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Are you worried about repercussions coming from this interview today?

Oh, I am terrified, absolutely terrified, not necessarily that individual people will be upset with me. But I’m very, very, very worried about the law firm continuing to come after me because it’s one thing to take your licks, accept your punishment, and disappear, and it’s entirely another thing to come back and stand up and talk about it.

From “The New York Times,” I’m Sabrina Tavernise. And this is “The Daily.” It’s been more than five years since the MeToo movement changed the world, toppling powerful and abusive men. That moment was driven by reporting at places like “The New York Times,”

Behind these stories were sources, many of whom were anonymous, who took enormous risks to expose wrongdoing and harassment and sexual violence. Today, the key anonymous source behind a major story is disclosing her identity for the first time. My colleague, Rachel Abrams, is going to tell her story.

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It’s Thursday, May 18.

Ali Dirks has described herself to me as a, quote, “unremarkable person.” Ali grew up in a small town in Indiana with a Midwestern aversion to acting big headed. When you talk to her, she frequently apologizes for things before she even says them or declares what she’s about to say cringe worthy. It can sometimes feel like she’s afraid of taking up too much room in the world.

So it makes sense that when Ali was graduating from law school and lots of her friends were trying to get fancy jobs at high-powered corporate law firms, Ali decided she wasn’t going to do that. She just didn’t feel like those jobs were for her.

Yeah. I’m like cringing at my own thought process. I never thought any of that was accessible to me. I don’t have the kind of prestige and pedigree that are required. I could make myself miserable trying to compete for a spot in a stratum where I don’t belong, or I can try to find something that makes me happy that maybe has less earning power and less prestige, but maybe where I might fit in.

Ali bounced around a bit, temping for various law firms, working in an unglamorous part of the legal world that non-lawyers probably haven’t heard of. It’s called document review.

Or doc review, as it’s colloquially d it’s grunt work. It’s very unprestigious. A lot of, quote unquote, “real attorneys” make fun of it because it’s just such low status work.

Essentially, doc review is where lower ranking lawyers dig through piles of documents and evidence, flagging things that are deemed important enough for higher ranking lawyers to read. By the time Ali was in her early 30s, she was ready for something new.

I was primarily just really in a state of yearning, a state of anticipation, a state of wanting, desperately wanting to plant roots and feel like I was on firm ground.

And then in 2018, Ali landed a job at exactly the kind of firm she thought she could never work in, a big, top-tier law firm named Covington and Burling. She would still be doing doc review, but it felt like a huge step up.

I was just very poised for some sort of watershed moment in my career that would mean I’ve finally arrived.

A watershed moment arrived faster than Ali might have expected. Right after she started at Covington, she got word she’d been assigned to a new case, a major one.

As I recall, it was really just delivered as, we’ve got the CBS internal investigation. I don’t know if you’ve heard about the stuff that’s in the news, but that’s us. That’s our case.

This investigation, the case Covington assigned Ali to, it had to do with Les Moonves, the former chief executive of CBS. Some of you might remember this Les Moonves situation. But just to quickly lay out what this investigation was — Les Moonves was a living legend of American television. He was known for greenlighting hits like “Survivor,” “ER,” “CSI,” and “Friends.” He was so known for picking hits people called him the man with the golden gut.

But in the summer and fall of 2018, the “New Yorker” published allegations from a dozen women who accused Moonves of sexual misconduct. The claims were numerous — intimidation, harassment, and sexual assault. Moonves denied the allegations, but left CBS anyway in September 2018, making him one of the most powerful men to lose his job during MeToo.

The network hired Covington and another law firm to investigate the allegations and the culture at the company. One big thing hanging in the balance was $120 million severance package. And the investigation would determine whether he should have been allowed to resign and take all that money, or whether CBS might retroactively fire him for cause instead, in which case, he’d lose that golden parachute. This would easily be the biggest, highest profile case Ali had ever worked on.

Oh, this makes me cringe in retrospect, but I was really excited that it was such a big deal.

That something I did, moving around stacks of paper and reading through endless emails, might manifest in some way in the real world. And the reason I guess I feel like it’s crass or tacky is, that’s not a great or noble motivation to want to be involved in something because it’s in the news.

But I guess it’s just my invisibility and the precarity of the kind of work that I was doing in doc review was just — it ground me down so much that one of the most prestigious firms in the country, not only that, not only having a stable job finally, not only being assigned to a big deal investigation, but the work that we do might end up being something that my friends and family can read about. I might not appear anywhere in the credits, so to speak, but I worked on this. I was part of it.

At Covington, Ali was one of about 35 people to review thousands of documents, emails, memos, letters, company files. She says many of them were mundane, innocuous, totally boring detritus of office work. But very soon, Ali began to see evidence of abusive behavior by Les Moonves. And what’s more, she saw that through all of it, he had enjoyed loyalty and support in the upper echelons of CBS.

Ali had been excited by this case in part because it was a chance to be part of something big, the moment of MeToo. But, like all of us, Ali could look around and see lawyers falling onto different sides of what was unfolding. Week after week, there were attorneys on the news, standing in front of victims, calling for justice for their clients.

But there were also other attorneys standing in front of the accused abusers, also calling for Justice for their clients. Ali’s big new job left her strangely in the middle of this “us and them” situation. On one hand, she could think of herself as an investigator, digging into allegations of sexual misconduct, seeking accountability. But on the other hand, she was working for Covington, who was working for CBS.

Ali knew from years of document review that no matter how much damning evidence she flagged, she would have no control over what CBS ultimately did with it. They might act on it and make it public, or they could very well keep it under wraps and try to minimize damage by burying it. For Ali, in this moment of reckoning, it became hard to tell which side she was working for. Then Ali was riding the train home from work one day and she read something that struck exactly that nerve.

I think I was writing the metro, reading “The Times” on my phone —

It was a “New York Times” article about the Moonves investigation. In the story, people were casting doubts about Covington and CBS. A number said they weren’t cooperating with the investigation because they didn’t trust CBS or Covington and its lawyers, lawyers like Ali. Ali was like, hey, I’m here. I’m trying to do good.

I remember it calling into question the integrity of the investigation or the people doing it. And I thought, you know what? That’s really unfair. Everyone that I’m surrounded by every day is working really hard to get to the truth. Nobody talks about covering anything up. Everybody cares about MeToo and doing the right thing.

You know, it’s not fair to just assume that because people are in a big law firm that they don’t care about doing what’s right. And I felt weirdly defensive of the process.

And then Ali did something impulsive that would change the course of the rest of her life and the lives of many others. She looked up the email for sending tips to “The New York Times.”

I brought a copy of what you wrote. Can you read it for us?

Sure. Oh, man. “I’m a staff attorney at Covington and Burling, working on the CBS Moonves investigation. There are around 35 of us doing document review for the case. It makes me sad every time I read in the press that people don’t trust the independence of the investigation. At the same time, just because document reviewers find the truth, doesn’t necessarily guarantee the higher ups will use it for good. And staff attorneys aren’t privy to any of their decision making.

But I do trust the partners integrity and independence, irrespective of whatever conflict of interest people think they see. While I’ve only been on the case a few weeks, I can say every report about CBS’s toxic work environment is true, especially at ‘60 Minutes.’ Obviously, I must request anonymity, because both my job and my law license are at risk. But this case enrages me so much, and it breaks my heart to look behind the curtain and see the ugliness and moral bankruptcy of institutions and people I admired since childhood. Please let me know if I can be of assistance to ‘The Times.’”

Ali’s email landed in a general email address for tips that anyone can write to. An editor sent it to me, me, because it was my story that Ali read on the train that day. It was me for whom Ali would eventually become an essential source.

I can’t stress enough how unusual Ali’s email was. It’s almost unheard of to get an email out of the blue from someone offering help with the exact thing we were investigating. And on top of that, for it to be a lawyer, who has access to sensitive details that are usually under the lock and key of attorney-client privilege. It wasn’t clear what Ali was offering exactly or what she wanted, but it seemed certain that Ali would be in an incredible position to share inside information if she decided to.

Do remember where our first meeting — I’m actually trying to remember this myself.

We met at a bar.

We met at a bar. That’s right. We met at a bar, and we ordered every fried thing on the menu.

Yes.

Ali and I first met at a bar in DC in the fall of 2018. She had dark hair and was wearing a fire engine red coat so I could spot her easily. She didn’t seem like she’d ever met with a reporter before, certainly not under these circumstances.

Oh, my gosh, it was a huge rush. I don’t particularly like admitting that or like that I felt that way because it seems a little, I don’t know, childish or silly. But I felt like being in a movie. I don’t know if I recognized this at the time, but I was really excited that an important person was paying attention to me and listening to what I had to say, and that something I did might manifest itself in the national paper of record. That carried me a lot more than logic did at first.

Ali’s motivations at this point, they’ve always felt complicated and not totally clear. Even Ali would tell you that they were messy. I think one part of her was trying to figure out the right thing to do and to do that. Another part of her felt swept up in the moment of MeToo.

She was also — and this seems like a key factor — someone who is used to feeling kind of powerless. And she was also yearning to be part of something that felt important. The longer we sat at our bar stools, the more you could see her excitement overtaking any ambivalence she had. She started showing me handwritten notes and a timeline, juicy details from inside the investigation.

We talked for hours. One specific thing I told her was that we were especially interested in this tip my colleague James Stewart had gotten. According to that tip, Moonves had not been ousted because of the allegations in the “New Yorker,” but because of something to do with another woman whose accusations against Moonves weren’t yet public.

Moonves was apparently trying very hard to keep this woman quiet. Her name was Bobbie Phillips. Ali told me she thought she’d seen some materials about Phillips and said she’d be in touch. We wrapped things up and left.

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I hadn’t even gotten on my train back to New York when Ali started sending me information about text messages, conversations she’d read between Les Moonves and Bobbie Phillips’s longtime manager, a man named Marv Dauer. The two men were clearly talking about some kind of incident that had happened with Phillips, and seemed to be conspiring to keep her quiet. Ali was disgusted.

It was just one of those really rare, when people don’t think anybody will find out. This is how they talk. This is what they’re worried about.

So what happened was, this talent manager, Marv Dauer, he’d set up a meeting between Bobbie Philips and Les Moonves back in the 1990s. Dauer didn’t know what exactly had happened during that meeting, but he suspected it was something very bad because Phillips was so upset afterward. In this text conversation, he dangles his knowledge of that incident over Moonves’s head, pressuring the executive to get Phillips a job on a CBS show and implying that if he doesn’t, she might talk to reporters.

Even though Dauer didn’t the specifics at the time, we would later report on how Phillips alleged that Moonves had sexually assaulted her during that meeting. She alleged that Moonves told her, “be my girlfriend and I’ll put you on any show,” then grabbed her by the neck, pushed her to her knees, and forced his penis into her mouth.

Phillips said it was traumatizing. She started having anxiety attacks before auditions and wouldn’t take meetings alone with male executives. She said once at a movie screening, she was so scared of seeing Moonves that she vomited in an alley outside the theater. Her career never took off.

It really bothered me that the subject of this was someone who didn’t go on to become a headlining marquee actress. It was someone who had made a career out of small parts, didn’t have blockbuster fame, and her career was in the hands of these two men. But these two men had a lot of control over Bobbie Phillips’ career. And I saw how that had played out so far. Like, why her?

These text messages had enormous stakes in the CBS investigation beyond the alleged sexual assault. They show that Moonves was potentially compromised as the head of CBS, seemingly making decisions not based on the best interests of the company, but his concerns about his own reputation. The messages also meant that the very first night Ali and I met, she’d handed us the key to a huge story. And this was just the start.

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In the coming days and weeks, Ali’s uncertainty continued to fade as she saw more and more things from the investigation that troubled her, and cemented her belief that talking to me was the right thing to do.

I think in a lot of ways, it was death by 1,000 cuts. Every document that came across my desk added into that, or added into my calculations. Just the more I saw, the more I was bothered. And I became more disillusioned the more I read, really.

Many of the things Ali was seeing were more glimpses of Moonves’s misconduct. But there were also pieces of evidence that fed her concerns about what CBS was going to do with what the investigation found.

Part of what we reviewed was HR reports, where they would track different things that were going on. And if there were complaints or investigations happening, those would also be logged.

Ali remembers seeing internal CBS documents that tracked all kinds of allegations of misconduct throughout the whole company, including what had been done about those claims, or not done.

The ways in which things weren’t followed up on or were brushed aside was really upsetting. And you know, HR is supposed to be the backstop against that kind of thing. And if they’re not taking it seriously, then I don’t know how anyone else is supposed to. So just seeing how those workplace investigations that should have taken care of the problem and held people accountable, that those workplace investigations were either not being done at all, not being followed up on, or it was a very cursory look, we’ll do this to check the box, that was really upsetting.

Put together, these materials gave Ali the impression that CBS could have taken such allegations more seriously. And she wondered if the company would take Covington’s investigation seriously. Soon, Ali was sharing information from documents like these, as well as from texts, memos, emails, and depositions from key witnesses.

What has always struck me about Ali’s story is how much it clashes with a stereotype of a whistleblower. I think we have a tendency to think about whistleblowers as acting from a place of clarity and conviction. What Ali did was very different. Her motivations were kind of a mixed bag.

She was conflicted. She took a messy first step because she had a gut feeling and felt swept up by the moment she was in. And ultimately, she charged ahead without a full appreciation of how much it would cost her in the end.

We’ll be right back.

The first story, based significantly on materials that Ali Diercks leaked to “The New York Times” ran on November 28, 2018, about a month after Ali had first reached out to us. The headline was, “If Bobbie, talks, I’m finished — how Les Moonves tried to silence an accuser.” The article description began, “A trove of text messages details a plan by Mr. Moonves, and a faded Hollywood manager, to bury a sexual assault allegation.”

Actress Bobbie Philips, breaking her silence about an alleged sexual assault at the hands of former CBS chairman Les Moonves more than two decades ago. In a new report from “The New York Times,” Phillips recalls a 1995 incident that she says took place during a meeting in Moonves’s office.

The new revelations about Moonves and Phillips immediately put a spotlight on Moonves’s massive exit package. And arguably, made it look a lot worse for CBS to just hand him $120 million.

“If Bobbie talks, I’m finished,” five words, if true, could cost former CBS CEO Les Moonves as much as $120 million.

I was really excited, on the one hand, seeing something that I contributed to in the national news. But I also had to suppress that because it wasn’t something I could talk about.

Ali, of course, had to watch all of this from a very strange secret perch.

And I think that, as I sort of watched reactions to it, both in the news and even on social media, I was really interested in seeing what people said about it, or in the comments. Oh my god, I poured over the comments on “The Times” website because I wanted to see if this affected anybody, if anybody thought, well, good. That sleazebag is getting what’s coming to him, or if people thought, how is this possible? How could someone do this and leak this information?

I wanted to know the effect it was having on other people. But I couldn’t talk about it.

I remember you sent me in a text message a fist bump emoji. And it said, “long live the fourth estate.” I mean, was it hard to keep this to yourself?

Oh my god. Oh. Oh. It makes me want to cringe at myself. It was incredibly hard. It was really, really, really, really bad for my mental health, in no small part because most of my closest friends are people I went to law school with and lawyers. And I didn’t think they would celebrate me for this. That absolutely tore me apart, trying to reconcile those things.

Nowhere was Ali’s secret more isolating than at work, at Covington, where day after day, she was now showing up to live a high-stakes double life. Ali was spending her days puzzling out what information she might share with us and how. Sometimes, sneaking out to the lobby to send messages. She kept her distance from co-workers, didn’t friend anyone on Facebook, didn’t give anyone her phone number.

I mean, I have distinct memories of walking through the lobby to get to the elevator and seeing people I worked with, or even just making myself tea from the communal office coffee station and feeling like, oh my god, these people have no idea what I’m doing. I’m drinking their tea and eating their snacks and sabotaging all of this at the same time. Like, how am I still existing in the same space where I’m doing all of these things?

But that would occur to me in just — in flashes. And for the most part, I had to stuff that down in order to keep functioning.

And I’m just sort of wondering, were you thinking like, I am violating attorney client privilege? Or was it something else that was just like really eating at you?

I think first and foremost, it was the attorney client privilege thing because what I did was wrong. It was against the rules. There was no nuance to it. There’s no way around the bare fact that I violated a sacrosanct bedrock principle of the profession that I spent years in school and went into debt for.

Also, on a less noble level, I think anyone who’s a high achiever and a people pleaser, or who grew up that way, could maybe empathize, just the feeling of having people be mad at me and I’m in trouble. I’m going to get in trouble. It’s like a childlike feeling, a childlike concern almost. In the pit of my stomach, it was, people more important than me are going to be very, very mad at me, and they’re going to want to punish me.

“New York Times” reporter Rachel Abrams says she reviewed a 59-page draft report prepared by lawyers hired by CBS that found Leslie Moonves deliberately lied about and minimized the extent of his sexual misconduct.

About a week after we ran our story about Bobbie Phillips, we published another story based on new information Ali was leaking to us. In this case, Ali allowed me to see a draft of Covington’s final report from the Moonves’ investigation.

“The Times” says the report shows Moonves allegedly deleted text messages, instructed at least one person not to speak to investigators, and even handed over his son’s iPad to investigators instead of his own.

The report read like a distillation of all the things Ali was disturbed by, Moonves’s misconduct, and how CBS handled it. We ended up writing several stories about it. And gradually, it turned up the pressure on CBS over the Moonves’ situation.

Well, CBS says former chairman and CEO Leslie Moonves will not get the $120 million severance payment his contract called for.

CBS moved to deny Moonves his $120 million golden parachute, saying its outside investigation concluded he violated company policies, breached his contract, and failed to cooperate fully.

The fallout from what Ali did was both sweeping and complicated. In the end, CBS decided it had cause to fire Moonves, denying him his enormous $120 million severance. In a twist though, Covington reportedly had to pay undisclosed settlements because of the leaks, both to Bobbie Philips and to Les Moonves himself. Moonves made a statement at the time that he would donate the money to charity.

But it’s worth noting, it was not just Moonves that Ali helped expose. There were also other problems at CBS. The information Ali shared from the report included details about secret, multi-million dollar settlements that had been paid over the years to women who said they suffered sexual harassment, assault, or wrongful termination by other men, men who didn’t lose their jobs and instead, went right on working for the network. In total, these stories offered everyone an unprecedented look at how a corporation handled crises like these behind closed doors. And we never would have gotten that without Ali.

Part of all of this that was not in the stories we ran and hasn’t been since, until now, is the story of what happened next for Ali. After we started publishing stories, Covington new, almost right away, it had a leaker. And the firm started hunting for who it was. An email went out that, according to Ali, said they were aware someone was sharing information with the press and they were handling it.

Then, Ali started noticing some serious-faced meetings in conference rooms. But the first sign of real trouble for Ali was when one day, she sat down at her computer to start work.

That day, when I opened up the case management software that they use and went to open up the shared drive, double click, and the letter that’s supposed to be there is not. And my stomach definitely dropped a little bit. That spelled danger to me.

It seemed like Ali’s access to the case files had suddenly been cut off. She wondered if this was happening to everyone around her. But she also worried this might be a sign that Covington was onto her. Remember, it wasn’t just Ali’s job that was in jeopardy, but her entire career as an attorney.

Then, in the coming days, more drives got cut off. And Ali got more and more scared.

Terrified, but apparently not enough to do anything to try and save myself.

What were you supposed to do?

I mean, I was supposed to either quit my job, if I feel that morally compromised by what I’m doing, or what the firm culture would have taught me to do, I guess, is to go confess and try to help them repair the damage.

When did you know that you, specifically, were in trouble?

It was right before Christmas, right before the holiday break, when they had started pulling individual people out of the staff attorney room and walking them over to the main building to be questioned. Once it was my turn, I knew I was sunk.

Ali says late on a Thursday afternoon, 4:30, she got called in for questioning.

Now, this I documented fairly carefully in notes to myself because I thought, if I needed to come back to it, that I wanted to have clear memories. On Thursday, December the 20th, so almost the end of the workday, I was walked over to the main office.

Ali’s notes covered two interrogation sessions with Covington. The first one, Ali says, lasted two hours. She says the lawyers questioning her didn’t accuse her directly of being the leaker, but showed her documents, hoping she’d fess up.

Things escalated in the second interrogation. Ali says there were two attorneys from Covington, a man and a woman, and then also, an outside lawyer they’d brought in. This time, they explicitly accused Ali of leaking information.

They sort of circled me like they were pack hunting or something, and just making their points and setting up the logical conclusion. And then they were going to either pounce on me or get me to admit it. And I lied to them. I straight out lied. I denied communicating with you and denied having done any of this.

This went on for a while. The more Ali denied things, the more intense the attorneys got. At one point, one of the Covington lawyers got so mad he had to leave the room. The outside counsel told Ali he’d been losing sleep, wondering how such a young, promising attorney could do something like this. The other lawyer from Covington even started crying.

I wrote this down specifically that she had said, it’s not frustrating. It’s heartbreaking. Help us explain this. Just confirm our suspicions, and on and on. And she had tried to do a sort of female solidarity thing, like, this is going to hurt the movement, or you’re harming other women by doing this.

After several hours of this, the Covington team wasn’t budging, but neither was Ali. And it all ended in kind of a stalemate.

This is not an admirable way to feel. But on one hand, I was really proud of myself for maintaining my composure to the point that it irritated these people, who do litigation for a living. They’re supposed to be able to badger witnesses. But they didn’t break me.

Eventually, they told Ali she could go. Ali took the elevators down. And just a few months after she’d started, she walked out of Covington’s building for the last time.

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In terms of what ultimately blew Ali’s cover, things got complicated between the two of us. She thinks the Covington lawyers made it seem like a very small detail in one of our stories, the number of pages in that draft report, is what ultimately got her caught. She’s pretty sure she asked us not to include that detail. But neither of us can remember her saying that explicitly.

I’ve gone back and reviewed all of our messages repeatedly. The only message. I can find about the page number is me asking Ali if it’s right and her simply confirming it. Also, in retrospect, Ali feels like she would have been caught regardless. All of her activity on that shared drive was traceable, so the firm could see everything she accessed, every document, file, text message, meaning that she was essentially leaving footprints in the snow. And it was only a matter of time before Covington caught up to her.

Covington, for the record, declined to speak to us for this story. And the truth is, without Covington telling us how Ali got caught, we still don’t know and maybe never will. I can say, nothing like this has ever happened to me with a source other than Ali. Obviously, I feel awful about all of it.

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This interview, the one you’re hearing today, is the first time I heard many of the details of what happened to Ali, in part because a lawyer who represented her through all of this advised her not to speak to me anymore. And so we fell out of touch until somewhat recently. But essentially, what happened to Ali after the CBS investigation was a slow motion disintegration of her life, the life she had, and the promise of the life she thought she might have when she landed the job at Covington and Burling.

After she was found out, Ali was placed on leave. And Ali, figuring she was going to get fired, resigned. Following that, Covington filed a complaint with the DC bar, which in turn, suspended Ali’s law license, cutting off her ability to work as a lawyer. Technically, the suspension was for a year and a half.

Ali’s husband, Lee, has urged her to get it reinstated. But at least for Ali, it’s never felt like something she could come back from.

I don’t think I’ll ever get my law license back. Way back when all of this started, disciplinary counsel told me I have a very clear memory that Covington is going to fight tooth and nail if and when you apply for readmission. They will fight you every step of the way to make sure that you don’t get your law license back.

How do you feel about the prospect of not getting it back?

I mean, in some ways, it can’t get any worse than it is. I mean, I had to seek out work that, some of which requires only a high school degree, for god’s sake. I’ve had to do things that were — I hate saying this — but I’ve had to do work that’s so beneath my skill set, beneath my education, to survive. And it doesn’t really get much worse than that.

Ali swayed from job to job. At one point, she took a job for an arts organization, making $12 an hour. When COVID hit and schools were scrambling for teachers, Ali started substitute teaching. But that was unreliable. Throughout all of this, Ali didn’t have a wide circle of support, in part because she was so reluctant to tell people what she’d done.

I was just absolutely consumed by shame. My parents thought I had just thrown away my career for nothing. They just said this was such a stupid thing to do. How could you do this? How could you throw away your career? The concept that there was any greater good being served was just not — it did not register with them.

What about Lee? What kind of conversations are you having with Lee at this point?

On some level, in order to keep going and getting out of bed every day, we’d sort of put this to the side. But there were multiple, multiple conversations that ended with me just collapsed onto his lap, just sobbing hysterically so that I couldn’t even form words. He was the only receptacle for all that pain and all that shame.

It frustrated him a lot that the shame part of it was so bad for me. He really felt like I should have had more of a sense of righteous indignation because he always believed from the get go, that, OK, this is right. And you believe in it. That’s what it is. This is a MeToo issue, and bad people are doing bad things.

He wanted me to be roaring and ferocious. This is what I did. I’m not afraid of you. I mean, I think maybe a braver person would say, come get me if you really want to come after the person who stepped forward. Like, go for it. But that’s not who I am, and that’s not how I feel.

Ali says she’s been through several hard years since all of this. And Lee’s support never wavered. That was true even as they drained Lee’s retirement account to make ends meet, to pay Ali’s law school bills, which of course, kept coming, or the mortgage for their house, which Ali, who’s been in and out of work, has worried frequently about losing. Ali still remembers the day when she was stressed and worrying to Lee about the possibility they might lose their home. Lee replied, I’ll build you a house with my own two hands if I have to.

In the last year or so, Ali’s finally found steady work as an on-call court reporter. In some ways, it’s nice. She gets to use her legal background. But in another way, it’s also a bit of a constant reminder of the future she gave up.

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In the last five years, people have done a lot of analyzing of MeToo, what it changed, what it didn’t, what was the backlash. A lot of it feels academic and abstract. Ali’s story stands out I think, because it’s such a concrete example of a trade off. She gave up so much so concretely. In her story, there’s such a plain version of the question, was it worth it.

How are you feeling about your decision to talk to me at this point, when your life is basically falling apart?

It’s strange because I never felt like if I could go back and do it differently, I wouldn’t talk to Rachel. I never had that thought. It’s a very weird, emotional space to be in of, not necessarily regretting or wanting to take back the things I did and the decisions that I made, but also going through staggering amounts of suffering for the things that I did. Because normally in any other context if that had happened in my life, I would say, absolutely I wish I could take that back. I’d take it back in a heartbeat. But I was never able to settle into that posture, I guess.

I feel so bad about what happened to you, of course. You went through this horrific, probably traumatizing experience. And I feel terrible about that. But like you, I’m not sure what I’d go back and do differently. And I wonder how you feel hearing that?

I mean, I knew that you felt bad for me. And I guessed that it was probably really hard for you. Lee didn’t want to hear that. And it was also hard for him to accept because our career trajectories were thrown in diametrically opposed orbits by the same thing, the same catalyzing event. A scoop like this is going to make your career and ruin mine at the same time.

And Lee harbored a lot of anger about that. And I didn’t. Yet somehow, somehow I knew that it was eating at you.

It’s never been lost on me what Ali said about how her decision sent our lives in opposite directions. She lost her career and struggled in isolation. I got a bigger profile and ended up with a book deal. I did ask, especially given what she lost, if Ali felt like the change that MeToo produced was what she’d hoped it would. She said flatly, no.

No. I mean, I hope that that is not a finished, closed matter. I hope it’s still viewed by everyone as an open item and an ongoing conversation.

Ali’s main feeling was that she’d seen a lot of individual men toppled, but she had not seen the kind of societal change she hoped might come.

You know, Harvey Weinstein goes to jail. Dragon slayed. Bad guy imprisoned. And that doesn’t do it for me.

As for why All is choosing to tell her story publicly now after all these years and to take the criticism and risks that come with that, Ali says mostly, she just doesn’t want to live with the secret anymore. She knows that some listeners will consider what she did and unjustifiable act of betrayal to her colleagues and to her profession. They might consider it proof that she should never have been a lawyer in the first place, and maybe that she should not be allowed to work as one again.

Even Ali will tell you she’d never advise any other lawyer to do what she did. Because if everyone felt like they could just break the rules if they didn’t like the client, our entire legal system would fall apart. At the same time, Ali also knows there will be people who sympathize with her, that she had a very difficult decision between following those rules and following what she thought was the right thing to do. Ali feels all of those things too. Five years later, she still sees her decision as a complicated one, an imperfect one, one that other people might make too.

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Rachel Abrams is a reporter at “The New York Times,” and the co-author of the book “Unscripted,” which is based on her reporting about CBS.

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We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you should know today.

I feel very strongly as governor, but also just as a dad of a six, a five, and a three-year-old that we need to let our kids just be kids.

On Wednesday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a set of socially conservative bills that ban gender transition care for minors, prevent children from attending live drag shows, and restrict the use of preferred pronouns in schools.

What we’ve said in Florida is, we are going to remain a refuge of sanity and a citadel of normalcy. And kids should have an upbringing that reflects that.

The bills are widely viewed as laying the groundwork for a descent as presidential campaign. Meanwhile, in Texas, the state legislature passed a bill banning gender transition medical care for minors. Texas would become the largest state to ban the treatment. The bill was championed by Republican Governor Greg Abbott, who is expected to sign it into law soon.

And in a dire warning on Wednesday, forecasters at the World Meteorological Organization predicted that the next five years would likely be the hottest in recorded history, driven by human-caused warming and a climate pattern known as El Nino. That prediction is especially alarming because even small increases in warming can increase the dangers from heat waves, wildfires, and droughts.

Today’s episode was produced by Diana Nguyen and Rikki Novetsky. It was edited by Ben Calhoun and Paige Cowett, with help from Devon Taylor, and with contributions from Lisa Chow, Michael Benoist, Lexe Diao and Will Reid. It contains original music by Marion Lozano, Elisheba Ittoop, Diane Wang, and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to James Stewart, David Enrich, and Sam Dolnick.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Sabrina Tavernise. See you tomorrow.

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