An NDA or non-disclosure agreement is a legal contract that specifies information that may not be shared with others. This type of contract makes sense in some circumstances, such as protecting trade secrets or plot details of an upcoming tentpole movie but can apply to any type of information. And there’s the problem: it’s legal in most of the United States to use NDAs to silence whistleblowers and victims of sexual harassment or discrimination. Lest you be too quick to condemn people who sign an NDA, it’s often a condition of receiving a severance package, and an individual employee seldom has the money to effectively challenge a corporation in court.
Juliane Dressner and Miriam Shor’s documentary My NDA looks at the cases of three individuals who were bound by NDAs: Ifeoma Ozoma, a former Public Policy Specialist at Pinterest; Ashley Kostial, who worked for the German tech firm SAP; and Lachlan Cartwright, former Executive Editor for the National Inquirer. Shor has also signed many NDAs as a condition of her employment as an actress in the entertainment industry and realized that they could be weaponized against those signing them; she partnered with Dressner, an experienced documentary director and producer, to create this film.
Kostial was sexually assaulted by a colleague during a work trip and reported it to the police. SAP arranged a mediation and she accepted a settlement; part of the deal was signing an NDA that prohibited her from so much as mentioning to anyone that there was an NDA, let alone the terms of it, with a $20,000 fine for each breach of the contract. You can see the problem: the perp gets to keep a clean record, as does the company, while Kostial can’t even mention in a job interview while she left her previous position.
Ozoma discovered, a few months into her employment at Pinterest, that she was being grossly underpaid according to Pinterest’s own salary schedule, and spent more than a year trying to get the situation remedied. After a performative “Black Lives Matter” promotion by Pinterest, she decided to go public about racial discrimination and retaliation within the company and immediately attracted broad interest including from outlets like The New York Times and The Guardian. It was a huge risk, given an NDA that said she could not disparage the company, but she decided that enough was enough.
Cartwright says he witnessed the National Enquirer engaging in “catch and kill”: paying for exclusive rights to a story then not publishing it. One such killed story, written by Cartwright, involved Harvey Weinstein victim Ambra Battilana Gutierrez. Other catch and kill stories involved illegal activities by President Trump. Cartwright decided to leave the paper, but his visa was tied to his employment there; by signing an NDA he was able to keep his visa active and remain in the United States.
One common theme emerges from Ozoma’s and Kostial’s cases: once they took the plunge and made public the abuse they had suffered, many more victims came forward, citing discrimination as well as sexual abuse, which will surprise no one familiar with the #MeToo movement. NDAs in such cases protect the powerful and prevent victims from telling their story to protect others, and also prevent victims from organizing. As lawyer Vince White points out, with an NDA you can be sued even for telling the truth, and corporations have a lot more money than you do. In such a situation, it’s easy for a victim to feel that they’re all alone and maybe it’s their fault since such things apparently have never happened before, so taking the money and keeping quiet seems like the best course.
My NDA is a well-made documentary that combines background information about NDAs with the very human stories of the three main people who form the focus of this film; the filmmaker’s use of graphics and screen cards is particularly effective. There’s also hope among the doom and gloom: three US states have passed NDA reform laws: New Jersey, Washington, and California, as have the UK and Ireland. | Sarah Boslaugh
My NDA was shown as part of the 35th annual St. Louis International Film Festival. Information about tickets and the full festival schedule is available from the Festival web site.
