in the process of seeing that problem clearly for the first time. And clearly we all have a lot of work to do. We also understand that #MeToo has become controversial in that there’s a lot of debate. Basically there are three questions about #MeToo issues that are totally unresolved. One: What kind of behaviors are under scrutiny? Are we talking about Aziz Ansari? Yes or no? Number two: How are we evaluating this information? What are the tools we’re using to figure out what actually happened? And number three: What’s the punishment or accountability that we’re going to use? Each of those three questions is a matter of huge debate.

Twohey: It’s clear that both the accusers and the accused feel like there has not been adequate reform. They feel like there has not been a system put in place by which complaints can be made and vetted, and accountability can be adequately and fairly applied. We can’t predict exactly how this sort of systemic change will work, and how these reforms will come about and what they’ll look like, but we can continue to do our jobs as reporters, which is to work to unearth and publish the facts.

Kantor: Since October of 2017, we’ve been flooded with messages from women who want to tell us their stories. And there have been times when we’ve really felt overwhelmed. There’s no way that any publication, even a publication with the resources of the Times, could ever get to every one of the stories. It’s almost like so many systems have failed, and, of course, we want journalism to step in and do what it can, but journalism can’t compensate for an entire system that’s broken.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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