Anonymous #MeToo source goes public (2023)

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From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernise. And this is El Diario. It's been more than five years since the MeToo movement changed the world by disempowering powerful and aggressive men. The moment was fueled by coverage in places like The New York Times,

Behind these stories were sources, many of them anonymous, who took enormous risks to expose misconduct, harassment and sexual violence. Today, a key anonymous source behind an important story reveals its identity for the first time. My friend Rachel Abrams will tell her story.

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It's Thursday, May 18.

Ali Dirks described herself to me as, quote, "an ordinary person." Ali grew up in a small Indiana town with a Midwestern aversion to boasting. When you talk to her, she will often apologize for things before she even says them or declare that what she is about to say is regrettable. Sometimes it can seem like you're afraid of taking up too much space in the world.

So it makes sense that when Ali was graduating from law school and many of her friends were trying to get stellar jobs at reputable corporate law firms, Ali decided she wasn't going to do it. She just didn't feel these jobs were for her.

Ali hobbled around a bit, working temporarily for various law firms, working in an unattractive part of the legal world that non-lawyers probably hadn't heard of. This is called document review.

Essentially, document review involves lower-level lawyers going through piles of documents and evidence, highlighting things deemed important enough for higher-level lawyers to read. By the time Ali was in her thirties, she was ready for something new.

And then, in 2018, Ali landed a job at the very firm she thought she would never be able to work for, a large, reputable law firm, Covington and Burling. I would still go through the docs, but felt it was a big step forward.

The decisive moment came sooner than Ali expected. As soon as he started working at Covington, he learned that he had been assigned an important new case.

This investigation, the case Covington assigned Ali to, involved Les Moonves, the former CEO of CBS. Some of you remember this situation from Les Moonves. But to quickly explain what this investigation was all about: Les Moonves was a living legend on American television. He was known for hits such as "Survivor", "ER", "CSI" and "Friends". He was so well known for picking hits that people called him the man with the golden guts.

But in the summer and fall of 2018, The New Yorker published complaints from more than a dozen women who accused Moonves of sexual misconduct. The claims were numerous: intimidation, harassment and sexual assault. Moonves denied the allegations but left CBS in September 2018 anyway, making him one of the most powerful people to lose their jobs during MeToo.

The network hired Covington and another law firm to investigate the allegations and culture within the firm. One big stake was a $120 million severance package. And the investigation would determine whether he should have let him resign and take all that money, or whether CBS could have retroactively fired him for good cause, in which case he would have lost that golden parachute. It would certainly be the biggest and most prestigious case Ali has ever worked on.

That something I was doing, shifting piles of papers and reading endless e-mails, could somehow manifest in the real world. And the reason I think it's rude or cheesy is because it's not a great or noble motivation to commit to something because it's in the news.

But I guess it's just my invisibility and the insecurity of the kind of work I was doing document reviewing was just this: it depressed me so much that one of the most prestigious companies in the country, not only that, not only finally having a stable job not only will we be assigned to a major investigation, but the work we do could become something my friends and family can read about. It may not appear anywhere in the credits, so to speak, but I've been working on it. I was part of it.

In Covington, Ali was one of 35 people who reviewed thousands of company documents, emails, memos, letters and files. She says many of them were down-to-earth, harmless, and utterly boring dregs of office work. But very quickly, Ali began to see evidence of abuse by Les Moonves. Moreover, she could see that through it all, he enjoyed the loyalty and support of the highest echelons of CBS.

Ali was excited about the case in part because it was a chance to be part of something big, a MeToo moment. But, like all of us, Ali could look around and see the lawyers fall on different sides of what's going on. Week after week, lawyers standing in front of the victims, demanding justice for their clients, appeared in the news.

But there were other attorneys facing accused perpetrators, also demanding justice for their clients. Ali's new big job has oddly left her in the middle of this "us and them" situation. On the one hand, he may think of himself as an investigator, investigating allegations of sexual misconduct, looking for accountability. But then again, she was working for Covington, who was working for CBS.

Ali knew from years of reviewing the documents that no matter how much damning evidence she pointed out, she would have no control over what CBS ultimately did with it. They could have acted on it and made it public, or they could have kept it a secret and tried to minimize the damage by burying it. Ali at this point in the reckoning found it difficult to determine which side he was working on. One day Ali was on the train home from work and he read something that hit exactly that nerve.

It was an article in the New York Times about the Moonves investigation. In this story, people questioned Covington and CBS. Several said they were not cooperating with the investigation because they did not trust CBS or Covington and their lawyers, lawyers like Ali. Ali said, hey, I'm here. I'm trying to do good.

And then Ali did something impulsive that changed the course of the rest of his life and the lives of many others. He was looking for an e-mail to send directions to The New York Times.

Ali's email landed on a general email asking for advice anyone can write to. The publisher sent it to me because it was my story Ali read that day on the train. It was for me that Ali finally became a vital source.

I cannot stress enough how remarkable Ali's email was. It's almost unheard of to receive an email from someone offering help on exactly what we've been researching. And for it to be an attorney who has access to sensitive data, which is generally under the attorney-client secret. It wasn't clear what Ali was offering or what he wanted, but it seemed certain that Ali would be in an incredible position to share confidential information if he so wished.

Ali and I first met at a bar in Washington in the fall of 2018. She had dark hair and was wearing a red fireman's coat, so I could see her easily. It seemed he had never met a reporter before, and certainly not under these circumstances.

Ali's motivations at this point always seemed complicated and not entirely clear. Even Ali would tell you they got lost. I think part of her was trying to figure out what to do and do it. Another part of her felt agitated at the MeToo moment.

She was also, and this seems to be a key factor, someone who was used to feeling powerless. I also wanted to be a part of something that felt important. The longer we sat on our bar stools, the more you could see his enthusiasm overcoming any ambivalence. He started showing me handwritten notes and a timeline, juicy details from inside the case.

We talked for hours. One specific thing I told him was that we were particularly interested in the advice my colleague James Stewart had received. According to this information, Moonves was not expelled because of the accusations in The New Yorker, but because of something related to another woman whose accusations against Moonves have not yet been made public.

Moonves apparently went to great lengths to silence this woman. Her name was Bobbie Phillips. Ali told me she thought she had seen some material on Phillips and said she would get in touch with her. We finished things and left.

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I hadn't yet boarded the train back to New York when Ali started sending me information about text messages she'd read between Les Moonves and Bobbie Phillips' longtime manager Marv Dauer. The two men were apparently discussing some incident that had occurred with Phillips, and seemed to be conspiring to keep her quiet. But he was nervous.

What happened was that talent manager Marv Dauer arranged a meeting between Bobbie Philips and Les Moonves in the 1990s. Dauer didn't know what exactly happened during this meeting, but he suspected it was something very bad because Phillips was very upset afterwards. In this text conversation, he brings knowledge of the incident over Moonves' head, putting pressure on management to hire Phillips on the CBS show and implying that if he doesn't, he can talk to reporters.

Although Dauer did not elaborate on this at the time, we will describe later how Phillips claimed that Moonves sexually abused her during this encounter. She claimed that Moonves told her, "Be my girlfriend and I'll put you on any show," before grabbing her neck, pushing her to her knees, and shoving his penis into her mouth.

Phillips said it was traumatic. She began to have interrogation anxiety attacks and did not attend meetings with male managers alone. She said that once at a film screening, she was so afraid to see Moonves that she vomited in the alley outside the cinema. His career never took off.

These text messages had a lot to do with the CBS investigation aside from the alleged sexual assault. They show that Moonves was potentially at risk as head of CBS, apparently making decisions based not on the company's best interest but for the sake of his own reputation. The news also meant that the first night Ali and I met, she gave us the key to a great story. And that was just the beginning.

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In the days and weeks that followed, Ali's insecurities lessened as she saw more and more details of the investigation that concerned her, reassuring her that talking to me was the right thing to do.

Many of the things Ali saw were flashes of Moonves' misbehavior. But there was also evidence that fueled his concerns about what CBS intended to do with the investigation's findings.

Ali remembers seeing internal CBS documents that tracked all kinds of allegations of misconduct throughout the company, including what was or wasn't done about those allegations.

Taken together, these materials gave Ali the impression that CBS might have taken such allegations more seriously. And he wondered if the company would take Covington's investigation seriously. Ali soon shared information from such documents as well as text messages, notes, emails and key witness statements.

What always struck me about Ali's story is how much it goes against the whistleblower stereotype. I think we tend to think that whistleblowers are clear and convincing. What Ali did was completely different. His motivations were something of a mixed bag.

She was conflicted. She took the difficult first step because she had a hunch and felt carried away by the moment she was in. And eventually he went ahead, not fully realizing what it would ultimately cost him.

We'll be right back.

The first story, largely based on material that Ali Diercks leaked to The New York Times, was published on November 28, 2018, about a month after Ali first contacted us. The headline read "If Bobbie Says I'm Done: How Les Moonves Tried To Silence The Accuser." The article's description began as follows: "A series of text messages detail a plan by Mr. Moonves and the swooning Hollywood executive to cover up a sexual assault accusation."

New revelations about Moonves and Phillips immediately put Moonves' massive exit package in the spotlight. And he probably made CBS look a lot worse by giving him $120 million.

Ali, of course, must have seen all this from a very strange, secret position.

Nowhere was Ali's secret more isolated than at work in Covington, where day after day she showed up to lead a double life. Ali spent her days thinking about what information she could share with us and how. Sometimes he would sneak into the lobby to send messages. She stayed away from co-workers, did not make friends with anyone on Facebook, did not give anyone her phone number.

About a week after we published our story about Bobbie Phillips, we published another story based on new information Ali gave us. In this case, Ali let me see Covington's draft of Moonve's final investigation report.

The report reads like a distillation of all the things that disturbed Ali, Moonves' misbehavior, and how CBS handled it. We ended up writing some stories about it. And gradually the pressure on CBS increased over Moonve's situation.

The consequences of what Ali did were both radical and complex. In the end, CBS decided it had grounds to fire Moonves, denying him a massive $120 million severance pay. However, at one point, Covington reportedly had to pay undisclosed settlements due to leaks to both Bobbie Philips and Les Moonves himself. Moonves then made a statement that he would donate the money to charity.

But it's worth noting that Ali helped expose more than just Moonves. There were other problems at CBS as well. The information Ali shared in the report included details of secret, multi-million dollar settlements that had been paid over the years to women who claimed they had been sexually harassed, assaulted or wrongfully fired by other men - men who had not lost their jobs. and instead continued to work for the network. Altogether, these stories gave everyone unprecedented insight into how the corporation handled such crises behind closed doors. And we would never have achieved it without Ali.

Part of all that was not in the stories we published and has not been until now is the story of what happened to Ali afterwards. After we started publishing the articles, Covington knew almost immediately that he had a leak. And the company started looking for who it was. An email was sent out where Ali said he knew someone was sharing information with the press and they were taking care of it.

Ali then began to notice serious meetings in boardrooms. But the first sign of real trouble for Ali was when one day he sat down at the computer to start work.

Ali's access to the case file seemed to have been suddenly cut off. He wondered if it was happening to everyone around him. But she also worried that it might be a sign that Covington was following her. Remember, it wasn't just Ali's job that was at stake, but her entire legal career.

Then, in the days that followed, more units were cut. And Ali was getting more and more scared.

Ali says she was called in for questioning one Thursday afternoon at 4:30 p.m.

Ali's notes included two interviews with Covington. The first, Ali says, lasted two hours. She says the lawyers who questioned her did not directly accuse her of being a leaker, but instead showed her documents, hoping she would confess.

The situation escalated during the second interrogation. Ali says there were two lawyers from Covington, a man and a woman, and an outside lawyer they hired. This time they clearly accused Ali of leaking information.

It lasted for a while. The more Ali denied, the more the lawyers intensified. At one point, one of Covington's lawyers became so angry that he had to leave the room. An outside lawyer told Ali that he couldn't sleep and wondered how such a young and up-and-coming lawyer could do such a thing. Covington's other lawyer even started crying.

After a few hours, Covington's team persisted, but neither did Ali. And it all ended in some kind of impasse.

Eventually, Ali was informed that she could leave. Ali took the elevator down. And just a few months after it started, he walked out of the Covington Building for the last time.

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As for what Ali's cover was finally blown, it was a mess between us. She believes Covington's lawyers made it seem like a very minor detail in one of our stories, and the number of pages in this draft report eventually caught up with her. She's pretty sure she asked us not to include that detail. But neither of us remember her saying it outright.

I went back and checked all our messages multiple times. The only news I can find about the page number is that I ask Ali if it's correct and she just confirms it. In retrospect, Ali feels she would have been caught anyway. All his activity on that shared drive could be tracked, so the company could see everything he accessed, every document, file, text message, which meant he was basically leaving footprints in the snow. And it was only a matter of time before Covington caught up with her.

Covington, for the record, declined to talk to us about this story. And the truth is, without Covington telling us how Ali was caught, we still don't know and perhaps never will. I can say that nothing like this has ever happened to me with a source other than Ali. Of course, I feel very bad about all this.

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In this interview you are listening to today, I heard for the first time many details about what happened to Ali, in part because the lawyer who represented her in all this advised her not to speak to me again. . And so we lost contact until recently. But basically what happened to Ali after the CBS investigation was the slow disintegration of her life, the life she had and the promise of a life she thought she might have when she got a job at Covington and Burling.

After she was discovered, Ali was released. And Ali, thinking she was going to be fired, left. Covington then filed a complaint with the D.C. Bar Association, which in turn suspended Ali's law license, interrupting her ability to work as an attorney. Technically, the suspension lasted a year and a half.

Ali's husband, Lee, urged her to bring him back. But at least for Ali, it never felt like something she could come back from.

Ali jumped from job to job. At one point, he took a job with an arts organization, earning $12 an hour. When COVID hit and schools began to fight for teachers, Ali began to organize substitute classes. But it wasn't credible. All this time, Ali did not have a wide circle of support, partly because she was very reluctant to tell people what she had done.

Ali says she's had some tough years since all of this. And Lee's support never wavered. This was even when they were draining Lee's retirement account to make ends meet to pay Ali's law school bills which of course kept pouring in or the mortgage on his house which Ali who worked and didn't work you were worried often. after losing Ali, she still remembers the day she was stressed and worried about Lee that they might lose the house. Lee replied: I will build you a house with my own hands if necessary.

Over the last year or so, Ali finally landed a steady job as an on-call court reporter. It's nice in a way. He can use his legal experience. But on the other hand, it's also a constant reminder of the future you've given up on.

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People have looked at MeToo a lot in the last five years, what has changed, what hasn't, what has been the reaction. Many of them seem academic and abstract. I think Ali's story stands out because it is a very concrete example of compensation. She was so specific. In his story there is such a simple version of the question: was it worth it?

I never missed what Ali said about how his decision turned our lives in opposite directions. He lost his career and struggled in isolation. I did a bigger profile and ended up with a book deal. I asked her, especially considering what she had lost, if Ali felt the change MeToo brought was what she was hoping for. She firmly said no.

Ali's main feeling was that he saw the overthrow of many individuals, but he did not see the social change he expected.

As for why All chose to tell his story publicly after so many years and accept the criticism and the risks involved, Ali mostly says he doesn't want to live with the mystery anymore. He knows that some listeners will consider what he did as an unjustified act of betrayal of peers and profession. They might take that as proof that she should never have been a lawyer in the first place, and perhaps shouldn't have been allowed to work as a lawyer again.

Even Ali will tell you that she would never advise any other lawyer to do what she did. Because if everyone felt they could break the rules if they didn't like the customer, our entire legal system would collapse. At the same time, Ali also knows that there will be people who will sympathize with her, that she had a very difficult decision between following these rules and following what she thought was right. But he feels it too. Five years later, she still sees her decision as a complicated, imperfect one that other people could have made too.

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Rachel Abrams is a reporter for The New York Times and co-author of the book Unscripted, which is based on her reporting for CBS.

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We'll be right back.

That's what you should know today.

On Wednesday, Florida's Governor Ron DeSantis signed a set of socially conservative bills that would ban gender reassignment custody of minors, prevent children from participating in live drag shows, and limit the use of preferred pronouns in schools.

The laws are seen as laying the groundwork for the fall of the presidential campaign. Meanwhile, in Texas, the state legislature passed a bill banning gender reassignment healthcare for minors. Texas would become the largest state to ban the treatment. The bill was supported by Republican governor Greg Abbott, who is expected to sign it into law soon.

In a dire warning on Wednesday, meteorologists from the World Meteorological Organization predicted the next five years would likely be the hottest on record, driven by man-made warming and a weather pattern known as El Niño. This prediction is particularly worrying because even a small increase in warming could increase the danger of heatwaves, wildfires and droughts.

Today's episode was produced by Diana Nguyen and Rikki Novetsky. It was edited by Ben Calhoun and Paige Cowett, with assistance from Devon Taylor and contributions from Lisa Chow, Michael Benoist, Lexe Diao and Will Reid. Featuring original music by Marion Lozano, Elisheba Ittoop, Diane Wang and Dan Powell, and designed by Chris Wood.

Our theme song was performed by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk from Wonderly. Special thanks to James Stewart, David Enrich and Sam Dolnick.

So much for the Journal. I'm Sabrina Tavernise. See you tomorrow.

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