Seven years after #MeToo: what does it cost to say something?

On November evening in 2022 I rode a very long escalator to a movie theater in Toronto. I was always looking for metaphors and thought the elevator was beautiful: it was long and very slow, just like the progress of women’s equality in this world. But it still went somewhere.

Listening, talking, silence, shame. These were all themes of the movie we were going to see, She said. It hadn’t even hit theaters yet, but every woman in the audience knew the story it would tell: the explosive investigation of New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey into the reign of violence and terror led by Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein. Like a kick to a chessboard, the #MeToo movement that followed turned the polite game of complicity on its head.

Our host for the evening, a slim woman with short hair, came out and took the microphone. She wore a yellow T-shirt with the words “Can’t Buy My Silence” written in black. This was Julie Macfarlane, formerly a law professor at the University of Windsor, a survivor of sexual assault, and co-founder of a campaign to ban non-disclosure agreements – legal contracts that essentially put tape over the mouths of people who have suffered. abuse. NDAs were central to Weinstein’s ability to continue his campaign of harassment, and they continue to be used to silence victims today.

“There is no point in bringing people into the light to talk about sexual harassment and other misconduct,” Macfarlane said, “if we then tell them never to talk about it again.”

It took me back to October 5, 2017. The Globe and mail had recently moved to new excavations. I was sitting downstairs in the cute hipster cafe, wondering what I was going to put in my column that week, when the news broke. The New York Times The story came with a soft ping that contained no hint of the cacophony that was to follow. “Harvey Weinstein has punished sexual harassment accusers for decades.”

As soon as I started reading, I knew Kantor and Twohey had the goods. This was explosive. The reporters had exposed nearly three decades of allegations of “harassment and unwanted physical contact” by Weinstein. Crucially, dozens of people at his film company said they were aware of the allegations. As Kantor and Twohey wrote, “Only a handful said they had ever confronted him.” One courageous employee, Lauren O’Connor, had written to executives at the Weinstein Company to say, “There is a toxic environment for women at this company.” Nothing was done to contain the top predator, let alone report him.

I read every word of the story, barely breathing. When I was done, I emailed my editor. Holy shit, this is big. Maybe I should scrap my column for this week and write about Weinstein instead?

I had no idea that the stories would keep coming – and coming, and coming. The media, the financial world, Silicon Valley and the restaurant industry all had their own #MeToo movements. When I look back on the stories, I am amazed at the outpouring of anger and pain. It was like a new law of physics: injustice times secrecy times power inequality equals one impressive shitstorm.

The ensuing years have yielded as many questions as answers: what were the secrets the movement uncovered? Who was left out? Who was injured and who was rehabilitated? Who got involved in the backlash? How far do we have to go? What are the mechanisms of change, and who gets to operate these levers? And finally, a question that torments an individual soul when the world wants to put a hand over its mouth: what does it cost to say something?

Meast of the world learned about NDAs during #MeToo – especially the way Weinstein’s legal team used them to suppress the truth. Zelda Perkins, one of Weinstein’s assistants at Miramax, was silenced under one of those non-disclosure agreements. In the 1990s, she tried to report his attempted assault of her assistant, Rowena Chiu, to her superiors. The complaints went nowhere and Perkins and Chiu were persuaded to sign a settlement that included a non-disclosure agreement.

In that theater in Toronto I saw Samantha Morton playing Perkins. “I needed their permission if I wanted to contact a therapist or speak to an accountant,” Morton-as-Perkins said. “This is bigger than Weinstein. This is about the system that protects abusers.”

After the film ended and the applause had died down, Macfarlane stood up in front of the audience. In September 2021, she contacted Perkins via Twitter. Together they founded Can’t Buy My Silence, a global organization dedicated to banning the use of NDAs in settlements where sexual assault and harassment occur.

Macfarlane explained to the audience why she left her former employer, the University of Windsor, ‘in disgust’. Macfarlane was an advocate for students on campus who had also been victims of sexual violence and abuse. One particular fellow professor was identified as an intimidator and was eventually released, but his departure was covered by a non-disclosure agreement. When Macfarlane was asked about his reputation by other universities, she shared what she thought of her former colleague. The other professor then sued her for defamation, and instead of providing documents that would have supported her, the university “threw me under the bus,” she said. So she stopped.

“The other thing that connected Zelda and I in our own experiences with NDAs was that we were relatively privileged,” Macfarlane continued. “She was very young, but she was a white woman, she had a way of supporting herself. I was a university professor. Yet we are still completely screwed. If we were completely screwed, how much worse is that for all the other people who don’t have any of the benefits we could have?”

A few months laterI met Macfarlane while she was traveling to Australia. She was in her 60s and a cancer survivor, but somehow her engine of injustice kept running. In less than eighteen months, the Can’t Buy My Silence campaign had achieved a series of astonishing victories. One of those victories meant that NDAs on college sexual misconduct, like the one Macfarlane inadvertently violated, were banned in several jurisdictions, including the United Kingdom and Ontario.

“It’s a little dizzy right now, but it’s great,” she said. Just a week earlier, the Canadian Bar Association had passed a motion to curtail the abuse of NDAs and “discourage their use to silence victims and whistleblowers who report experiences of abuse, discrimination and harassment.” It was largely a symbolic move, but an important one, and it came shortly after legislation was passed in Prince Edward Island to ban non-disclosure agreements in sexual misconduct cases.

Macfarlane told me that the Hockey Canada scandal had been crucial in changing course. In the spring of 2022, a shocking story made headlines: a young woman said she was sexually assaulted by several hockey players, including members of the junior national team, in a hotel room in London, Ontario, in 2018. The investigation into the incident was halted, but later reopened after public outcry. In February 2024, five former team members – four of whom played for the National Hockey League – would be accused of sexual assault. The London police chief apologized to the woman for the time the investigation had taken.

The young woman reached a $3.55 million settlement with Hockey Canada, but was subject to a non-disclosure agreement that prohibited her from sharing details. The outrage that followed was seismic. For starters, Hockey Canada had settled twenty-one sexual abuse claims since 1989, some of which were tied to non-disclosure agreements. On the other hand, the money came from a pot of money with the Orwellian name ‘National Equity Fund’.

Under public pressure, Hockey Canada released the complainant from her non-disclosure agreement. This change did not come because the organization was ashamed of the alleged assaults of its players, or the way it had handled those allegations, but because it had become bad for the brand. “Corporate Canada will not agree to stop using NDAs on moral grounds,” Macfarlane told me. “They’re going to stop because using it seems even worse.”

The process of reporting sexual assault is still fraught, Macfarlane noted. “It is still very difficult for people to report crimes. Not only is it personally traumatizing for them, but they also find themselves in a system – whether in the workplace, in civil court or in the criminal justice system – that treats allegations of sexual violence completely differently than anything else. You still have those issues of so-called credibility and how much you have to show in evidence about something that of course almost always no one else witnesses.”

Was it worth it? It was for her. But knowing what it required of her, she couldn’t make that decision for anyone else.

Sourced from What she said: conversations about equality by Elizabeth Renzetti. Copyright © 2024 Elizabeth Renzetti. Published by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Multiplied in consultation with the publisher. All rights reserved.

Elizabeth Renzetti is a bestselling author and journalist. In 2020 she won the Landsberg Award for her reports on gender equality. She lives in Toronto.