am david the bruce and this is the creative good yes day well actually i was thinking about starting a whole series on the me to think so many women have been posting their stories and some of them with a creative commons license which means that you can reuse that video i wish they were all that way the word could spread even faster than it already is the me to campaign against sexual harassment has become a worldwide phenomenon so i've been collecting a few videos and the creative commons from me t participants and saw them very enlightening most are chilling such things could happen in a civilized culture such as ours  where we elect such people as the little trunk but roy moore go figure yeah or allow predators to remain in hollywood for decades harvey you know it's just sickening so anyways i thought it would be good i opened up the beginning of the year with i think ten episodes on the woman's march and that march was the beginning of a powerful movement not that elements of that thing wasn't there before it certainly was but be that as it may there has never been a world wide demonstration as big as the woman's march and now several months later towards the end of the year the me to which i think was actually it started in two thousand and six tag and then over time it has really picked on to where now in two thousand and seventeen it has become a phenomenon and we're going into two thousand and eighteen as i speak but anyway just as i was  to put these videos together for you what should happen but time magazine announces person of the year or in this case persons of the year silence breakers and i thought oh my gosh this is great so i really am going to do the meet to thing and in the next few episodes and i am going to tie it into the time magazine article which i think it's just fabulous what i wh want to do is doing videos from the history of this thing so some will go back to zero eight let's say before and during the time that  journey so i want to celebrate that journey on creative commons and we're going to start right now i think what we're going to do although this is not a creative commons video it's fully copyrighted by time magazine it was released as a promo so in that light i want to show it to you here we go we can't all be slots we can't all be asking for it i'm here to give you permission to be angry this reality might not have to be our reality honestly i was furious i had had a man grope me in front of multiple colleagues and i was tired of wondering if it was something i wore abs tired of wondering if that was the vibe i was giving off and when i talked to other women they were furious too i felt that if i can speak out maybe if i just stand when someone else will stand up with there wasn't a place for us to report these experiences but i sure did talk about it a lot over the years the least i can do was actually tell my own story and validate theirs for them in a way just as i was hoping someone much bigger than me would help validate my story and i knew that other women would continue to apply for jobs there and that made me feel really uncomfortable i was afraid of the retaliation i know the power of patriarchy i know what men can do when they're angry they did everything that they could to prevent me from raising my concerns further they asked me if there were other girls leave that he has done this to when can i go ahead to show them that i wasn't lying it's like they took me for a joke and if they couldn't stop us from talking well they were going to stop everybody from listening to us people digging into my instagram and you know pulling up in those photos as if that kind of discredited me well i've seen you in committee you're really tough why didn't you just hit him why did you let it go on for so long i was a smart young woman that had gone to college that knew how to fight and i still was manipulative and calm and i felt ashamed that i hadn't spoken out sooner not having the strength earlier on to make it stop the feeling of being humiliated a woman in a set up by you being if in my fault for so long i went around harboring this ridiculous belief that because i was an on white woman in my twenty's that somehow it was expected that i would have to be treated this way we don't have to just live like this i always thought maybe things could change for my daughter and never thought things would change for me i'm here to g permission to be angry people are afraid polite to be nice to be kind to be liked to not make waves bullshit we can't all be crazy we can't all be sluts we can't all be asking for it and i'm telling you all the people who stand took away the power from the predator and placed the power on the victim and maybe just maybe we would be able to get a glimpse at the magnitude of this problem the amount of people sharing the stories of me is so intense people that were complete strangers reached out to tell very personal story and it's what they did with this and they did a lot and not just on in france in in japanese it's i feel like the day that i spoke up and i said you are a sexual harasser i changed  that also with us for this conversation the chief content officer at hearst magazines joanna coles my friend how are you i'm good good thing so here we are and here it is this i guess where do we begin with all the other choice why this one i think i can answer it for you but go ahead well it was a tough year a year of so much disruption but in the end we were just overwhelmed by the velocity and sweep of this social change which is moving faster certainly than anything i've seen in my lifetime and  talk about who we see on the cover we went through it so i know you you're you're you're already in and why yeah ashley judd ashley judd the voice of the weinstein she was the first person to come out on the record taylor swift  about life the masses the so many women at once and finally we also have you know it's really important to us to report not only the famous and the notable but also the unknown the women that represent a much larger swath arm she's also representative of a much bigger swath of women who can't come out for fear of reprisal for fear of their lives and she represents she is from a small town in the south and she came she years not being believed and this is a huge story in the new york times this morning about harvey weinstein and the extraordinary lengths he went to to stop people writing about him and all the people that kind of knew  show the pictures of everybody again if you could alex so so the question is how we certainly have heard from a lot of people who have been harassed by famous people or media  politics in hollywood how does this movement spread to middle america where people who are working for the rich and famous get just as much justice from somebody and you know it's it allowed them to have their own voice and to to really speak truth to power and that we found that that the weinstein story and the people that came out in that story really validated a lot of other people's story across the central to the two female reporters at the new times finally broke this story and then in the new the extraordinary lengths that people went to to stop those stories coming out is incredible we've been having a lot of discussions on this a nd me and the guests that we bring on talking about sexual harassment talking how it's hit close to home here at n b c talking about culture and also very very carefully trying to go into the gray area there are obvious black and white cases and and all that enabling around those cases or not only worth being looked at it is it is absolutely the top priority that we take a look at culture of  enablement but doing a blog for the know your value website about how we are witnessing a sea change i'm just worried it turns into as the nominee that washes away all of our progress if we're not careful well clearly there are different categories of it and you could probably  i get whatever you know you just want to go into it and leave i mean justice is the icing on the gas but i think what people want to do is work in harassment free inside that's what we all have to i think joe joe raises an important question that we spend a lot of time on in our package which is how long lasting and how far reaching is this so much of the attention has been in our business in the entertainment business very high profile worlds will it reach the middle of the country will it reach very far down the or chart what happens to women whose whose incomes depend heavily on tips and the ability to push away is feels more constrained and the threats greater and i think we don't know a lot of the answer to it's been sweeping in astonishing you know on the coasts and in the worlds we live in but there's still a lot to go but i do think when you see the consequences and the consequences a swift and people are losing their job that is a day of terror and i do think people will think twice about doing it one of the ironies is that as you look down the list here care is that the number two choices president trump a man who himself has been accused of sexual harassment and assault by some women what was the debate like inside the time conference room as you tried to figure out whether or not he ought to be number one or whether the need to  we we always reach out for an interview being the person of the year is not contingent on an interview and we seriously of course we always consider the present united states always a strong contender to be a person of the year what was a debate like between number one by the end of october we were really all just overwhelmed by the velocity and sweep of this and it continued to present itself in real time like every day so it's not a story that's passed it's still happening i also want to say that it's interesting when we think about the middle of the country in the world you know me too has spread to eighty five countries in the first week but also the generations that have not come up through the work force yet i think it's really interesting the women that we profiled that they are from all socioeconomic backgrounds they are unknown there are known and they are all of all different ages and you know susan fowler twenty six years old and  she wrote a blog post very straightforward if it crossed the line not behavior and taylor swift same thing there is no emotion to it they just said there is a line that is crossed this is not acceptable and i think what happens to the fifteen year olds the five year olds that are all coming up i mean that's really where you're going to see this social change and you know we were talking we couple months ago we did a story about the glass ceiling breakers the women that are first and you know you have madeline albright who is the godmother of the first she has her glass ceiling brooch on when we interview her and then you have money davis who is the fifteen year old the little league pitcher that was the first girl to pitch a shutout in the world series and when we asked money davis about the glass ceiling she was like what's the glass ceiling exactly and it was like she literally had never heard the term before and i think you know when you see it just goes for me personally in the same story of working on it being on the set with all these shoots interviews it's the same and a thing that the generations different people have different ways of of acceptance you know and so it's something interesting as well incredible issue edward tells and paul and keira pollack thank you very u s electorate and they are overwhelmingly democratic we'll talk about the implications of that next time to a nation the united states to the world and women are posting their meet to stories about sexual misconduct sexual youth that they have suffered it is  phenomenal you know and there is other there's concerns when something like this becomes too big and that is things like are we blowing it because we're making it far too common there risk not that every single me two story doesn't matter but is there a risk that it gets exploited here and it goes too far and it loses its purpose now i read the article and i don't agree with it for the most part because when women and men decide to come forward to alleged sexual assault of sexual abuse it's a huge step it's a huge undertaking and most men and women don't do it why because we've seen how many times these people have been discredited and how many times they've been treated as though they are a liar as are they are trying to take people down i think it's very rare for someone to step forward and make these allegations and also the one thing i do agree with that she said in the article is that if someone is lying it is very easy to pick apart those lies at some point they are not going to be able to withstand the questioning and the sort of been terrible and that comes through when someone makes these kinds of allegations so i don't necessarily agree with that and i also think it's very dangerous to sort of start to suggest that there should be a ten step way that a woman decides or a man decides to come forward to you know talk about these kinds of allegations it's almost as though she's suggesting well let's do this and some sort of measured perhaps we should have a meeting and discuss how we're going to you know decide i think what she's saying is this is such an important topic we don't want it to turn into white noise how do we make sure things actually do change but i just don't think that's going to happen well  you look at social movements and social progress and how these seismic moments happen roy moore the other night in his rally i gave a pretty big dog whistle and said one thousand nine hundred sixty five we started giving out too many rights in reference to the civil rights movement so this is so this moment is about story out of balance and about fundamental decency and about respecting all americans as equal individuals are responsible who have the full process of the rule of law and i think that we can't ignore what women have been going through i mean really since the beginning of time that is true you know i want to point out there are some difference for more and conservative commentator amanda carpenter tweeted this what does the senate ethics committee have to investigate about franken we've got the story the photo and an apology how important is it to make sure we don't lump all of these cases together i mean these are two conservative voices are saying that and you know president trump who said let's see picture two four five and six we've never heard that there even aren't exactly and but you know president trump should not be weighing in on something like this he sort of lost the ability to discuss this when we know we unearth the access hollywood tape in those fifteen women have come forward so he's not credible on the subject at all but apart from that i think it's interesting that they've made those comments and he has been very different from roy moore and he's also done something that roy moore has not done and that a lot of others have not done is accept responsibility you know i read his apology and it was contrite but i think as a sitting senator it is important to look into whether or not this is something that he does regularly or there are other women that he's worked with in the senate where this has been a problem so the only reason why i think an investigation is important is because he is a sitting senator he represents the people from the state of minnesota and it ought to be made clear whether or not this is a problem that's ongoing with him you know it ought to be made clear the fifteen million dollars in harassment claims from this slush fund that the u s and government paid out not only do i not want to be harassed i don't want my tax dollars going to our congressmen and women who have had settlements because of harassment that amazingly get covered up and we don't hear about i'd like to hear more about them so please come on forward ladies thank you we're going to take a break ok well that's just about it for us today here on the creative and as you know we've been covering the campaign a phenomenal campaign that grew out of the woman's march way back in january of this so it's a great book and for the year we have more me two videos coming out we're going to be listening to some victims as they begin to share their stories and some really compelling you've got a lot to look forward to your group of come one that was particularly interesting to me was that you know when she was a teenager she was curious as all teenagers are coming of age and she said  her cousin used curiosity as a way to feel that she was consenting so you know sometimes things can start off rather  with a sense of curiosity or a need to explore find out more but that does not mean well we've got a lot more coming up but in the meantime i'm david bruce this is a creative good you be good to others you hear me