The Speak Out Act, signed on 7 December 2022, does something narrow and structurally precise.
It makes pre-dispute nondisclosure and non-disparagement clauses unenforceable in cases involving sexual assault or sexual harassment. Pre-dispute is the operative term: the Act does not touch settlement agreements reached after a dispute has arisen, where a complainant with advice may reasonably choose confidentiality. It voids the clause signed before anything happened — the one in the employment contract, agreed on the first day, covering events that had not yet occurred.
The reason that distinction matters is a mechanism rather than a legal nicety.
An NDA signed in advance silences a person about something they cannot yet know. And because each person is silenced individually, the pattern never assembles. A later target cannot discover that there were earlier ones, because the earlier ones are prohibited from saying so — which means the information that would have warned them has been legally destroyed.
That is chapter 282's isolation, executed institutionally. The individual mechanism cuts a person off from comparison information; the contractual mechanism cuts a population off from it.
The Weinstein case is the documented instance. Settlements with confidentiality clauses reached over decades meant that each accuser believed herself to be alone, and Ronan Farrow's and the New York Times' reporting was substantially the work of establishing that they were not. Several accusers described breaking their agreements as the hardest part.
Congress's remedy restores the information flow rather than attempting to regulate conduct, which is why it is a good instrument. It does not require anyone to speak. It removes the prohibition.
The transferable principle generalizes well beyond harassment, and it is the practical content of this chapter.
Any arrangement that binds you to silence before you know what you will need to disclose is a control mechanism, whatever its stated purpose. Read pre-dispute confidentiality clauses in employment contracts, settlement templates, membership agreements, training programs and volunteer arrangements, and note what they cover prospectively.
The counter-response is legal advice before signing rather than after, and — where a pattern exists — reporting to a regulator or an authority that can aggregate, since aggregation is exactly what the clause was designed to prevent.
This counters Law 28.
Counters Law 28 — Never Let Them See the Source