Zelda Perkins: Twenty-five years of ‘being in the wilderness’ - and a campaign to end NDAs

Zelda Perkins broke a non-disclosure agreement to tell the truth about Harvey Weinstein. Now she’s campaigning to change the law around NDAs — and her sights are set on Ireland, she tells Michelle McGlynn

Zelda Perkins: campaigner and advocate against the use of Non-Disclosure Agreements to silence justice for harassment.

You may not be familiar with the name Zelda Perkins but you have witnessed the impact and change that she helped to bring about.

Perkins was among the women who spoke out about convicted rapist and former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein and helped to bring him to justice.

Having worked as his assistant in the 90s, Perkins was subject to persistent sexual harassment and inappropriate behaviour but had no idea of the widespread abuse perpetrated by Weinstein, who is currently serving a 23-year sentence.

It was when he attacked another young woman, a new assistant, that 24-year-old Perkins hit her breaking point. 

She confronted Weinstein, one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, face-to-face and reported the incident to a senior executive at Miramax who simply told Perkins to get a lawyer.

She thought, perhaps naively in retrospect, that this meant her complaint would be taken seriously, that it would go to court and that Weinstein would be made to pay for his crimes. But that is not what happened.

“It was the lawyers that made it impossible for me to do that,” Perkins tells me on the phone from her home in England. 

“They weren’t fighting for me. It is quite an awful realisation that I didn’t really have access to justice.”

Perkins and her colleague were advised their only real option was a “damages agreement”. From there, things just got worse. Negotiating the agreement “was much more horrific, in a way, than the initial issue with Weinstein”.

Locked in offices for periods up to 12 hours, “we weren’t allowed to bring paper. We were escorted to the loo. We were made to feel like we were the criminals in the situation rather than the people trying to highlight a sexual predator.”

Zelda Perkins: campaigner and advocate against the use of Non-Disclosure Agreements to silence justice for harassment.

Part of the agreement that Perkins was encouraged to sign by her own counsel was a non-disclosure agreement (NDA), something that has become normalised in settlement negotiations.

By signing this, Perkins was not allowed to speak to anyone – family, friends, a therapist – about what had happened. 

The campaigner described the period of her life that followed as “25 years of being in the wilderness”, broken only when she spoke to the New York Times about the settlement and NDA as part of their story which laid Weinstein’s decades of abuse bare for the world to see.

“One of the huge damages of signing the NDA that I signed was that it kind of retarded me into my 24-year-old self and made me believe that I was wrong and I was stupid. It took away any belief or confidence I had in myself and my own abilities,” Perkins tells me.

“When I started talking and when I broke it, I did kind of re-enter my body in a way I hadn’t known I’d left it.”

Publicly breaking her NDA had the potential to destroy the life Perkins had spent years building for herself but she chose to speak out in the hopes of protecting others. 

“Power stays in power by keeping the little people quiet,” Perkins says in a defiant manner that tells me she won’t ever be kept quiet again.

For many people, their only knowledge of NDAs comes from news stories involving the rich and famous or from television and films. 

Zelda Perkins pictured at her home in Wiltshire. Picture: Gareth Iwan Jones

In reality, NDAs are being used across all industries and often to keep forms of misconduct under wraps including sexual misconduct, harassment, bullying, and discrimination.

“It’s not about the individuals like Harvey, it’s about the system that enables people in power to behave with impunity.”

When negotiating her own NDA, Perkins discovered that her own legal team signed a professional undertaking that no one could see the agreement unless Harvey gave permission — including Perkins herself. 

She would later discover that this is an extremely common occurrence when law firms are dealing with high-net-worth individual corporate clients.

It was like the final nail in the coffin. Legally, Perkins had been let down by those who should uphold the law from the very beginning.

After doing her own research, Perkins found that in all likelihood her NDA was not legally enforceable because of the clauses they were putting in — something that no one on her legal team told her when she signed it. 

The same is true of many, if not most, NDAs signed. Four people in the UK have broken NDAs in the past 12 months with no legal reprisals or recriminations, Perkins informs me.

“I can tell people fairly confidently that their NDA is legally unenforceable, but I can’t guarantee the other party won’t come after them.”

Since 2017, Perkins has been campaigning to change the guidance and legislation around how lawyers use NDAs and to make it an offence to create an NDA that is hiding any form of misconduct.

This work led Perkins to establish Can’t Buy My Silence with Canadian law professor Julie Macfarlane and has seen her testify before UK committees. It also led her to Senator Lynn Ruane.

Senator Lynn Ruane, with her NDA Bill, at Leinster House.

The Independent Dublin senator is another woman who has proven that she will not be silenced.

When I speak to Ruane, her name has been trending for over 24 hours on X, formerly known as Twitter, as members of the far-right singled her out for speaking in support of refugees in Ireland.

The abuse in these tweets ranged from mild to vile, but speaking to Ruane it is clear they have not distracted her from the work that is important to her.

After an anonymous letter was delivered to her raising concerns about repeated use of an NDA in relation to one individual, Ruane decided to study up on them and see what other countries were doing in relation to NDAs.

Like Perkins, Ruane began to look into the use of NDAs in Ireland and found they were being abused across almost every sector, creating a system where problematic and harmful behaviour goes unchecked.

“Once you sign an NDA and you agree to silence around the issue, that behaviour is never addressed and that person is never held accountable,” Ruane explains. 

“This not only enables the cover-up of the situation, it is actually empowering them to go on and do it under the guise of privacy elsewhere.”

Ruane, Perkins and Prof Macfarlane, began looking at how they could draft legislation to ban NDAs where they are used in instances of harassment and discrimination in the workplace.

When it successfully passed, unanimously and unamended, through the Seanad in October, Ruane hailed it as “a landmark day for victims of workplace abuse and harassment who have been silenced by NDAs”.

Zelda Perkins, Lynn Ruane, and Fight Like Apes' MayKay, at an event in Dublin.

Known internationally as the Irish NDA bill, it is now leading legislation on NDAs in Europe. It will also have huge reverberations if passed, as the large US tech companies based in Ireland will have to adhere to the rules too.

“It blew me away,” Perkins says of Ruane’s bill moving on to the Dáil adding that its use as a template around the world has given their campaign validity and strength.

Speaking of strength, I am curious as to how Perkins, who has been let down by the system since she was 24 years old, finds the will to keep fighting.

“People with true integrity and who really are fighting for right, that has given me so much faith in the system. It may be pretty broken at the moment, but we do live in a democracy and if you do pull those rusty levers and press those stiff buttons, they do work and it is possible to make change,” she says.

Before I say goodbye to this formidable woman, she surprises me one last time.

“I feel very privileged, in a way, that I have managed to turn something really negative and painful and disempowering into something really positive and empowering for me personally, and hopefully for everyone who will benefit from the changes. Not everyone gets that.”