The beginning of the #MeToo movement, as a cultural reckoning on endemic sexual misconduct and abuse, can be roughly dated by the click of a mouse. On 5 October 2017, the New York Times published an investigation into the film producer Harvey Weinstein, a Hollywood titan with a decades-long history of systemic abuse, triggering an outpouring of recrimination and recognition on and offline. (The phrase #MeToo was coined over a decade earlier by activist Tarana Burke, as a way for Black women to share their stories of sexual violence.)
That first moment – reporters and editors hovering around a computer screen, cursor lingering on the “publish” button – is the narrative climax of She Said, a new film adaptation of reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s book on the Weinstein investigation. Five years after the start of the movement, She Said is the most overt of so-called “#MeToo movies” – films which depict revelations of sexual abuse, process the upheaval of powerful perpetrators, grapple with the consequences, or envision a path forward. The film, directed by Unorthodox’s Maria Schrader, is literally the story behind the story that kicked everything off, the Hollywood version of the mission to uncover what had been an open secret in Hollywood for years.
