On Monday afternoon at New York’s Columbia University, The New York Times and The New Yorker were awarded a shared Pulitzer Prize in Public Service for their journalistic work on stories that ended up prompting the public’s focus on what we’ve come to know as the #MeToo movement. It’s not often that you can pinpoint the beginning of such a momentous cultural shift, but in this case you can draw a pretty clear line to the stories by Meghan Twohey and Jodi Kantor at the Times and Ronan Farrow at The New Yorker, which made public the initial allegations of abuse and harassment by movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. (Of course, the original #MeToo hashtag was created by Tarana Burke, but it gained even more traction in the weeks and months after the Weinstein stories broke.)
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Journalist Ronan Farrow
https://twitter.com/PulitzerPrizes/status/985956718860488704
In response to the award, Farrow wrote on Twitter, “Grateful for every brave source, for Jodi and Megan, and for a tireless @NewYorker team that stood by this story when others tried to bury it. This moment gets called a reckoning, but we just started telling the truth about old abuses of power. Thanks to all who keep doing so.”
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Journalists Meghan Twohey, left, and Jodi Kantor, far right, with actress and Weinstein accuser Ashley Judd
Asia Argento, one of the women who first spoke to Farrow, congratulated him on the win and thanked him for telling women’s stories.
Mira Sorvino, another of Farrow’s sources, tweeted: “The hugest congratulations to @jodikantor @mega2e & an especially warm hug to my friend and fearless truth teller @RonanFarrow you all created a wave of change that I am so grateful to be part of! With your conscientious journalism you literally changed the world! #MeToo”
In the wake of the Weinstein allegations, women began sharing their own stories of sexual harassment online. Soon many more powerful men—from Matt Lauer and James Franco to Al Franken and Charlie Rose in Hollywood, media, business, and politics were facing accusations of their own. A true reckoning had begun and frankly shows no signs of disappearing any time soon. A number of powerful women in Hollywood launched Time’s Up, which includes a legal defense fund for women of any industry who would otherwise not be able to afford counsel to fight workplace harassment.
It’s pretty hard to imagine that any of those events happen in such quick succession without the work of Kantor, Twohey, and Farrow—and the brave women who went public with their stories. Needless to say, a Pulitzer Prize seems an incredibly appropriate thank-you.