Why Hollywood's most explosive scandal took 30 years to surface.

Hollywood heavyweights allege producer Harvey Weinstein sexually harassed actresses, his employees and the young women in his professional orbit over decades.

For the last 3o years, Weinstein’s alleged poor treatment of women was, they say, the industry’s biggest “open secret”. But the women who claim to be Weinstein’s victims say he had a choke hold on the story, influential enough to shut down systematic attempts of journalists to report his indiscretions.

Now, after 30 years of speculation, New York Times‘ journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey finally sent their extensive report live. It was a report countless journalists over the course of many years tried to break themselves. Everyone in the industry knew about the accusations levelled at Weinstein. They weren’t a secret to major news outlets across the industry either.

Women like actresses Ashley Judd and Rose McGowan are now publicly naming Weinstein as someone they claim to have harassed them in the past.

So why did it take so long for the story to break?

According to Rebecca Traister, a journalist for New York Magazine, to understand the struggle to publish a story like this is to understand Weinstein himself. He has power. So, so much of it. Money, too. And, if his own quotes are to be introduced into the fray, people perceived him a bully.

“You know, for years I used to read about myself,” he once told New York magazine in an interview.

“They’d say, ‘He has a temper’ or ‘He’s a bully’ or something like that, and it always bothered me. You know, I always felt guilty about it. Somebody said, ‘The flower bill that is written by Harvey could have’ – you know what I mean – ‘because he needs so many apologies, could fund a small nation.’”

In a piece for The Cut on Friday, Traister wrote that she has been having conversations about Weinstein for 17 years. It began in 2000, when Traister herself was in her mid-20s. She was covering a story about one of Weinstein's films at the time, and at an event he was hosting, put a question to him he didn't like.

"I recall that he called me a c**t and declared that he was glad he was the 'f*cking sheriff of this f*cking lawless piece-of-shit town.'"

She alleges when her collague then intervened, Weinstein pushed him down a flight of stairs, bringing him into a headlock. Cameras were everywhere, photographers readied and journalists were a-plenty, watching on.

"Such was the power of Harvey Weinstein in 2000 that despite the dozens of camera flashes that went off on that sidewalk that night, capturing the sight of an enormously famous film executive trying to pound in the head of a young newspaper reporter, I have never once seen a photo," she wrote.

The message is clear: If cameras catch a wildly famous Hollywood executive assaulting a young reporter and the story itself doesn't become a story for the masses, what hope do women alleging harassment have?

"Weinstein didn’t just exert physical power," Traiser went on. "He also employed legal and professional and economic power. He supposedly had every employee sign elaborate, binding nondisclosure agreements. He gave jobs to people who might otherwise work to bring him down, and gave gobs of money to other powerful people..."

For decades, Traister says the reputations and the futures of those who did their very best to lift the veil on Weinstein and chink his shiny, iron-clad armour were in the hands of Weinstein himself.

"For decades, the reporters who tried to tell the story of Harvey Weinstein butted up against the same wall of sheer force and immovable power that was leveraged against those ambitious actors, the vulnerable assistants, the executives whose careers, salaries, and reputations were in his hands."

So only now, after three decades, have journalists published the accusations. Because it's only now, in 2017, that we have fostered an environment where women feel safe enough to speak up.