Women Who Inspire Me

There are so many inspiring women in this world that it’s impossible for me to write about the individual Women Who Inspire Me enough, but there are several women who deserve some big shout-outs this week: the women who helped convict Harvey Weinstein.

Speaking out against a powerful individual is hard. Doing it when you have no power is harder. And speaking out about something incredibly intimate is harder still. But six women agreed to do the next to impossible and testified against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein in a trial that resulted in two convictions and, possibly, a lengthy prison sentence.

Those six women – Dawn Dunning, Miriam Haley, Jessica Mann, Annabella Sciorra, Tarale Wulff and Lauren Young – overcame their own fear and anxiety (and, I’m sure, countless internet trolls) to tell the truth about what happened to them at the hands of someone who believed, with apparently good reason, that he could get away with it.

These six women are a fraction of the more than 100 women who have made public allegations against Weinstein, so they are to be thanked profusely – by the other women who spoke out but whose allegations weren’t prosecutable, by the women who still haven’t spoken out, and by all the women whose careers won’t be cut short by being blacklisted as a “troublemaker” in Hollywood.

These women, and all the women who joined hands and spoke up about Weinstein, inspire me greatly.

Major shout outs as well to Manhattan assistant District Attorneys Meghan Hast and Joan Illuzzi, who built the difficult case (sexual assault and rape, particularly ones without physical evidence, is notoriously hard to prosecute) and saw it through to a conviction. 

I’m a lawyer, but I handle transactional work (aka “deals”), so I’ve never had to build a case and win over 12 people, but I know it’s exceedingly difficult. Winning a criminal conviction requires both a compelling, believable narrative as well as the legal elements to justify a guilty verdict. Those two things don’t grow on trees.

Also inspiring is the incredibly meticulous reporting by New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, who broke the story back in October 2017. They spent months tracking down leads, talking to women who didn’t want to be interviewed, fielding legal threats, and being followed by private investigators, but they never stopped reporting. (For purposes of this article, I’m going to make Ronan Farrow an honorary woman, for his reporting on Weinstein for The New Yorker.)

More will be written about this case as time goes by, but if you want to read some great books on the subject, Kantor’s and Twohey’s She Said and Farrow’s Catch and Kill both read like fiction and shouldn’t be missed.

Of course, Weinstein’s conviction will be appealed, and might be overturned. (He maintains he never had non-consensual sexual relations with anyone.) But, for now, let’s just be incredibly inspired by the women who broke the Weinstein story, the women who prosecuted and convicted him, and, most of all, the women who overcame their overwhelming fear and spoke out.