The recent outpouring of sexual harassment and assault allegations has helped expose not only high-profile predators but the culture of secrecy that shielded them. Now lawmakers and advocates want to empower victims, and make it harder for serial harassers to hide, by restricting the use of nondisclosure agreements, the confidentiality provisions that obscured decades of complaints against Harvey Weinstein, Bill O’Reilly, and Roger Ailes by muzzling their accusers.

Since October, a handful of legislators around the country have proposed bills banning confidentiality clauses in sexual harassment settlements, where accusers are typically offered money if they agree not to pursue a claim or lawsuit. Critics of NDAs say signing away the right to report an unlawful act is inappropriate because the agreements “can effectively gag speech about a matter of genuine public concern,” says Mark Konkel, an employment lawyer with the firm Kelley Drye. Even the existence of an NDA can be secret. Without knowledge of prior allegations, serial harassers go undetected and victims can't negotiate for a fair settlement.

Bills banning NDAs in sexual-harassment settlements have been proposed in the state legislatures of New York, California, and Pennsylvania. In Congress, where US representative Blake Farenthold (R-Texas) was revealed Friday to have paid $84,000 in taxpayer money in 2014 to confidentially settle a harassment claim from a former staffer, US representative Jackie Speier (D-California) and US senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York) have cosponsored a bipartisan bill that would limit the use of NDAs in such cases.

State senator Brad Hoylman cosponsored the New York bill banning confidential settlements in response to stories about Weinstein and Fox News, whose headquarters are in his district. “I’ve heard from women who want to pull the plug on NDAs and don’t want to be in the position of [being asked] to sign away their rights for a pittance, especially when the company continues to thrive at the helm [of] the predator himself,” Hoylman says. “If that’s not an illustration of unfairness, I’m not sure what is.”

Even outside of a settlement, nondisclosure agreements have helped harassers evade accountability. The New York Times journalists who broke the Weinstein story said former employees felt constrained from reporting abuse because of the NDAs they signed when they were hired. Former Uber engineer Susan Fowler said nondisclosure and nondisparagement agreements had silenced complaints about sexual harassment at Uber.

There’s nothing inherently nefarious about an NDA. Employers have traditionally used these confidentiality provisions to safeguard trade secrets or intellectual property. Nowadays, NDAs show up everywhere from employment contracts when workers first join a company to separation agreements when they leave.

But NDAs also have become common in settlements to resolve many types of civil disputes, including allegations of sexual harassment in the workplace. Employers typically insist on such agreements as a condition for settling a complaint out of court. Employment lawyers say it’s unfair to characterize NDAs as “hush money” because no one is forced to settle, or to sign an NDA.

But amid the flurry of allegations against Weinstein, a pattern emerged: Younger women raised complaints at great professional risk, were intimidated into signing NDAs by both their attorneys and Weinstein’s, then kept silent. In October, Zelda Perkins, Weinstein’s former assistant, broke her NDA, and 19 years of silence, in an interview with the Financial Times.

In 2016, former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson sued Roger Ailes, then the company’s CEO and chairman, for retaliating against her after she refused his sexual demands. Carlson sued Ailes personally, rather than the network, to avoid a clause in her contract that compelled her to settle disputes with Fox through arbitration. Carlson has been meeting with lawmakers on Capitol Hill to ban forced arbitration agreements. But she is still under the NDA that she signed in 2013 when she renegotiated her contract with Fox.