So we started by going through the lawsuit and making a list: Who was this woman? Where did she go to college? Who did she work with at the time? Who was on his staff over this two-decade long period? And essentially we just started dialing for dollars.

Mike and I would sit in this little conference room, we had this crazy, very Homeland-style map on a whiteboard wall. And we just kept calling and calling and calling and calling.

Convincing sources to go on the record is an incredibly delicate process. How did you tackle it?

MEGAN TWOHEY: What I’ve found can be useful is to say, which I believe, that “We know we can’t change what’s happened to you, but we may be able to prevent this from happening to other women.”

I always try to stress in my first conversations that this is a process. I’m not going to hang up the phone and disappear on you and then you’ll appear in a story. We’re going to take this one step at a time and you’ll have a voice in every step of the way.

How did your concept of the story change throughout the course of your reporting?

JODI KANTOR: When we started, I thought it was possible that we were just correcting the history in terms of things that had happened years ago. In the course of the reporting the moral gravity of the story shifted, once we began to find out about incidents as recent as 2015. That for us was the journalistic “aha” moment to say, these allegations never stopped coming.