Sean “Diddy” Combs Arrest and Harvey Weinstein Retrial Put NDAs Back in the Legal Spotlight – Guest Column

Editor’s note: Nearly a decade after helping bring down Roger Ailes, former Fox News hosts Gretchen Carlson and Julie Roginsky remain silenced to varying degrees by nondisclosure agreements about what happened in the channel owned by Rupert Murdoch. As Harvey Weinstein and Sean “Diddy” Combs face new sexual criminal charges in court, Lift Our Voices co-founders advocate for renewed #MeToo movement and stop predators from keeping survivors of their crimes out of public view. .

With the recent indictment of Sean “Diddy” Combs, another high-profile man has been credibly accused of horrific sexual assault and misconduct, paving the way for another major industry to have its #MeToo moment.

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We’ve been here before.

In July 2016, one of us, Gretchen, was the first to file a sexual harassment complaint against Roger Ailes, then CEO and chairman of Fox News, paving the way for an investigation into how women had been handled by one of the most powerful men in media.

In April 2017, one of us, Julie, filed another complaint against Fox News and Ailes, also for sexual harassment and retaliation. The same day, the New York Times broke a devastating story about how many women were allegedly sexually harassed by Fox’s biggest star, Bill O’Reilly, and how they were silenced through forced arbitration and nondisclosure agreements, allowing the host to continue working while these women were deported. the door. O’Reilly was out at Fox less than three weeks later.

Six months later, in October, news broke about Harvey Weinstein’s decades-long abuse of women who had the misfortune of crossing his path.

Other high-profile stories followed: those of Matt Lauer, des Moonves and several more powerful and famous men who were quickly forced out after allegations of toxic behavior surfaced. It seemed like Hollywood and the media were finally having something to say about the pervasive mistreatment of women in these industries.

And yet.

Some of the men whose downfall was celebrated at the height of the #MeToo movement were welcomed with open arms.

Take O’Reilly, whose behavior at Fox forced the network to pay tens of millions of dollars to settle with women who alleged he engaged in widespread sexual misconduct. One of those women, a former producer named Andrea Mackris, left Fox News with a settlement and an NDA in 2004. Nearly 20 years later, amid the #MeToo movement, she gave a poignant interview to the Daily beast, detailing his alleged abuse; settlement negotiations that forced her to sign a nondisclosure agreement; and even her mistreatment by male journalists, who sued her for daring to come forward.

Earlier this year, Mackris was forced to pay O’Reilly nearly $100,000 in fees for an arbitration proceeding he initiated to enforce his 2004 NDA. She was silenced, once moreover, as she has been for 20 years, except for a brief moment when she apparently assumed it was finally possible to safely share her own story.

Most, if not all, of the women allegedly harassed by O’Reilly never worked in television news again.

Meanwhile, O’Reilly became a TV regular again — he even returned to Fox to plug one of his books just six months after leaving. Since then, O’Reilly has been making the regular rounds on every cable news network except MSNBC. Aside from a recent interview with PBS’s Margaret Hoover — who, in a feat of journalistic excellence, repeatedly pressed O’Reilly on his treatment of women — not a single anchor from CNN, NewsNation or elsewhere asked him directly questions about tens of millions of women. dollars in payments to his alleged victims, or why he should be allowed to return.

O’Reilly’s recent resurrection in the media is just one of countless comebacks that many male celebrities have enjoyed since their cancellation at the height of the #MeToo movement.

As we approach what many consider to be the seventh anniversary of the #MeToo movement, it is clear that we, as a society, still have work to do to ensure that survivors are protected and empowered to speak out against toxic behavior and to obtain justice. that sexual predators receive more than just a slap on the wrist in public.

Through our nonprofit, Lift Our Voices, we have worked tirelessly to bring permanent reckoning to those who engage in toxic acts in the workplace. Thanks to our two bipartisan laws, the Ending Forced Arbitration for Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act and our Speak Out Act, survivors of sexual misconduct are no longer automatically forced into the secret room arbitration or to remain silent. But as is often said, changing the law – as difficult as it is in these hyper-partisan times – is always easier than changing the culture.

With each passing week, the allegations against Combs become more disturbing, including a recent report here at Deadline that his legal team is attempting to intimidate his alleged sexual assault victims by forcing the public release of their names. While these claims, if proven at trial, are as horrific and damning as anything Harvey Weinstein has been convicted of, we must remain vigilant and ensure that the red carpet is not rolled out for the attackers once the proverbial dust has settled fallout. in a few years.

To be clear, one of the reasons Combs might have preyed on so many people is his pervasive use of NDAs, which made survivors fear being sued by a rich and powerful man if they spoke out. .

This is what silencing mechanisms do: they seek to intimate and isolate. One attorney noted that the NDAs Combs regularly distributed were perhaps “the broadest nondisclosure agreement(s)” he had ever seen. But the NDA Combs were not particularly unusual in their scale. Politicians on both sides of the aisle — from three-time Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to Democratic New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy — have used similarly broad NDAs to cover up toxic behavior. Lesser-known organizations and individuals have also used them to prevent inappropriate and illegal behavior from being exposed.

Combs is not the only musician to have abused less powerful women, just as Weinstein is not the only producer to prey on women in Hollywood and Ailes is not the only executive to have harassed women in the media. If we are serious about holding bad actors accountable, we must stop making an example of some high-profile abusers while allowing so many others to rehabilitate themselves on national television, before our eyes.

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