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

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

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 then-Fox News CEO and President Roger Ailes, starting a reckoning about how women had been treated by one of the most powerful men in the media.

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

Six months later, in October, it was revealed that Harvey Weinstein abused women who happened to cross paths with him for decades.

Other high-profile stories followed: of Matt Lauer, Les Moonves and several more powerful and famous men being quickly kicked out the door after allegations of toxic behavior surfaced. It seemed as if Hollywood and the media were finally having their day of reckoning regarding the widespread mistreatment of women in these industries.

And yet

Some of the men whose downfalls were celebrated during the height of the #MeToo movement have been welcomed back 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, in the midst of the #MeToo movement, she gave a chilling interview to the daily beast, detailing their alleged abuse; settlement negotiations that required her to sign a non-disclosure agreement; and even her mistreatment at the hands of male journalists, who persecuted her for daring to come forward.

Earlier this year, Mackris was forced to pay O’Reilly nearly $100,000 in fees for arbitration proceedings he instigated to enforce his 2004 NDA. She was silenced, once again, as been for 20 years, except for a brief moment when he apparently assumed it was finally safe to share his own story.

Most, if not all, of the women O’Reilly allegedly harassed have never returned to work in television news.

Meanwhile, O’Reilly has become a regular on TV again; he even reappeared on Fox to plug one of his books just six months after his departure. Since then, O’Reilly has made the rounds regularly on every cable news network except MSNBC. Aside from a recent interview by Margaret Hoover of PBS, who, in a feat of journalistic excellence, repeatedly pressed O’Reilly about his treatment of women, no host on CNN, NewsNation or anywhere else has asked him directly about the tens of millions of dollars in payments to his alleged victims, or why he should be allowed a refund.

O’Reilly’s recent resurgence in the media is just one of countless comebacks that many male celebrities have enjoyed since being written off at the height of the #MeToo movement.

As we approach what many consider to be the seven-year anniversary of the #MeToo movement, it’s clear that we, as a society, still have work to do to ensure survivors are protected and empowered to report toxic behavior and seek justice, and that sexual predators get much more than a public slap on the wrist.

Through our nonprofit, Lift Our Voices, we have worked tirelessly to force a permanent account for those who engage in workplace toxicity. Thanks to our two bipartisan laws, the Ending Forced Arbitration for Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act and our Speak Up Act, survivors of sexual misconduct are no longer automatically forced into to the secret arbitration chamber or to keep silent. But as we often say, changing the law, as difficult as it is in these hyper-partisan times, is still easier than changing the culture.

With each passing week, the allegations against Combs continue to grow more disturbing, including a recent report here at Deadline that his legal team is trying to intimidate his alleged sexual assault victims by forcing their names to be released publicly. While these claims, if proven at trial, are as horrific and reprehensible as anything Harvey Weinstein has been convicted of, we must remain vigilant to ensure the red carpet is not rolled out for abusers again when the proverbial dust has settled. years from now.

To be clear, one of the reasons Combs was allegedly able to take advantage of so many people is because of his widespread use of NDAs, which made survivors fearful that a rich and powerful man would ask them to forget if they spoke .

This is what silencing mechanisms do: they aim to intimate and isolate. One lawyer noted that the NDAs Combs routinely handed out might have been “the broadest non-disclosure agreement” he had ever seen. But Combs’ NDAs weren’t particularly unusual in their breadth. Politicians on both sides of the aisle, from three-time Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to New Jersey’s Democratic governor Phil Murphy, have used equally expansive NDAs to cover up toxic behavior. Less well-known organizations and individuals have also used them to avoid exposure of inappropriate and illegal behavior.

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 harass women in the media. If we are serious about taking responsibility for bad actors, we need to stop making examples of a few high-profile abusers while allowing so many others to be rehabilitated on national television before our eyes.

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