It’s pure coincidence that a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist is visiting Honolulu as questions swirl around a mystery lawmaker and $35,000 in a paper bag.
Jodi Kantor is an investigative reporter at The New York Times. She’s here to talk about trust, truth and power. Kantor is the co-author of “She Said” and an investigation credited with starting the #MeToo movement.
The Conversation spoke with Kantor about her career and her advice to journalists looking into the $35,000. She also has a new book out this year: "How to Start: Discovering Your Life's Work."
Interview highlights
On the #MeToo movement and her investigation into Harvey Weinstein
JODI KANTOR: The #MeToo moment for me, and certainly the Weinstein story, was about truth. It was about the fact that these women's stories had been more than forgotten. I mean, they had been willfully hidden. Weinstein did this stuff, used very sophisticated tools to erase it, and so people didn't know. And so it was about the unearthing of those stories, really listening to the women, but also building factual consensus. The Weinstein story had enormous impact, because people could trust what we published. We had receipts, we had all these different forms of evidence. We had a pattern that was indisputable. So the debate after that story broke was not: What did Harvey Weinstein do to women? It was: How could this have happened? It was a better, richer, more productive debate. We weren't fighting over the basics of what had happened. It's a painful thing to say, but were that story published today, would we have the same impact? It's hard to say, because the truth just feels so broken up and challenged and shattered.
On parsing through the Epstein files
KANTOR: The thing that is really tricky about the Epstein story, however, is that we've never been able to achieve the same kind of factual consensus that we have with Weinstein. And this is not a criticism of anybody in particular. It's a way of being journalistically responsible and saying: Here's what we know and here's what we don't know. Listen, my colleagues are doing rock-solid coverage of the Epstein story in The New York Times, and they are really mining the release of those new documents for revelations. So I would really trust, you know, what's published in the paper, which is supported and vetted. But there is a lot about the Epstein story that is still very messy, right? He committed suicide. That obviously shuts off one of our most important sources of information, and now some of what's coming out in these files are allegations that have not been fully vetted, right? They're one person saying something has happened. Like in an investigative story in The New York Times, we try to add more support to that, so that we can make sure that these very serious accusations are being leveled really fairly. So I would, you know, my advice in parsing the Epstein story is try to get your information from really reliable news sources and keep an eye on what we know for sure, versus the huge body of what just looks terrible and what we suspect — I mean, that's not good, but it's something different from having hard, verifiable info about what happened.
On her investigations into the U.S. Supreme Court
KANTOR: What I would say is journalists scrutinize power. That is job one. And we have nine of the most powerful people in the country, basically working in the dark, and in an institution that is, on the one hand, at the center of our lives and making a lot of big moves in the last few years, but on the other hand, very cut off and hard to see. Everybody who works there takes a vow of silence. There are no visitor logs or public records laws that apply. The truth is, the law is not even common English. I mean, try to read a Supreme Court opinion. Some of them are pretty accessible; others will just read like Latin to you. But what I want, and this is a group project in journalism. This isn't just me. It's with my colleagues at the Times. It's with other journalists across the spectrum. We want to illuminate this place. We want to understand it. There's going to be a lot of debate about the Supreme Court in coming years, should we have more justices? Should there be age limits or term limits? Because we're the only constitutional democracy in the world that doesn't have age limits or term limits for judges. So when we have that debate, I want it to be based on good information on what this place really is. Our views of it are so polarized. It's so common to have people on the right lauding the current Supreme Court, people on the left deriding it, but with these really big questions about it, like, how partisan are the judges actually? How political are they? How good are they at their jobs? How do they age in these roles? What does it mean for someone to hold power for 20 or 40 years at a time? We need actual, fair, accurate information about those big questions.
On journalism advice about the $35,000 lawmaker payment allegation in Hawaiʻi
KANTOR: I would say with $35,000, it's hard for that to change hands without people knowing, right, like banks are involved. Money is moving around. Politicians have staffers. The people who might have given the bribe perhaps did not do so in complete secrecy. You want to use the on-the-record tools of journalism to confront politicians. I don't want to cast aspersions, because I obviously don't know the facts here, but if you think there's a politician who's accepted a $35,000 bribe, one tool is to get in their face right as they're walking down the halls of the Legislature, and whether with a notebook or a camera, just ask, ‘Did you accept this money? Have you ever accepted money from this entity?’ Ask it a couple of different ways to make sure they're not wiggling out of it, and capture and publish that answer, because if they're telling the truth — great, you're giving them a chance to represent themselves, and if they're lying, you want to get that answer out in public because even broadcasting that could trigger more reporting, because maybe there's a scenario where somebody who knows differently gets in touch with you and says, ‘Hey, I heard that politician made that claim on TV that he never took that money. But I know otherwise, and I'm going to tip you off.’ So I would just encourage you to be relentless in asking those very good questions.
Kantor will be speaking Thursday night at ʻIolani School in Honolulu, as part of the University of Hawaiʻi’s Better Tomorrow Speaker Series. Register for the event here.
This story aired on The Conversation on Feb. 11, 2026. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Hannah Kaʻiulani Coburn adapted this interview for the web.
