Weinstein whistleblower, Zelda Perkins, likens misuse of NDAS to ‘legal waterboarding’

By Rachel Birch

Former assistant to Harvey Weinstein, Zelda Perkins, has spoken about her experience as a whistleblower and subsequent campaign to end the misuse of Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA) during a University of Galway (UoG) event.

Ms Perkins was the guest speaker at this year’s ‘Sheehy Skeffington Annual Distinguished Lecture’ on 6 November, a series which honours individuals who have spoken truth to power, challenging the course of justice as a result.

The Englishwoman was the first to break an NDA at Weinstein’s production company Miramax in 2017, thus exposing the harassment and sexual assault that she and other colleagues had suffered at the hands of the film producer while working there.

Weinstein’s abuse

Ms Perkins told the event that she was inspired to break her NDA, which had previously kept her silent for 20 years, after she learned that a colleague of hers had suffered the same fate.

Ms. Perkins said: “When it happened to me in 1998, I was only 24 or 25 at the time and I naively thought that if I told the grown-ups, they would do something about it, but that very clearly didn’t happen.

“So, I never felt the need to speak up about Weinstein’s behaviour towards me [again] until the moment I found out that it had happened to a colleague of mine.

“My next move was just a reaction because to me because it was very clearly a case of right or wrong. I hadn’t known the depth of his depravity and when that became clear to me, I also felt complicit.

“I had an absolute desperate need to speak up, so in 2017, when the journalists approached me, I had gotten to a point where I no longer could keep silent.”

She went on to explain that a “blanket of silence” had prevailed over Miramax up until that point, aided and abetted by the legal profession’s use of NDAs which had concealed the systemic abuse of female employees at play in the company.

Perkins’ campaigning

Her bravery led to the groundbreaking New York Times investigation which uncovered the extent of Weinstein’s crimes, triggering the #Metoo movement and Weinstein’s eventual incarceration.

Since then, Perkins has gone on to establish the ‘Can’t Buy My Silence’ campaign which aims to enact legislative and regulatory change surrounding the enforcement of NDAs which she says have increasingly been weaponised to conceal crimes.

The campaign also serves to educate people on their legal rights pertaining to NDAs, ensuring those with knowledge or experience of wrongdoings are protected by law, rather than silenced.

“The problem lies within the bullying tactics, the fear and the language that people use around victims of misconduct.

“We were put through what I can only really describe as legal waterboarding – we were kept isolated in different rooms overnight, we weren’t able to drink water and were made to feel like criminals.

“The whole atmosphere that’s created around this agreement is one of fear, time constraint, emergency to capitalize on the vulnerability of a victim, but the reality is, none of that has to happen.

“You have more power than everyone else in the room when you retain your voice and remember what is ethically right and wrong,” she explained.

Nowadays, she spends her working life advocating for victims and liaising with corporate executives and heads of HR to combat the culture enabling the misuse of NDAs beyond their original intended purpose.

According to Ms. Perkins, NDAs should only ever be used to protect confidential business information ‘intellectual property’, trade secrets and client confidentiality and anything else should be deemed a “tool of coercion”.

She painted a vivid picture of the kind of reactions she has become accustomed to in her liaisons with industry chiefs: “Generally, when I go into these organizations, I have several of their NDAs up my sleeve.

“The smart ones come in with their heads of HR and their general counsel, the arrogant ones come in on their own and those are the ones that I really enjoy because they sit there and go ‘yeah, this is terrible, of course, we don’t use these in our organization’.

“Then I say ‘oh, gosh, that’s, that’s strange you should say that because I’ve got this case here and this happened there, and you just see them go pale and start to shuffle around.”

Legislative reforms

Perkins also works with governments to change legislation at a statutory level and her campaign efforts have led to tangible reforms in the UK, Canada, Australia and even here in Ireland.

Last year, Ireland amended its Employment Equality Act to restrict employers from deploying NDA’s in the contexts of harassment and discrimination on foot of Perkin’s collaboration with Senator Lynn Ruane, who first introduced the bill in 2021.

Following in Ireland’s footsteps, in July 2025, the UK government also announced plans to change it’s laws around NDAs, which Perkins deemed “seismic”.

The campaigner also spoke of her work with universities, which she brands as “hot beds” for NDA misuse and has created a pledge which has been signed by over half of all British and Irish third level institutions which bans the weaponisation of the legal agreement.

The event’s namesake, Dr. Micheline Sheehy Skeffington, who was also in attendance at the event, testified to similar university misconduct.

The esteemed academic’s activism inspired the launch of the series in 2019, after she won a landmark gender discrimination case against the UoG ten years prior in relation to the appointment of senior lecturer promotions.