"Audience members in a Washington, DC, synagogue hurled boos and heckles at journalist Bob Woodward..."

"... when he repeatedly interrupted two New York Times reporters during a discussion about their new Harvey Weinstein book Wednesday evening. Woodward was speaking to reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey at the Sixth and I synagogue about their book 'She Said' when audience members began walking out, booing and tweeting criticisms of the questions posed by Woodward.... 'Let her finish!' one audience member shouted from a balcony.... [A]nother shouted, 'All women deserve to be heard!' when Woodward asked the authors about Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.... 'When @mega2e explained she built trust w sources by talking abt how the harm can’t be undone but together they can build constructive power from pain, Woodward interrupted, giddily, "that was your standard line?"'.... 'Twohey and Kantor told Woodward repeatedly that they believed Weinstein’s assaults were about "power," but he didn’t seem satisfied'.... 'So it’s about power?' she said he asked. 'It’s about sex also though, isn’t it?'"

From "Bob Woodward booed, heckled during #MeToo book conversation" (NY Post).

Show me the video. I'm assuming Woodward did a fine job and the NYT reporters benefited from his keeping it lively. But maybe it was one of these mythic examples of a sexist man controlling women's speech.

"Toward the end of the book, Kantor and Twohey devote two chapters to Christine Blasey Ford and her decision to air her sexual-assault allegations against the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh."

"This, and the book’s finale, 'The Gathering,' seem appended, an anticlimactic climax. In 'The Gathering,' the reporters assemble 12 of the sexual abuse victims they interviewed (including a McDonald’s worker, Kim Lawson, who helped organize a nationwide strike over the fast-food franchise’s failure to address sexual harassment) at Gwyneth Paltrow’s Brentwood mansion to talk, over gourmet Japanese cuisine, about what they’ve endured since going public with their charges. The testimonials inevitably descend into platitudes about personal 'growth' and getting 'some sense of myself back.' At one point, Paltrow starts crying over the way Weinstein had invoked his support for her career to get women to submit to his advances, and Lawson’s friend (a McDonald’s labor organizer who came with her so she wouldn’t feel alone in a room full of movie stars) hands the actress a box of tissues. These therapeutic scenes paste a pat conclusion onto a book that otherwise keeps the focus not on individual behavior or personal feelings but on the apparatuses of politics and power."

From Susan Faludi's review of "SHE SAID/Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement" by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey. (Kantor and Twohey are NYT reporters, and the review is in the NYT.)

Interesting detail about Paltrow, the tissues, and the McDonald's workers.

"Weinstein Company Was Aware of Payoffs in 2015."

Megan Twohey reports in The NYT.

David Boies, a lawyer who represented Mr. Weinstein when his contract was up for renewal in 2015, said in an interview that the board and the company were made aware at the time of three or four confidential settlements with women.

And in the waning hours of last week, as he struggled to retain control of the business in the wake of allegations first reported by The New York Times, Harvey Weinstein fired off an email to his brother and other board members asserting that they knew about the payoffs, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the confidential communication....

[A]n outside lawyer, H. Rodgin Cohen... assured the board in a September 2015 letter that it was legally safe to retain Mr. Weinstein because there were no unresolved complaints or threats of litigation against him, according to two people who saw the letter and spoke on the condition of anonymity....

Big legal names.

(Half a lifetime ago, I worked in a law firm with H. Rodgin Cohen.)

"Unlike most people involved in lawsuits, Donald J. Trump can be hostile toward judges."

A caption containing a questionable assumption, under a photograph of Donald Trump, at a NYT article by Michael Barbaro and Megan Twohey titled "A Biased Judge? Donald Trump Has Claimed It Before."

I guess the accuracy of the statement depends on what the meaning of "be" is.

How could reporters possibly know the level of hostility people in court cases feel toward the judge? There are plenty of reasons to be hostile toward the judge in your case. This person holds government power directly over you. He or she orders you around, constrains your speech, and may take your money or your liberty or deny you a remedy for your injuries — all for reasons that will be presented as punctiliously neutral and rational while you're deprived of the knowledge of what's really going on inside their head.

But maybe what the NYT means by "be hostile" is not feel hostile, but express hostility. Yes, of course, most litigants don't express hostility toward the judge in any way that the judge is likely to hear. Behaving strategically, you wouldn't normally choose to let the judge know you don't like him. And that's one more reason to be afraid of judges: They don't hear honest opinion about what people think of them. They're treated with extreme, even servile respect by most of the people around them.

This convention — borne of fear and need — makes deviation from the norm all the more striking.

That's Donald Trump. Saying things you feel but don't dare say. Oh, no, not you, specifically, but those other people out there in the hinterlands. They must be people who are unlike most people... because if most people feel that Donald Trump is saying what they think but are afraid to say, then, in a democracy, Donald Trump would win.

Most people don't say they're hostile toward the judge in their case, and most people don't say Donald Trump expresses what they only think and don't say. But Donald Trump is winning....

By the way, I love this line from the NYT article: "He does this despite his close ties to a federal judge, Maryanne Trump Barry, his sister." Wow! That's what you call the Butterfield Fallacy (presenting a cause-and-effect relationship as a paradox). If your sister were a long-time federal judge, you'd be less intimidated by judges, less respectful, more likely to see judges as real people and not neutral dispensers of law, more likely to take it personally, to get angry, and to express your antagonism.