Seven years after #MeToo: How much does it cost to speak out?

Owell November night In 2022, I took a very long escalator to a movie theater in Toronto. Always looking for metaphors, I thought the elevator was wonderful: it was long and very slow, much like the progress toward equality for women in this world. But it was still going somewhere.

Listening, talking, silence, shame. These were all themes of the film we were about to see, she said. It wasn’t even in 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 delve into the reign of violence and terror of Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein. Like a kick against a chessboard, the ensuing #MeToo movement turned the polite game of complicity on its head.

Our host for the evening, a slim woman with short hair, came out and grabbed the microphone. She wore a yellow T-shirt with the words “Can’t Buy My Silence” written in black. That was Julie Macfarlane, a former law professor at the University of Windsor, a survivor of sexual violence and co-founder of a campaign to ban non-disclosure agreements – legal contracts that effectively tape 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 this day to silence victims.

“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 they can never talk about it again.”

It took me back to October 5, 2017. The Globe and mail had recently moved to new digs. I was sitting downstairs in the cute hipster cafe wondering what I would write in my column this week when the news broke. The New York Times The story arrived with a gentle ping that held no hint of the cacophony that would follow. “Harvey Weinstein paid off sexual harassment accusers for decades.”

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

I read every word of the story and barely breathed. When I was finished, 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, finance, Silicon Valley, and the restaurant industry all had their own #MeToo movements. When I look back at the stories, I marvel at the outpouring of anger and pain. It was like a new law of physics: injustice times secrecy times power imbalance results in an impressive shitstorm.

The years since have produced as many questions as answers: What secrets has the movement revealed? Who was left out? Who was injured and who was rehabilitated? Who was affected by the backlash? How far do we still have to go? What are the mechanisms of change and who is allowed to use these levers? And finally, a question that torments a single soul when the world tries to put its hand over its mouth: How much does it cost to speak out?

MEast of the world learned about nondisclosure agreements during #MeToo — particularly how Weinstein’s legal team used them to suppress the truth. Zelda Perkins, one of Weinstein’s assistants at Miramax, was silenced under one of these nondisclosure agreements. In the 1990s, she tried to report the attempted attack on her assistant, Rowena Chiu, to her superiors. The complaints went nowhere and Perkins and Chiu were persuaded to sign a settlement that included a nondisclosure agreement.

I saw Samantha Morton playing Perkins at this theater in Toronto. “I had to get her permission if I wanted to contact a therapist or talk to an accountant,” Morton-as-Perkins said. “This is bigger than Weinstein. This is about the system protecting perpetrators.”

After the film ended and the applause 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 sexual assault and harassment settlements.

Macfarlane explained to the audience why she left her previous employer, the University of Windsor, “out of disgust.” Macfarlane had advocated for students on campus who were also victims of sexual violence and abuse. One particular colleague was identified as a harasser and ultimately fired – but his departure was covered by a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). When Macfarlane was asked by other universities about his reputation, she told them what she thought of her former colleague. The other professor then sued her for defamation, and instead of producing documents that would have supported her, the university “snubbed me,” she said. So she gave up.

“The other thing that linked 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 the ability to support herself. I was a university professor. Still, we were completely screwed. If we were completely screwed, how much worse would that be for all the other people who didn’t have the advantages that we have?”

A a few months laterI met Macfarlane when she was on a trip to Australia. She was in her sixties and a cancer survivor, but somehow her engine of injustice just kept running. In less than eighteen months, the Can’t Buy My Silence campaign had achieved a series of stunning victories. One of those victories led to NDAs covering sexual misconduct at universities, like the one Macfarlane unintentionally violated, being banned in several jurisdictions, including the United Kingdom and Ontario.

“It’s a little dizzying right now, but it’s great,” she said. Just a week earlier, the Canadian Bar Association had approved a motion to curb the abuse of NDAs and “prevent their use to silence victims and whistleblowers who report experiences of abuse, discrimination and harassment.” It was largely a symbolic but important move, and it came shortly after the passage of a law banning NDAs in sexual misconduct cases in Prince Edward Island.

Macfarlane told me that the Hockey Canada scandal was pivotal in turning things around. In the spring of 2022, a shocking story made headlines: A young woman said she was sexually assaulted in a hotel room in London, Ontario, in 2018 by several ice hockey players, including members of the men’s junior national team. A police investigation into the incident was closed but was later reopened after a public outcry. In February 2024, five former members of the team – four of whom played for the National Hockey League – would be charged with sexual assault. The head of the London police apologized to the woman for the long duration of the investigation.

The young woman agreed to a $3.55 million settlement with Hockey Canada, but was subject to a non-disclosure agreement that prohibited her from revealing details. The outrage that followed was seismic. For one thing, Hockey Canada had settled twenty-one sexual assault lawsuits since 1989, some of which involved nondisclosure agreements. On the other hand, the money came from a pot of money with the Orwellian name “National Equity Fund”.

Hockey Canada bowed to public pressure and released the complainant from her NDA. The move was made not because the organization was ashamed of the alleged assaults on its players or how it handled those allegations, but because it damaged the brand. “Corporate Canada will not agree to stop using non-disclosure agreements on moral grounds,” Macfarlane told me. “They will stop because using them looks even worse.”

The process of reporting sexual violence is still difficult, Macfarlane emphasized. “It’s still incredibly difficult for people to report anything. Not only is it personally traumatizing for them, but they are also caught up in a system – be it in the workplace, in civil courts or in the criminal system – that treats allegations of sexual violence completely differently than anything else. There are still problems with so-called credibility and the question of how much you have to be able to provide evidence for something that, of course, is almost always not attested to by anyone else.”

Was it worth it? It was for her. But knowing what it would require of her, she couldn’t leave the decision to anyone else.

Excerpt 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. Reprinted after consultation with the publisher. All rights reserved.

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