With the women who had firsthand experiences and decided that they may want to come forward as sources, “the initial interview was always an hour and a half long, at a minimum,” Ms. Ryzik said.

Over the next few months, they were in contact with those women multiple times , making several trips to Los Angeles and Ohio to speak with them in person. In some cases, sources put them in touch with other women who had stories to share. There were, Mr. Coscarelli said, “many official interviews and then hundreds of texts, emails, check-ins, quick phone calls.” In the days after publication, Ms. Ryzik estimated that she had texted with Ms. Moore six times .

As they listened to the women’s experiences and gathered corroborating information from other sources, they discovered certain patterns of behavior. In relationships, Mr. Adams could be controlling: insisting that one partner, the musician Phoebe Bridgers, prove her whereabouts, for example, and threatening suicide if a woman didn’t respond to his messages immediately. In the case of the young woman who was a teenager when she developed a texting relationship with Mr. Adams, several details stuck out as especially disturbing: video calls on Skype in which he exposed himself; nicknames for her body parts.

Mr. Coscarelli and Ms. Ryzik have worked on several articles about sexual abuse, separately and together. One thing they’ve learned about addressing such a delicate subject is that the women involved know their experiences best. “They know what the most damaging and damning parts of their accounts are,” Ms. Ryzik said. “If something sticks out to them as, ‘This really shows what the problem is,’ then that’s the kind of detail that you want in the story.”

It has been more than 500 days since The New York Times published its first article detailing the film producer Harvey Weinstein’s yearslong record of sexual harassment and assault allegations. The reporting set off a sea change both for Mr. Weinstein, who was arrested last May and is awaiting trial, and for culture at large. The #MeToo movement has unseated titans in industries including media, restaurants, politics and business, in many cases as a direct result of Times reporting that has continued to expose abuses of power and created ripple effects for those involved.

One reason Mr. Coscarelli and Ms. Ryzik, as well as their editors, Caryn Ganz and Ian Trontz, felt the Ryan Adams story was important to tell was it provided a window into the complicated power arrangements that undergird the world of pop music. “The music industry isn’t like Hollywood; it doesn’t operate in the same kind of power structure,” Ms. Ganz said. “An artist can wield just as much power as a large executive; it’s just a matter of their influence and connections.”

Mr. Coscarelli said the Ryan Adams case is an example of a complex spectrum of behavior that includes subtler abuses of power that have been harder to document — but are much more common.