The Culpability of NDAs in Perpetuating Sexual Assault Culture

In the wake of the Weinstein revelations, everyone is talking about it: NDAs seem to be part of the problem. They were used consistently to silence people from speaking out. The NDA seemed to be how you could get away with it, as Weinstein's last-ditch offer to Rose McGowan to keep the lid on the story seems to illustrate. You can read criticisms of NDAs at Vox, Variety (and again), CNN (and again), the New York Daily News, Above the Law, and Forbes. And that was just my first page of Google results. I've been blogging about the danger of them for a while. It's not just the rich and powerful using them; college campuses are also using them in the sexual assault context. And they're not just being used to cover up sexual abuse; Amber Heard's NDA restricted her from apparently ever even mentioning domestic abuse at all. It's easy to see why NDAs are popular among the powerful (the President also loves them). They allow complete and total control of the narrative. An NDA can make it a legal breach for you to tell the truth; an NDA can indeed make it legally enforceable for you to lie, basically. And, in this way, the fuzzy line between truth and fiction becomes fuzzier and fuzzier. And people get victimized and feel alone and the culture of contractual silence makes them lonelier, depriving them of support systems. 

NDAs also exist for lots of valid and important reasons. But they are also being widely and abusively used and we as a society need to confront that. The question isn't why less powerful people sign these NDAs. Until we can fix power imbalances (and we're a long way from that), it's always going to happen. But we should really question the public policy justifications for NDAs in certain circumstances. These past couple of weeks have spotlighted lots of troubling systemic issues in our society. This is one of them.