Over a period of months, several reporters with The New York Times have broken open stories about the producer Harvey Weinstein and the former Fox host Bill O’Reilly. The stories have documented yearslong patterns of sexual abuse, detailed the institutional systems honed to silence victims, and sparked a national reckoning over sexual abuse in the workplace.

These reporters are not done. On Tuesday, The Times published a detailed account of the network of people that Mr. Weinstein built to protect himself and discredit or intimidate his victims.

Later that evening, Jodi Kantor, Megan Twohey and Emily Steel, three of the reporters who have anchored this coverage, were joined in a TimesTalks conversation by the actress Ashley Judd, who was among the first to go on the record with accusations against Mr. Weinstein.

Here are takeaways from that conversation.

Reporting on the abuser is just the first step.

When Ms. Steel and Michael Schmidt, another Times reporter, dug into settlements surrounding Mr. O’Reilly, they came to understand that the culture that protects abusers — and, in some cases, enables them to harass or assault multiple people — can be institutionalized by human resources departments and the internal legal teams that draft such settlements.