In this week's issue, Reeves Wiedeman examines the rise of the nondisclosure agreement, the defining legal document of our time, which has gone from protecting corporate secrets to regulating our most intimate relationships. There was, of course, the NDA Donald Trump gave to Stormy Daniels. In Silicon Valley, employees at OpenAI complained that the digital juggernaut of the moment was sending out NDAs. O. J. Simpson reportedly gave one to every member of his family before they could visit him on his deathbed. Billie Eilish released a song called "NDA" about contemporary celebrity. The Me Too movement produced various efforts to rein in NDAs, but progress was fitful. And then there's the dating NDA, often deployed by the wealthy and famous. "In Hollywood, people really are corporations," Wiedeman writes. "A friend in Los Angeles told me she had recently gone to a party, in a canyon she couldn’t disclose, with Hollywood eminences whose names she redacted, where NDAs were handed out at the door, and for good reason — some weird stuff had gone down that she now couldn’t tell me about." |
