(National Anthem Playing) COOPER: The 20th century was a whirlwind century in terms of changing things for women.

I had the pleasure of knowing my great-grandmother, Little Mama we called her.

From her being born in 1903, to me being born in 1980 was a huge shift in what is possible for women.

You get the right to vote in 1920, the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

And then in 1965 the Voting Rights Act.

Finally, everyone gets the right to vote.

And then you begin to have a veritable feminist uprising in this country.

JORDAN: We are attempting to fulfill the promise of America.

COOPER: But when I began teaching a decade ago, my young women students were very quick to tell me they didn't know why they needed to be feminists.

That all of their rights had basically been won and been secured.

STEINEM: I think after the activists of the 70s began to have children, those children kind of felt their mothers had done it, and they didn't have to.

TRAISTER: In periods that follow apparent successes, what you get then is a sense of complacency, the sense that we fixed it.

OBAMA: We have come so far.

TRAISTER: The sense that, that pernicious sense that we're done.

CLINTON: I accept your nomination for President of the United States!

COOPER: Now the tide has shifted and I see an anger and a passion.

We're in a sea change, here.

DAKHIL: Something awoke in women everywhere.

A primal scream, really.

SARSOUR: Follow women of color, sisters and brothers.

Because when we fight for justice, we fight for it for all people.

CULLORS: Black Lives Matter created a new playing field.

And I'm proud of us.

BURKE: MeToo is a tiny part of a large movement that's been happening for decades.

KANTOR: A lot did change in the wake of these revelations, and I think it's about women coming together.

CRENSHAW: Then there's this moment where it was, like, "Oh my god, we haven't progressed at all since Anita Hill came forward."

GAY: So some people are outraged enough to run for office.

UNDERWOOD: I'm Lauren Underwood, running for Congress.

GARZA: This country is changing, it's been changed, and I think we have an opportunity this time to do it right.

RHIMES: We need to all agree to be difficult, crazy, bitches who need to go.

PROTESTORS: Black Trans Lives Matter.

CULLORS: There is a new found language around who gets to claim feminism.

STEINEM: Now it's a majority and it's unapologetic.

THUNBERG: Our house is on fire... STEINEM: Now we know it's a revolution IRON EYES: All that movements are, are devastation and at the same time, tremendous amounts of hope.

♪ ♪ (overlapping chatter) (Cheering) DAUGHTER: Mom why are you crying?

MOTHER: I got to vote for a woman for president.

WOMAN: To push that button next to a female's name was, so awesome.

EMMETT: Maybe that's why God's let me live this long, he wanted me to have one last thrill.

GARCIA-DANIELS: I know we're gonna have a Madame President.

VOTER: We are all in anticipation of a great victory and a historic occasion.

GAY: I was very confident on the election day.

I went and I voted early.

So I actually was going to go to bed early because I was just like, "Hillary's totally got this in the bag."

And right before I decided to go to my bedroom, I started to notice that the little meter on the New York Times website that was indicating the likelihood of whoever was going to win was leaving from Hillary's side and moving to Donald Trump's side.

WALLACE: And no matter what happens, Trump had a lot more support, in a lot more states, among a lot more people than the polls detected.

KAPLAN: We were at the Javits Center that night with the Clinton campaign.

By about 9:00 at night it was looking pretty bad.

It was kind of like walking around a funeral, frankly.

CRENSHAW: First of all, I just took to my bed.

I just couldn't move.

It felt like a future that we could see ourselves in and building off of the momentum from the past eight years had just disintegrated.

GAY: I think for those of us who are Black, it was easy to just be like, "Yeah, white people are going to white."

But the next day it was very hard because I kept thinking about what the world was going to look like, and what the world was going to feel like, and what my nieces were going to be able to think was possible for them.

CLINTON: I know we have still not shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling, but someday, someone will and hopefully sooner than we might think right now.

And to all the little girls who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams.

RICHARDS: I was not surprised that Hillary Clinton lost.

I know there are many reasons that people have given for why she was not a great candidate.

But I think that ultimately what was underlying a lot of people's resistance was quite simply that she was a woman.

And more specifically she was a smart, competent woman.

Because she was about to assume the most powerful position in the world, and she very much knew what she would do with that power.

And I think that that's what threatened people.

TRAISTER: For a lot of white middle-class women, it was this enormous wake-up call.

Hillary Clinton was just going to win.

Of course she was going to win.

Trump had been caught on tape bragging about grabbing women against their will.

Donald Trump was an incompetent racist.

He wasn't going to win.

And the fact that he did, opened the eyes of a lot of people who had been asleep for a long time.

MCGRATH: There was a woman in our company who was in tears.

She's a white woman and she was just talking about her fears for her daughter.

Will she be able to control her body?

What kind of destiny will she have?

And then this young African American woman said, "You know, I hear you.

But I'm a black woman from North Carolina, and I've been done dirty my whole life.

This is America.

This has always been America.

So welcome.

The water's warm."

TRAISTER: It made clear to a lot of people who had for a long time believed the flattering lies about this country and the progress that it had made.

I think it woke a lot of people up.

SARSOUR: The women's march idea came from a retired attorney in Hawaii, a woman named Theresa Shook, who literally just posted on Facebook immediately after the election results, we have to march.

And immediately it went viral.

TRAISTER: There's a lot of enthusiasm, especially from middle-class white communities.

And then there's a critical response to this.

SARSOUR: Particularly women of color were giving kind of side-eye.

Like, "Mmm, yeah, I'm supposed to follow some, like, white ladies that never marched with us before?"

I was feeling so betrayed by my country.

I was feeling betrayed by white women who voted for Donald Trump at 53%.

And so I actually went in the event and I commented "I hope that you include Muslim women."

And eventually myself, Carmen Perez, and Tamika D. Mallory, all women of color, were invited to join the women's march in a leadership position.

MALLORY: I come as an angry black woman at all times of my life.

SARSOUR: I have been serving in my own community as a civil rights activist since the ashes of 9/11.

It absolutely felt the Women's March was going to be a place for me to redefine what it looks like to have a women's rights movement in America.

We specifically and by design talked about race.

We cannot assume what different women from different backgrounds prioritize as issues.

We cannot say that reproductive rights is the most important issue for every community, when you have Black mothers who just want their Black sons to come home to them at night.

Or undocumented women who just want to come home and not be separated from their families.

And so we were figuring out how to build an intersectional movement that wasn't just about the diversity of women, but actually the diversity of issues that impact us.

TRAISTER: Encouragement of contentious dialogue between participants, any mainstream evaluator would have said, "this is a huge risk."

And in fact they did.

You know, will people show up?

Are there going to be people, people have been excited about this, but now somebody is saying they have a problem with race.

When in fact, what the organizers were betting on is that it was going to be a recipe for strength moving forward.

FLIGHT ATTENDANT: Ladies and Gentlemen we have arrived in Baltimore.

I just want to know how many of you are going to the March on Washington?

(cheering) You're going to the women's march, right?

CROWD: Yes!

FLIGHT ATTENDANT: Let's get a round of applause for all the nasty women on board.

(cheering and applause) WOMAN: If you're ready to march on Washington, let me hear you make some noise.

WILSON: I heard about the march through two other female firefighters.

We took the train and the platform was just filled with people, in their pink hats, we all were pushing and cramming in.

SWISHER: I took my sons, and a bunch of their male friends.

I couldn't get the hats on them, but whatever.

I didn't wear one either.

FERRERA: I was at the march in Washington DC and I was the opening speaker.

Good Morning.

I didn't know that I was going to be first up, and then they were like, "It's you!"

and I was like, "What?"

I am deeply honored to march with you today as a woman, and as a proud first generation American born to Honduran immigrants.

We are America.

PROTESTORS: This is what democracy looks like.

WOMAN: Show me what democracy looks like.

PROTESTORS: This is what democracy looks like.

CRENSHAW: It was a spiritual experience to finally be able to go to Washington, DC as women of color... ♪ WOMAN: I am my sisters keeper ♪ ♪ I'm gonna say her name.

♪ CRENSHAW: And to be there with young people.

We flew a young woman from my hometown to come with us, and she would lead the protest and the chants with us.

It was just great to see that intergenerational passing the torch.

STEINEM: This is the upside of the downside.

SARSOUR: We thought a quarter of a million people were going to come and about 1.2 million people came, to the point that we weren't even able to march because we pretty much shut down the entire Capitol Hill area.

It was the largest single-day demonstration in American history.

TRAISTER: It was in cities across the United States and around the world.

It was in Antarctica.

KANTOR: And it happened in some of the small and medium-sized towns in this country not the so-called coastal elite enclaves.

CRENSHAW: I see this as a moment of taking feminism back, making feminism a project that all of us can share.

CULLORS: Has it been perfect?

No.

No movement is perfect, it can't be.

But the promise was an intersectional movement.

TRAISTER: The one thing that's too bad about the Women's March, is that it's read as being a reaction to Trump, which by many means, sure it was.

It was born on election night and all of that.

But one of the reasons it was important that the co-chairs of the women's march came from different movements is because they knew what was already bubbling.

Movements around Indigenous rights, environmental justice, immigration reform, mass incarceration, gun violence, all of which are of course women's issues.

And it's in the Obama administration, that you see the development of Black Lives Matter.

And that is a movement that is founded by queer black women in response to systemic racial violence.

NEWSCASTER: It's the story that's ignited fierce passions across the nation.

NEWSCASTER: Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, was shot down by a white neighborhood watchman who claimed self-defense.

PATRISSE: After the shooting and killing of Trayvon Martin, I watched as George Zimmerman was acquitted on every single count.

FOREWOMAN: We the jury find George Zimmerman not guilty.

CULLORS: I was in shock.

It still leaves me breathless.

GARZA: I thought to myself, there's no way that they could let this man walk away from murdering a child who had done nothing to him.

CULLORS: So I went on social media, looking for answers, connection, resolve, reprieve.

And I went to Alicia Garza's page, who's one of my closest friends.

GARZA: I woke up in the middle of the night.

I started writing some stuff on Facebook.

CULLORS: And she wrote a love letter to black folks.

GARZA: And I wrote underneath it that I love black people, I love us, and that our lives matter.

And Patrisse read it, and I believe she put a hashtag in front of it.

And I didn't know what a hashtag was.

Cause, you know, I'm not a millennial.

CULLORS: When I put the hashtag, she definitely was like, "What's was that?"

And I was like, "This thing, we're going to make this thing go viral."

Opal Tometi jumped on board, and the three of us, within days, started Black Lives Matter, which was an online platform at first, but by the time Michael Brown was murdered, really turned into a global movement.

PROTESTERS: We want answers.

NEWSCASTER: On the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, outrage and anger.

Protestors of different ages and races demanding answers in the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown at the hands of a policeman.

Witnesses said Brown's body lay in the street for hours.

GARZA: We organized a freedom ride to Ferguson, to witness, to support.

PROTESTERS: Black Lives Matter.

Black Lives Matter.

CULLORS: The mandate was to show up for the people there, and then go home and fight because every place we lived was Ferguson.

WOMAN: Whose lives matter?

CROWD: Black lives matter!

GARZA: It became an international rallying cry.

SARSOUR: To see a new iteration of a civil rights movement led by young black woman, queer women most often at the margins of society and see them in this like leadership position was very inspiring to other marginalized people.

COOPER: They had learned the lessons of the 1960s and 1970s and all of the tales of Black women experiencing sexism in those movements, experiencing homophobia.

And they said, this thing we can do differently.

GARZA: Patrisse and I and Opal have been really clear from the beginning that it's all of us or none of us.

Black women, black queer and trans folks are disproportionately impacted by the criminal justice system, by policing, by issues of safety, violence, and harm.

And I think this decade has been a decade of women saying it's not only time for change but that it's time that we are leading the change.

KANTOR: Believe or not, the Harvey Weinstein story started with Bill O'Reilly.

MUIR: We begin tonight with that bombshell announcement from Fox News.

NEWSCASTER: Bill O'Reilly the host of cable's most popular show for sixteen years, out in the wake of that growing sexual harassment scandal.

KANTOR: Something was starting to shift, you could feel it.

Revelations about Roger Ailes, Bill Cosby.

An Uber employee, became a kind of whistleblower at that company.

Now we're used to the idea that powerful men could lose their jobs for these reasons.

But this was like a change in the whole weather system.

And that's when I started working on the Harvey Weinstein story.

TWOHEY: I was actually home on maternity leave.

I was surrounded by diapers and bottles and attempts at sleep training.

When I got a phone call from my colleague Jodi Kantor.

KANTOR: Megan had been a sex-crimes reporter for a long time.

She had done the Trump allegations.

TWOHEY: Jodi had just begun looking into these rumors that this powerful Hollywood producer had preyed on actresses and other women for decades.

KANTOR: Megan had a series of really interesting objections to the story at the beginning.

TWOHEY: As investigative reporters, you're really looking for opportunities to help give voice to the voiceless.

And it was hard for me to conceive of some of these famous Hollywood celebrities as being victims who were in need of help of the New York Times investigative reporting unit.

But, Jodi had made a case to me which was that listen, if these women have also been victims of sexual harassment it suggests that nobody is immune.

KANTOR: We understood some of what we were up against, but we didn't understand all of it.

TWOHEY: Harvey Weinstein was one of the most famous and influential producers in Hollywood.

And he had been for decades.

LAWRENCE: Harvey, thank you for killing whoever you had to kill to get me up here today.

AFFLECK: Harvey Weinstein.

HUNTER: Harvey and Bob Weinstein.

WILLIAMS: The mishpucka Weinstein.

ZELLWEGGER: Harvey Weinstein.

DICAPRIO: Harvey and Bob Weinstein.

CRUZ: Thank you Harvey Weinstein.

WILLIAMS: Thank you to Harvey.

KIDMAN: Harvey.

SCORESE: I have to thank Harvey Weinstein.

STREEP: And God, Harvey Weinstein.

TWOHEY: Even when actresses started to get on the phone with us, they were terrified to go on the record.

And that's why we really threw ourselves into collecting other bodies of evidence, the financial trail of payoffs.

KANTOR: I was secretly meeting with Weinstein's accountant of 30 years, Irwin Reiter, who became the kind of deep throat of the Weinstein investigation and was giving us essential information and documents.

TWOHEY: Records that showed that there were allegations as recently as 2015.

So we were able to after building this body of evidence, go back to some of the women who had been telling us about their experiences in secret and say, "Listen, we're asking you to go on the record with this whole mountain of evidence underneath you."

KANTOR: With only days to go until publication, Ashley Judd bravely went on the record.

She became the first actress to go on record.

And then, Laura Madden, a mom in Wales went on the record.

She's a former assistant of Weinstein.

She had a horrible story of assault from a hotel room in Ireland in 1992.

Mom of four kids, recently divorced, she was just days away from breast cancer surgery.

And Laura was very worried about going on the record.

She called her daughters into her kitchen.

They thought that she wanted to talk to them about the surgery, but instead for the first time she told them her Weinstein story.

TWOHEY: What happened next really shocked her.

They actually started to open up to her about the experiences that their friends had gone through.

So, at the end of that conversation, she sent an email to us saying that she didn't want her daughters to grow up in a world where this type of abusive behavior was acceptable and that she too was prepared to be a named source.

The day before the story was published, Weinstein himself, barged into the New York Times, uninvited, and insisting on meeting with us, trying to bully us trying to intimidate us.

He had a team of high-priced lawyers who were coming after us who were threatening to sue us.

KANTOR: He hired private spies to try to dupe us.

TWOHEY: But in the end, it was no match for the truth.

KANTOR: I still remember the exact moment when we hit the publish button.

We're all huddled around a desk in the New York Times Investigations Unit.

And then Rory Tolan, one of our editors, pushed the button.

TWOHEY: We kind of watched with wonder as the story started to take off like wildfire.

NEWSCASTER: One of the most powerful men in showbiz, out of his company.

NEWSCASTER: The damning report in the New York Times detailing numerous sexual harassment allegations spanning decades.

NEWSCASTER: Another explosive story today, this time in "The New Yorker".

TWOHEY: Ronan Farrow within days had also done his first story about Harvey Weinstein.

And our phones, our emails, were being flooded with women who are coming forward, telling their own stories of abuse and harassment.

To just feel like the dam broke.

For us, those were the first indications that there was a real significant societal shift that was starting to happen.

NEWSCASTER: And reaction to the Harvey Weinstein scandal exploding overnight... NEWSCASTER: Millions of women across the country and around the world, sharing their experience with sexual harassment and abuse online, using the #MeToo.

NEWSCASTER: That movement took off last weekend, when Alyssa Milano highlighted it on Twitter posting: "If you've been sexually harassed or assaulted, write me too as a reply to this tweet."

SARSOUR: The Metoo movement hashtag went viral because Alyssa Milano made it go viral.

But the actual founder of that movement was a Black woman named Tarana Burke.

BURKE: The day that it goes viral, I saw a post that said "Me Too" on Facebook.

I was so confused, I was like, "What is this?"

I just saw that this hashtag was trending.

And then I inboxed my friend and said, what is this?

And she was like, "Oh, girl, it's everywhere!

This is great!"

You know, like, "Congrat..." kind of thinking it was me.

So that really is what set the panic off.

The reality that I know of other Black women whose work has been erased, or who they've been erased from their work.

And people started tweeting at Alyssa saying, "This already exists."

She tweeted out the information as soon as she got it, and acknowledged me after that, and then reached out to me after that and said, "How can I be of help, how can I amplify your work?"

And then three days later we were on national television together.

GUTHRIE: We're joined now by Tarana Burke the creator of the Me Too movement and Alyssa Milano, one of the actresses who helped that hashtag go viral.

Do I have this right, you just met each other in person a few moments ago.

MILANO: We did, but we text like 20 times a day.

BURKE: I could never imagine this.

I could have never envisioned something that would be, that would change the world.

I was trying to change my community.

The 2005-2006 school year, my best friend and I had decided to start this organization with black and brown girls in Selma.

The girls who we had in our program, start telling us about sexual violence that they experienced.

And so, I practiced deeply listening to little black girls when they told me the truth about their lives.

And in the spaces where they could not find the strength to do that, my story became the impetus for it.

This happened to me too.

I know what you're holding.

And just the simple act of believing them changed everything.

WALSH: The way the hashtag exploded on Twitter, I think shows us that while we all thought we were alone, we're not.

TWOHEY: It felt like just all of this hidden pain that had affected generations of women, not just here in the United States but around the world, being excavated.

KANTOR: And then very quickly, it was stories about other men as well.

NEWSCASTER: Matt Lauer has been fired over reports of inappropriate sexual behavior.

NEWSCASTER: More accusations emerge against Mario Batali.

NEWSCASTERS: Brett Ratner, also the subject... Michael Oreskes.

Mark Halperin.

Louis CK.

Charlie Rose.

More women are speaking out... James Toback.

Roy Moore.

Leslie Moonves.

Kevin Spacey.

Open Secret.

Tavis Smiley.

Russell Simmons.

The wave of allegations against powerful men Growing larger by the day.

BURKE: It's about power.

Whether you are Weinstein or Charlie Rose or R. Kelly.

Whether it's in the workplace or the church or the home.

It's the same thing.

TOLENTINO: I think MeToo is one of the best and most tangible consequences of feminism becoming a mainstream ideology.

There were enough feminist women in positions of power that the story couldn't be buried anymore.

It was this tidal wave of almost forced understanding, that this is not a women's issue, right?

it's a broad social ill.

It was time.

REPORTER: Any comment Harvey?

PORTMAN: It was right after the Weinstein revelations came out and of course everyone was feeling shocked like, "How can we respond to this?

How can we change things?"

FERRERA: I was invited by agents at CAA.

It was not a formal type thing, it was just coming together trying to figure out, what could we say in this moment?

What could we do in this moment?

DAKHIL: There was this urgent feeling that if we didn't do something immediately, that this would be some news cycle that would wash out.

So I called Reese, I called Natalie.

I called Shonda Rhimes, who I don't know but she just seemed like this superpower.

Had to talk fast before she hung up on me.

RHIMES: I'm a writer, I didn't know any of these women at all, really.

But I said, yes, cause I was mad.

What I remember most is that Natalie Portman brought her baby.

And so then there was a little, tiny baby girl in the meeting, PORTMAN: Maha was like, "Bring her.

If you can't bring her to this, you can't bring her anywhere."

SOLOWAY: One of the things I said to Maha right away is like, "Do you have people of color?

Do you have queer people?

Do you have trans people?"

What we all know, like everybody has to be there.

RHIMES: It wasn't a white woman's movement, which was nice because I wasn't gonna stay if it was, obviously.

It was a group of women from different parts of the business who didn't know each other well or had not, you know, collaborated before.

But immediately, it was a sisterhood.

SOLOWAY: I was kind of singing Hamilton a lot.

I was pounding on the table and going, "I want to be in the room where it happens.

The room where it..." I'm like, "Guys, we're in the room where it happens!

It's happening!

It's happening, happening..." And this was before we even had the name Time's Up.

We weren't sure what we were going to call it.

We were maybe going to call it the name of Natalie Portman's baby.

TCHEN: Towards the end of the meeting, Katie McGrath and Rashida Jones back and forth to each other, just sort of said, "Time is up, time's up on all of this behavior!"

Someone may have slammed their hand on the table.

And then it was like, "Oh, that's our name, Time's Up."

FERRERA: The meetings got bigger, and they were on the East coast, and they were on the West coast.

And what had been ignited in women was a conversation that was so much more than sexual harassment.

Yes, we shared those stories, but we also shared the stories about the inability to get paid more, the inability to be taken seriously as a producer or a director.

All the way down to how people treat you when you speak.

RHIMES It was just a really interesting experience of realizing that it wasn't just us thinking these things, it was a collective realization.

KAPLAN: In the '70s, during the second wave of feminism, there was really an effort for women to get together in groups and talk to each other about their experiences.

And those groups were called consciousness raising groups.

And so the sense I have of what we were doing is it was a new kind of, current version of consciousness raising.

But this time, with women who really had a lot more power than women ever had before and who were determined to use it.

SHAW: The first thing we talked about is, "This just can't be a bitch session."

And the beauty of it is that we had the letter, the "Dear Sisters" letter.

FERRERA: This letter that had been posted in Time Magazine.

It was the president of the National Women's Farm Workers Association.

RAMÍREZ: Farm worker women had been organizing around the issue of sexual harassment for about three decades.

So when the stories broke about Harvey Weinstein, we knew that just as brave as these women were to speak out, that there were going to be powerful people who are going to try to silence them.

And we wanted them to understand that there were people who were going to stand with them.

"Dear Sisters, we wish to say that we're shocked to learn that this is such a pervasive problem in your industry.

Sadly we're not surprised because it's a reality we know far too well.

Please know that you are not alone.

We believe and stand with you.

In solidarity, Alianza Nacional De Campesinas."

SHAW: America read the letter out loud.

People were tearing up.

PORTMAN: Mónica said, "You know, they tell us as farm workers, "No one cares about you.

You're in the shadows, shut up."

And then they tell you, "No one cares about you, you're like so fortunate in the spotlight, shut up."

And she said, "But they're telling all of us to 'shut up.'

And that's what we can't do."

FERRERA: It was such a revolutionary act of love.

They saw past vast things that divide our experiences in this world, and chose to stand in solidarity.

RHIMES: And I think that's what really started the idea that we wanted to do something that mattered for people.

You know, it wasn't just about us and our problem, it was about helping all women.

NEWS ANCHOR: A new initiative led by some of Hollywood's most powerful women is taking on sexual harassment.

The coalition called Time's Up was announced yesterday.

NEWS ANCHOR: The initiative establishing a legal defense fund for working class women, backed by $13 million in donations.

TCHEN: The real object of the fund is to make sure that low-income women, like the janitors like the farm workers like home health workers who don't have the means, know now that they have access to legal resources.

NEWS ANCHOR: Time's Up is also urging women to wear black to next Sunday's Golden Globes to speak out about sexual harassment as well as gender and racial inequality.

RAMIREZ: It was awesome.

We walked arm-in-arm down the red carpet and look into camera after camera and we sent the message that we were standing together and that people basically needed to buckle up and get ready because things were about to change.

MEYERS: It's 2018, marijuana is finally allowed and sexual harassment finally isn't.

NEWSCASTER: One of Hollywood's most famous parties turned into a protest Sunday night.

HAYEK: Time's Up.

STREISAND: Folks, time's up.

NEWSCASTERS: Female lawmakers taking a stand against sexual harassment.

NEWSCASTER 2: They work black today just like women and men at the Golden Globes.

WAITHE: Time's up on the abuse of power.

MONAE: We come in peace but we mean business.

RAMÍREZ: This moment feels incredibly different.

It's like people are finally paying attention.

NEWSCASTER: McDonald's workers across the country, hitting the sidewalks today to protest sexual harassment at the company.

NEWSCASTER: Outside the state capitol, they're demanding the Governor sign a bill protecting immigrant female janitors.

PROTESTORS: Se si puede!

Se si puede!

Se si puede!

RAMÍREZ: As women of color in low-paid positions, we have been speaking out and taking action to change the laws for a long time.

BARRETT: And we are gonna fight, until we get the National Domestic Workers Bill of Rights.

Thank you.

NEWSCASTER: Thousands of Google employees told their bosses today: Time's Up.

PROTESTER: We demand structural change.

RAMÍREZ: And now, since the Me Too breakthrough moment, we've created conditions so that people can no longer ignore the problem anymore.

PROTESTORS: Time is up.

Time is up.

Time is up.

Time is up.

Time is up... (applause) TRUMP: Tonight, it is my honor and privilege to announce that I will nominate Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the United States Supreme Court.

NEWSCASTER: We're following breaking news concerning Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

NEWSCASTER: A woman has come forward publicly accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of assaulting her at a party when they were both in high school.

TWOHEY: Talk about one of the most complicated stories to emerge in the Me Too movement.

This was not somebody who ever wanted to be on the national stage.

KANTOR: Christine Blasey Ford was just a serious, quiet, private person and she finds herself in the thunder dome of American politics.

It's ablaze with the Me Too movement.

But it's also inflamed with the opposition, and with Republicans who see her as trying to take down a Supreme Court nominee.

It becomes basically full-out war.

PROTESTERS: Feminism has been destroying our country for the last fifty years.

We are the silent majority and we are silent no more.

KANTOR: In the political sphere, these stories become totally politicized, they become completely partisan.

And the women and the real issue almost gets forgotten.

CRENSHAW: That was a little bit like Friday the 13th, like, it just it keeps coming back.

MITCHELL: The parallels are eerie.

A female college professor reluctant to publicly accuse a powerful man nominated for the Supreme Court of past sexual misconduct.

Days before a vote, forced out of the shadows when her identity is revealed.

HILL: My name is Anita F. Hill.

NEWSCASTER: Humiliated and accused of lying by some senators on what was then an all-male judiciary committee.

HEFLIN: Are you a scorned woman?

HILL: No.

NEWSCASTER: But in the Me Too era, will it play out the same way?

KANTOR: So this woman sort of walks onto the public stage and everybody's looking at her for the first time.

FORD: I am here today not because I want to be.

I am terrified.

I am here because I believe it is my civic duty to tell you what happened to me, while Brett Kavanaugh and I were in high school.

KANTOR: She had this kind of high-pitched, girlish voice, but she also had this sort of firmness and certainty.

FORD: I tried to yell for help.

When I did, Brett put his hand over my mouth to stop me from yelling.

This is what terrified me the most and has had the most lasting impact on my life.

It was hard for me to breathe, and I thought that Brett was accidentally going to kill me.

TRAISTER: The bar for being plausible, for having your story heard has to be so high for these women.

And they had to come in and describe with almost surgical precision everything that had happened to them.

FORD: Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter, the uproarious laughter between the two.

And they're having fun at my expense.

GAY: One of the frustrating things is that it has been proven that sexual assault survivors or victims can sometimes have trouble recalling details.

MITCHELL: You said that you do not remember how you got home.

Is that correct?

FORD: I do not remember.

GAY: And I couldn't tell you how I got home from when I was raped.

It was 33 years ago.

I couldn't tell you, like, the route I took.

I couldn't tell you any of the significant details.

All I knew is that I had my bike with me and those details don't matter.

DURBIN: Dr. Ford, with what degree of certainty do you believe Brett Kavanaugh assaulted you?

CHRISTINE FORD: 100%.

DURBIN: 100%.

GAY: The other thing that I found very heartbreaking, was the detail that she has multiple front doors in her house, that she's so afraid of not being able to escape any given situation that she built two front doors in her house.

That's such, that's how you also know she's telling the truth, because it's such a weird thing to do.

Only trauma could make someone do something that weird, and also that unaesthetic.

CRENSHAW: After Christine Blasey Ford finished I was watching Fox News and some of them even said, wow.

So what's the next move?

Is he gonna withdraw?

Is the President gonna force him to withdraw?

BAIER: Anybody can be critical or not.

But it is a totally different thing after you hear it.

WALLACE: This was extremely emotional, extremely raw, and extremely credible.

CRENSHAW: And I don't know.

Was it a half hour later when Kavanaugh came in and basically, you know, threw what can only be described as a fit?

KAVANAUGH: I demanded a hearing for the very next day.

This confirmation process has become a national disgrace.

My family and my name have been totally and permanently destroyed.

KANTOR: Brett Kavanaugh came out swinging.

He was visibly angry.

He was on the attack.

KLOBUCHAR: There has never been a case where you drank so much that you didn't remember what happened the night before, or part of what happened?

KAVANAUGH: You're asking about blackout.

I don't know, have you?

KLOBUCHAR: Could you answer the question, Judge?

CRENSHAW: No woman could go in sputtering, just losing it all out of a sense of righteous indignation.

That's not available for a woman.

Like Anita, they have to maintain their poise.

Like Christine Blasey Ford, she has to give no hint of being angry or resentful.

And even within this narrow terrain, she still loses her credibility when he comes on and basically performs as a person who is righteously indignant, entitled, and angry that he should even have to answer any questions.

SENATOR: Clerk may continue.

Mrs. McCaskill.

McCASKILL: No.

SENATOR: Mr. McConnell?

MCCONNELL: Aye.

KANTOR: At the end of the day, the political math prevailed, and he was confirmed.

TWOHEY: There were so many people who came to see Dr. Ford as the hero of the Me Too movement.

She was flooded with tens of thousands of letters from victims of sexual assault and sexual harassment.

But she also became a vehicle for the backlash, a symbol of the Me Too movement gone too far.

WOMAN: I can ruin someone's life, I can ruin someone's family, and we can do it all in the name of the Me Too movement.

INGRAHAM: It's up to each of us, to defend our sons, brothers, and your husbands, to make sure a travesty like this does not happen again.

KANTOR: Well, what's so confounding is that everything's changed and nothing's changed.

In the year or so of Me Too, so many companies and organizations were figuring out better ways to deal with these very difficult kinds of allegations.

And it felt like the Senate hadn't made that much progress.

In fact, some of the senators who Christine Blasey Ford faced were the exact same people who Anita Hill faced all of those years before.

PROTESTERS: November is coming!

November is coming!

November is coming!

UNDERWOOD: Tonight, November 6th, 2018, I stand before you as this community's first congresswoman elect.

Women have stepped forward.

We are marching for the first time, starting groups, many people getting politically involved for the first time.

There was a real sense of, "Our country needs us to step forward."

I felt that what I could do was run.

SARSOUR: In the first year after Donald Trump was inaugurated, over 20,000 women got up and ran for office around the country, anywhere from school boards to Congress to the US Senate.

OCASIO-CORTEZ: My gosh.

NEWSCASTER: Tuesday brought celebrations across the US for the record-breaking number of women who made history with their victories.

They ran and won in unprecedented numbers... (overlapping chatter) PRESSLEY: We won?

We won?

SARSOUR: Over 100 women went to Congress.

And not just any women.

TLAIB: We're going to Congress!

SARSOUR: Muslim women went to Congress and indigenous women went to Congress.

Latinas for the first time from a state like Texas, went to Congress.

The youngest black woman ever.

The youngest women ever.

UNDERWOOD: For the first time in our country, it's women, from the Speaker on down, who are the loudest, boldest, most powerful voices coming out of Capitol Hill.

PRESSLEY: Our squad is big.

Our squad includes any person committed to building a more equitable and just world.

UNDERWOOD: And that has just turned the power dynamics here on Capitol Hill on its head.

OCASIO-CORTEZ: I am here because I have to show my parents that I am their daughter and they did not raise me to accept abuse from men.

GAY: We don't have to agree with every position that they hold.

What matters is that they're there, learning the rules and also challenging the rules.

UNDERWOOD: I frequently get stopped in the hallways.

By security, or staff.

People who just don't think that someone like me could be an elected member of the house.

I don't think it's too much to ask for people to consider that perhaps I should be where I'm at.

COOPER: I'm the kind of feminist that believes that representation still matters.

When we got to 2018 Ayana Pressley and Ilhan Omar and AOC, they didn't come out of nowhere.

♪ ♪ GARZA: Pop culture-wise, black women in general are killing it.

DAVIS: I got a life too.

WASHINGTON: You want me, earn me.

COOPER: 2012.

Olivia Pope, "Scandal."

Shonda Rhimes, who had cut her teeth and built an empire with shows like "Grey's Anatomy" and "Private Practice," debuts the first primetime drama in 40 years with a black female lead.

I got together with my friends and every Thursday night we tweeted "Scandal" together.

All of a sudden it challenged our possibilities of representation.

POPE: If you don't get subpoenaed this never happened.

COOPER: Olivia Pope is a fixer.

And her iconic line, in all of TV was... POPE: It's handled.

COOPER: Finally, the world was being allowed to know just how capable and talented we were.

We also knew that this could happen when you had black women showrunners and black women decision-makers.

NEWSCASTER: Well this is a major coup for Netflix.

It just recruited TV producer Shonda Rhimes from Disney's ABC.

RHIMES: I did feel very much when I made the move from ABC to Netflix and it caused such a ripple that it was a power move, a realization that I was leading a way that hadn't been done before.

Which I hadn't even really been thinking about.

I had mostly just been thinking about, this is what I want, this is how I want it, this is how I want to build it, I have a vision, I'm going that way.

This is a huge deal because Shonda made, listen to this, 2 billion, $2 billion for ABC.

RHIMES: I think it's important for women to own their power, and own their accomplishments, and own their paydays.

Women do not brag enough.

Men brag about everything.

Even things that aren't things... let me take a deep breath, and on behalf of women everywhere, in the name of not leaving my sister hanging, I will brag and I got to say, this is harder than I thought.

I remember calling my attorney and saying, like, "If I say this, is it true?

Are we sure that it's true?"

And he was like, "Yes, we're sure, we're absolutely 100% sure."

And I was like, "But if I say it out loud..." He was like, "What's wrong with you?

We're sure.

It's fine."

And when it got time to say it, I felt sick to my stomach.

It was very interesting.

And I felt like I was doing something wrong, which was also interesting, which made me feel like I really had to say it.

I am the highest paid showrunner in television.

My hands are shaking.

Maybe true equality will happen when they stop putting qualifiers in front of my name.

When I'm not a black female showrunner, I'm just a showrunner.

Because they never say that a white guy is a white male showrunner, which I'm always really tempted to do.

GAY: The thing about progress is that you have to acknowledge it when it's being made.

And it is being made right now.

It's a question of, how do we sustain this progress.

The real shift is going to happen when you see more executives who are more diverse.

I've pitched a number of projects when a white man has sat across the table and said to me, why should I care?

In this day and age, that they don't inherently think that they should care about the lives of others is a measure of how far we have to go.

PROTESTORS: Say his name, George Floyd.

Say his name, George Floyd.

Say her name, Breonna Taylor.

O'DONNELL: Americans are in the streets tonight, demanding justice after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

TODD: For nearly two weeks, thousands of protestors across the country and around the world have captured a shift in public attitudes on race and policing.

NEWSCASTER: They were motivated by George Floyd's death, but they came to remember someone else too.

MARCHERS: Breonna Taylor.

NEWSCASTER: This is a true grassroots movement, united by that common belief that Black Lives Matter.

CROWD: Black lives matter!

WILLIS: Repeat after me, I believe in my power, CROWD: I believe in my power.

WILLIS: I believe in our power.

CROWD: I believe in our power.

WILLIS: I believe in black trans power.

CROWD: I believe in black trans power.

WILLIS: After the murder of George Floyd, and so many black trans people, I felt a duty to raise my voice.

Because as a Black trans woman, there's still so much risk, even in leaving our doors each morning.

NEWSCASTER: The rally comes days after two black transgender women were killed in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

It also follows the Trump administration's roll back of protections against gender identity discrimination in healthcare.

WILLIS: I don't think any of us anticipated the sheer number of folks.

Many of us hadn't really experienced anything like that, a rally specifically for Black Trans lives that have so many people.

You know, oftentimes black trans folks were on our own in our mourning, in our resilience.

And this was just so different.

It felt like lightning struck and just, a tide was turning.

We have been told that we are not enough.

And the truth is that we're more than enough.

Even within the feminist movement, there has been a history of exclusion of black women, Trans women, lesbian and queer women, disabled women.

You know, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton were white supremacist as hell.

But, you know, the power of feminism is the need for it to continuously evolve and be expansive.

Black trans women in particular give us windows of possibility to what the world will be like when all of us are less encumbered by restrictive ideas of who were supposed to be.

And what continues to give me faith is the young folks on the street see the connections between the various movements quicker than older generations have been able to.

IRON EYES: Young people have for so long been dealing with all of these really systemic and huge issues.

If I'm not fighting against the climate crisis, I'm fighting for Indigenous rights.

If I'm not fighting for indigenous rights, I'm still a brown person.

And then I'm still a woman.

Which is also like a super power at the same time.

It is everyday regular people, like me and Greta, it is us who are going to change this, it is us who have the responsibility to make our voices heard.

THUNBERG: It should not be that way, we should not be the ones that are fighting for the future, and yet, here we are.

WADLER: I am here today to acknowledge and represent the African American girls whose stories don't make the front page of every national newspaper.

I am here to say, never again for those girls too.

PROTESTORS: Fighting for justice.

Justice and DACA.

STEINEM: I've never seen this much activism in my life, in all of my long life.

When I look at 16-year-olds, and 22-year-olds, I always say, "Ah, I just had to wait for some of my friends to be born.

I'm so glad to see you."

GAY: The role of feminism right now I think is to remind ourselves we cannot be complacent.

And really make ourselves and people around us uncomfortable so that we create change.

CRENSHAW: There are those who are going to tell us that the project of equality is over with.

As far as I'm concerned, as long as we have to worry about whether we can be assaulted because of who we are.

As long as we have to worry about whether we're going to get paid the same thing for the work that we do, as long as we can pretty much predict who's going to be the CEO of a fortune 500 company who's going to clean the office, then we are not done.

CULLORS: I'm not done making a ruckus.

SARSOUR: We're not done building a country that respects the dignity of all those who reside here.

GAY: We're not done until every woman in this country can walk down the street and feel safe.

KANTOR: We're not done reporting.

TCHEN: We are inching our way towards workplaces where everyone feels safe and able to reach their full potential, but we are not done.

We are far from done.

CROWDS: Equal pay, equal pay, equal pay.

RAPINOE: I'm gonna fight for equal pay.

Equal pay, as the great Serena Williams says, until I'm in my grave.

UNDERWOOD: We're not done until we have a Congress that looks like the American people.

COOPER: In a world where women are still doing most of the child rearing across race and most of the household labor, we definitely need female representation and female leadership.

HARRIS: I'm so proud to stand with you and I do so mindful of all the heroic and ambitious women before me, whose sacrifice, determination, and resilience makes my presence here today even possible.

GARZA: We are not done transforming this country into what it has always promised that it would be.

SARSOUR: So there's some sort of, like, running line where we keep passing to one another, until one day this country realizes its full potential.

(music plays through credits)