Progress depends on information: Jodi Kantor on today’s crisis of truth and holding power to account

This October, Jodi Kantor’s voice rang out to a rapt audience in Stanford’s Bing Concert Hall: “Progress for women, progress for anyone, depends on information... and on people having a shared version of reality.” That shared reality, she warned, is under attack. At a time when truth itself is in crisis, research and investigative journalism, she argued, are antidotes: vital tools for exposing power and inspiring alternative paths forward. 

In the wake of Kantor’s reporting on the sexual assault allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein, the #MeToo movement re-ignited and spread around the world, exposing the pervasiveness of gender-based violence and inviting a collective reckoning with sexual harassment. Hosted by Clayman Institute with Stanford Live as part of the Jing Lyman Lecture Series, Kantor spoke before a packed audience – many of whom had read her article nearly eight years ago to the day – and who, in one way or another, had witnessed or become part of the movement it inspired.

Kantor, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on the Weinstein case, reflected to the audience that the story was not only about one man’s abuses. It was, she said, about how information itself is controlled and suppressed by powerful people and entrenched systems. The same forces that silence victims and protect abusers also distort our collective understanding. 

Journalism, Kantor offered, plays a key role in exposing information and scrutinizing power. Investigative journalism, in particular, embodies that mission by exposing secret information in service of the public good. Her own groundbreaking investigation into Weinstein embodies that pursuit: a story that peeled back layers of silence to spark a global reckoning. In a system built to protect wrongdoing, secrecy is a critical tool. In the context of sexual harassment, secrecy is maintained via legal settlements that include non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), in which victims are silenced, the truth is buried, and abusers are free to continue on to other victims. These insights helped inform the Clayman Institute’s own research program on gender-based violence and NDAs, an inspiration shared by the Institute’s faculty director, Adrian Daub, when introducing Kantor.  

Exposing secrecy comes with resistance or even danger. Kantor described the extreme measures Weinstein took to stop her and her colleague Megan Twohey. Beyond leveraging immense legal and PR resources, Weinstein went further by hiring ex-Israeli intelligence agents and offering a $400,000 bounty to prevent the story’s publication. Kantor highlighted how today, “methods could be much scarier... deepfakes, misinformation, misrepresentation. It’s getting easier, it’s flourishing.” Indeed, the pervasiveness of generative AI technologies and the changing nature of social media highlight new opportunities for intimidation and harassment.  

Kantor’s current focus continues her pursuit of revealing hidden truths about power, this time by turning her attention to the Supreme Court. She described the Supreme Court as “a locked box:” it welcomes no visitors, those who work at the court take a vow of silence, and the papers that show what happens in its deliberations remain sealed for decades.  

Kantor moved into conversation with Pamela S. Karlan, who is the Kenneth & Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law at Stanford, co-director of the school’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, and one of the nation’s leading experts on voting and the political process. She is also a former Clayman Institute faculty research fellow.

In discussing the Supreme Court, the two mulled over the fact that few institutions hold such immense power while operating with so little transparency or accountability. As Karlan put it, the Supreme Court is like “one big NDA.” Kantor drew an important distinction between privacy and secrecy: judges, she noted, need privacy to deliberate freely, but do they need secrecy? Systems built on total secrecy, she warned, can enable wrongdoing, avoid scrutiny, and reduce accountability.  

That danger was made visible in another story Kantor broke about Rev. Rob Schenk, a former anti-abortion leader. After the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, Schenk revealed that he had known about an earlier breach, in a 2014 case concerning contraception and religious rights. Kantor’s reporting revealed that Schenk had purposefully built a relationship with Justice Samuel Alito and was told the 2014 outcome weeks before it was announced. He used that privileged information to plan a public relations campaign and even tip off the president of Hobby Lobby, the company at the center of the case. The culture of secrecy and the absence of institutional accountability in the Supreme Court made such breaches possible and left them unaddressed. 

It is this culture of secrecy that Kantor works to infiltrate, including through better understanding the different justices. Kantor pays particular attention to Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative judge who, Kantor noted in a prior profile, was most likely to vote with the liberals and play the role of an internal critic on the conservative end. 

Karlan and Kantor returned their discussion to the state of journalism. Kantor joked that the field has been “in crisis” for as long as she’s been part of it, but genuine concern persists, including mounting threats to press freedom and the growing hostility toward the pursuit of truth.  

Information, she said, is what gives us a shared version of reality. When that shared reality erodes – when people can’t agree on basic facts – accountability and progress for women, and society more broadly, become impeded. Kantor put it simply, noting the truth today is in trouble: “Facts, knowledge, our shared sense of reality is all endangered... There is not yet a plan for saving the truth.” With journalism (and science) under attack, our grasp can slip on reality and we lose power to uphold accountability. 

Confronted with these challenges, the conversation raised a broader question: where are women’s rights headed? On one hand, Kantor highlighted, there has been progress with women achieving significant gains in recent decades, including but not limited to, the workplace. Yet at the same time, a powerful backlash is unfolding, visible in the rise of the “manosphere” and the persistence of misogyny. We have yet to see or understand how those two forces are meeting.  

Even in uncertain times, as Kantor’s work and voice remind us, truth always has the power to break through. Shining a light on it can be a simple act of awareness and accountability -- or the spark of a movement. 

This event was co-sponsored by the Office of the Provost, Department of Communication, and Stanford VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab.