Bob Woodward Was Booed During His Interview With Weinstein Reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey

Legendary journalist Bob Woodward interviewed fellow legendary journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, and the audience was not having it.

Kantor and Twohey, who broke the New York Times Harvey Weinstein exposé that launched the Me Too movement back in 2017, were being interviewed by Woodward at an event in Washington, DC on Wednesday ahead of the release of their new book, She Said. The intergenerational meeting of three accomplished journalists — Woodward became the Kantor and Twohey of this day after breaking the Watergate scandal — took an unexpected turn, however, when a series of interruptions and inappropriate questions on Woodward’s part eventually drew boos from the audience.

According to Vox, Woodward repeatedly interrupted Kantor and Twohey, to the extent that audience members eventually spoke up, shouting, “Let them finish!” and “Every woman deserves to be heard!” Woodward’s questions also began to stray from investigative journalism, the subject of Kantor and Twohey’s book, to Harvey Weinstein.

Woodward reportedly asked the journalists a number of increasingly ill-informed and tone-deaf questions about Weinstein and the nature of sexual misconduct. According to Robyn Swirling, the founder of the anti-sexual-harassment organization Works in Progress, who detailed the disastrous exchange in a Twitter thread, Woodward spent upwards of ten minutes asking Kantor and Twohey to explain Weinstein’s motivations, before accusing them of dodging his question and then ultimately — and bizarrely — dismissing research-backed arguments linking sexual assault to power and positing that Weinstein’s actions may have instead been “a weird foreplay.”

According to Swirling, this was the point at which the audience began to boo Woodward.

This went on for more than 10 minutes. Showing exactly why he was the wrong person to have any sort of public (or private) discussion about #metoo, @realBobWoodward said "So it's about power? It's about sex also though, isn't it?"

The audience booed.

— Robyn Swirling (@RSwirling) October 3, 2019

“You could just feel the whole audience going into a defensive posture,” said Vox visuals editor Kainaz Amaria, who attended the event.

Apparently undeterred, however, Woodward went on to question whether women accusing powerful men of sexual assault could be believed, asking Kantor and Twohey whether they doubted any of the women they spoke to about Weinstein, as well as whether they believed Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh.

Taking the higher road, Kantor and Twohey thanked all moderators, including Woodward, in an email statement to Vox, adding, “We welcome all questions, from them and especially from the audience, because each one is an opportunity to relate the wrenching decisions that many of our sources had to make and grapple with #MeToo as an example and test of social change in our time.”

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