Nearly 8 years after #MeToo splintered Hollywood, HR has a more active role on set

On October 5, 2017, the New York Times published a story that shifted the entertainment industry and the country: Harvey Weinstein, one of the industry’s most prolific and influential producers for the better part of the previous four decades, allegedly sexually assaulted multiple women, including Gwyneth Paltrow, Ashley Judd, and Angelina Jolie.

The story set off a firestorm in Hollywood and reverberated around the world. People began sharing their own stories of assault and exploitation in the industry. It quickly spread to other industries, as women said, #MeToo. Alleged victims exposed people like actor Kevin Spacey and filmmaker James Toback, and studios were accused of protecting predators.

Nearly eight years later, the effects of the #MeToo movement are still being felt in the world of entertainment and elsewhere as laws and policies, including the Speak Out Act, have changed and HR has a more active role in production. Despite the progress, experts tell HR Brew that victims of harassment are still afraid to speak out, and employers can do more to create safe workspaces.

Hollywood fault lines exposed. Tarana Burke, a sexual assault survivor and activist, first coined #MeToo in 2006, but it took 11 years, perhaps the biggest Hollywood scandal in history, and a tweet from Alyssa Milano, to show just how pervasive sexually predatory behavior was in the entertainment industry. As more stories surfaced about not only Weinstein, but dozens of other powerful men in Hollywood, people wondered how the abuse went on for so long.

While some looked at the alleged perpetrators, many looked at who might have protected them for years, including HR. At the Weinstein Company, the New Yorker reported, several Weinstein accusers recounted that HR leaders were “utterly ineffective” and said all complaints would immediately go to Weinstein, the company’s CEO, alluding to the power dynamics at play. The company’s board of directors maintained “shock” over the allegations and said they were unaware of Weinstein’s behavior.

Furthermore, before Matt Lauer, former anchor of the Today show, was fired after a sexual misconduct review, NBC reportedly attempted to cover up the allegations. NBC denied any prior knowledge of Lauer’s conduct at the time. The company also conducted an internal investigation, and said there was not a culture of harassment, but that NBC must do more to allow employees to file complaints without fear of retaliation, NPR reported.

As more accusations came out, from NPR to Fox News, it appeared that some employers across various industries knew what was going on but reportedly did not speak out, despite whistleblower protection laws.

Before #MeToo, victims who filed abuse or discrimination complaints say they often faced retaliation and further discrimination, and the men who were alleged to have victimized them often had few, if any, consequences. The system, from HR to the industry as a whole, appeared to shield perpetrators, while survivors had hardships beyond the abuse, thanks in part to compulsory arbitration agreements and restrictive nondisclosure agreements (NDAs).

“This means you often end up working with the same manager who harassed you before—only now you’ve filed a complaint and embarrassed him in front of HR. Often people don’t complain because they know what is going to happen,” Harvard sociology professor Frank Dobbin told the Atlantic in 2017, shortly after the Times broke news of Weinstein.

Swift response. Weinstein’s own company fired him within three days of the New York Times story. By January 2018, Time’s Up, an organization that called for workplace safety and equality, was born with support from more than 300 women across the entertainment industry.

Roughly a year after the Weinstein allegations were published, around 200 men across entertainment, tech, and politics were out of their positions; with more than half replaced by women, the New York Times reported.

“Women have always been seen as risky because they might do something like have a baby. But men are now being seen as more risky hires,” Joan Williams, a law professor who specializes in gender inequality at UC Law, San Francisco, told the Times in 2018.

“The root of the harassment issue is actually inequality in employment,” Leah Meyerhoff, the founder of Film Fatales, a support group for female directors, told the BBC the same year.

Hollywood changed beyond the initial changes in gender representation. Instead of holding auditions in hotel rooms, as had been common in Hollywood, SAG-AFTRA issued new rules banning the practice. Additionally, the demand for intimacy coordinators, who choreograph physical scenes between actors, increased, as studios tried to reduce the risk of harassment and sought to keep workers safe. Some HR executives were ousted as well—CBS, Sony Pictures, and Viacom all replaced their HR leaders in the wake of #MeToo revelations, the Independent reported.

“Established protocols—decades worth—are changing at lightning speed,” Amy Baer, a producer, told the Independent in 2018. “For people like me, who believe change is desperately needed in Hollywood, that is exciting. But a lot of people are lost in anxiety.”

As fast as things seemed like they were changing, survivors still faced challenges beyond their emotional scars. Sarah Ann Masse, who accused Weinstein of making an unwanted sexual advance during an interview in 2008, told HR Brew she saw firsthand how studios were taking things out on the survivors. For a long time, she was one of the many women who kept quiet about the abuse she says she experienced because she feared retaliation or people not believing her. Masse spoke out when it was clear that she wasn’t alone, but she believes it still hurt her career.

“I was afraid to walk into rooms that he might be in, get cast on a project that he was working on, that I didn’t know about, be alone with another powerful person who might have used me in the same way,” Masse recalled. “About two months after I came forward, that’s when everything went south. I got a call from my then agent, telling me that she was getting angry phone calls from casting directors, that I was being blacklisted, that I was ruining my career.”

Hurdles to progress. A little more than a year after #MeToo took off, some entertainment producers and executives, mostly men who were white, grew frustrated over how the movement seemed to be shifting Hollywood and the industry’s new diversity efforts such as in its membership with the voting academy, according to the Independent. Some of the men who were used to holding the keys to Hollywood resented women stepping into more powerful roles.

Survivors often faced the brunt of the consequences for reporting abuse. “HR departments need to make sure they encourage people to feel free to speak up [in work environments] when things happen,” Phyllis Golden-Gottlieb, a former television executive and sexual assault survivor, told Variety in 2018.

The #MeToo movement received pushback even early on, as some felt it was going “too far,” Variety reported, and that men weren’t given a fair shake. Some of the men got their jobs back fairly quickly after allegations surfaced. Louis CK, a comedian who several women accused of misconduct, for example, returned to the stage within a year and performed to full houses.

In 2022, Women in Film, which advocates for gender parity in the industry, released a survey finding that while 83% of respondents felt that the culture in Hollywood had improved since #MeToo, 80% either had experienced misconduct in the industry, or knew someone who had, in the last five years. “It’s kind of surprising how much hasn’t changed,” Kirsten Schaffer, CEO of Women in Film, said of the survey results.

Time’s Up, which had established a legal defense fund for survivors, was plagued by controversy and ultimately shuttered in 2023.

Five years after the first allegations against Weinstein surfaced, Kimberly Hamlin, a feminist history scholar at Miami University, told NPR, “What has not really changed so much over the past five years are the foundational elements of our institutions and structures of power that tacitly and explicitly facilitates, condones, and ignores sexual assault and harassment.”

HR on set. One head of production who spoke to HR Brew on the condition of anonymity, said that HR has become closer partners with the production team including being on set more than before the #MeToo movement.

“They [HR] are really dedicated and really good, and they’re even on set with us once a week,” the producer said. “It was drilled into us: document, document, document.”

Cameron Diaz said earlier this year that progress since the #MeToo movement has been “palpable.” “I’ve never in my entire career had HR come in prior to a movie and talk about what is appropriate and inappropriate behavior and a hotline, which Netflix has, to call anonymously to report any issues that you might be feeling.”

In 2024, the Hollywood Commission, a nonprofit established in Dec. 2017, created Respect on Set, which provides various resources to employers in the industry that may have smaller budgets, including sample code of conduct policies and guidelines for how employees can report harassment incidents.

“Employers have recognized their obligations toward providing a workplace free of harassment and abuse,” said Anita Hill, chair of the Hollywood Commission and women’s advocate, who testified in front of Congress about her alleged harassment by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Institutional impacts. Chris Yogerst, a media historian, told HR Brew that the #MeToo movement has allowed space for newcomers and created more diversity in the industry. The power dynamics that once ruled the industry have dissolved somewhat.

“One of the things that made these workplaces not feel like workplaces throughout the history of Hollywood was the amount of power that so very few people have,” he said. “Now a lot of that power has been upended, and I think that’s one of the reasons why a lot of these culture shifts have been allowed to happen…there’s that stuff that isn’t gonna get brushed aside anymore.”

Some have said the industry hasn’t changed enough and some men are still being protected, Claudia Eller, chief production officer at Variety and a journalist who has spent decades reporting on the industry, told HR Brew. “There were also hundreds more who were never held accountable,” she said. Eller also noted that those realities don’t negate the progress from HR being on the set to intimacy coordinators.

#MeToo and its survivors in 2025. The movement has been in the media during the last several months as Weinstein was found guilty of one count of a criminal sexual act and not guilty on another in a New York retrial. Actress Blake Lively accused It Ends with Us costar Justin Baldoni of harassment on set, and the ongoing lawsuit between the two is also a test of California state law 933, a ripple effect from #MeToo, to protect accusers from retaliation.

There are other signs of progress as well, according to some survivors. Industry unions have created clauses in contracts meant to protect workers. Many people working on set now have access to a hotline where they can call and report discrimination. Some studios, like Paramount, also have guidelines for producers on how to proceed when there are complaints to an HR department.

More than 80 anti-sexual harassment bills have been passed in 25 states since the start of #MeToo reckoning. What’s more, President Biden signed the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Harassment Act, and the Speak Out Act, which barred enforcement of harassment-related NDAs in 2022.

In 2022, a Hollywood Commission survey found that 73% of respondents believe that Hollywood leaders treat addressing sexual harassment as a “low“ or “medium“ priority and 28.6% feel that “minimal progress has been made in Hollywood since 2017.“ They are also still afraid that those in power won’t be held accountable for their actions, so many victims do not report the harassment, the report found. “There’s still a lot of fear and rightful fear around coming forward. There’s still a huge amount of retaliation,” Masse told HR Brew.

Survivors can still struggle to find work, says Masse, who believes employers should do more to recruit them. “We’ve lost a lot of talent by retaliating against survivors, both established talent and people who never really got a chance,” she said. In 2024, Masse established Hire Survivors, a nonprofit that connects employers with survivors and provides customized training to companies, and a free toolkit on how studios can create safe, trauma-informed workplaces.

“There has been this idea planted that somehow the #MeToo movement has failed, or nobody cares about the #MeToo movement anymore,” Masse said. “The only people who have shifted are the people who don’t want this progress in the first place. I don’t think they ever were on board.”

This is one of the stories of our Quarter Century Project, which highlights the various ways industry has changed over the last 25 years. Check back each month for new pieces in this series and explore our timeline featuring the ongoing series.

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