She Said

And he now rots in jail.

I was eating lunch in one of those godforsaken salad bowl places in New York City in 2020 when the two women sitting at a table next to me turned their attention to their cellphones. The verdict in the trial of Harvey Weinstein had just been announced. They turned up the volume so that everyone within range could hear: GUILTY. We almost pumped our fists in the air. I saw triumph and relief in their faces. Finally, we celebrated that justice had been served.

Justice is very elusive when the accused are powerful people. Given the difficulty of bringing justice to victims of sexual abuse and Weinstein’s reputation as one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood, the fear was that Weinstein, like many privileged, powerful white men before him, was going to get away with it. Our reaction that day was not an overreaction.

I had been transfixed by the Harvey Weinstein saga since reading Ronan Farrow’s exposé in The New Yorker, and later the spectacular reporting by Jodi Kantor (played by Zoe Kazan) and Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) of the New York Times, who wrote the book in which this movie is based. Written by Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Ida, Disobedience), it starts promisingly with a young woman who is walking her dog in the Irish coast when she comes upon a strange sight: a massive galleon floats on the water, soldiers with red cassocks and muskets…