Meredith Johnson (Disclosure)

Meredith Johnson
The evil Meredith Johnson

Meredith Johnson is an antagonist in the 1994 thriller Disclosure. She is played by the actress, Demi Moore. She is an important executive in a computer company called DigiCom. However, she is also a sexual harasser. As such she has abused six male subordinates, who finally are transferred, when they are fed up with it. Just before an important merger is settled for the IT company he works for, Tom Sanders (played by Michael Douglas) gets passed over for promotion, and his former mistress, Meredith Johnson, gets the job, making her Tom's new boss.

On the first evening after her appointment, she invites him to his office to discuss the merger and start their working relationship. However, Meredith makes very clear sexual advances, and forces herself onto Tom. A married man and a father of two, Tom is at first reluctant to respond, repeatedly saying no to his boss’ aggressive sexual onslaught. Meredith continues relentlessly, until Tom, in a mixture of anger and suppressed desire, reciprocates. A few moments later, however, Tom comes to his senses, interrupts the intercourse and leaves the office in a hurry. Furious at being rejected in this way, Meredith screams after him to come back or else, but Tom ignores her threats.

The next day, Tom learns that Meredith has filed a sexual harassment suit against him. As nobody seems to believe Tom’s version, his career prospects look very bleak. It is only with the help of a female attorney, supportive emails sent by “A FRIEND”, as well as a recording of events as they happened on an answering machine, that Tom manages to clear his name. The company announce that they will wait for the merger being finalised, before discreetly getting rid of Meredith.

However, the scheming Meredith is only just getting started. Together with some other company executives, she plans to publicly humiliate Tom at the following day’s presentation, where they intend to blame him personally for product shortcomings. The plan is to make Tom look like a liability for the upcoming merger, so that he will be fired. With the help of “A FRIEND”, Tom finds out about this and manages to turn the tables around by finding evidence that Meredith is, in fact, responsible as a result of a number of decisions she took when she headed the division in Malaysia. On the way he also finds out, that she had orchestrated the sexual harassment as part of a plan to remove him from his post in order to make sure he wouldn't find out about it and all in order to frame him later for the disaster and remove him from the company altogether.

At the presentation, when Meredith begins asking questions to embarrass Tom, she unexpectedly and suddenly finds herself on the defensive for incompetence. Her desperate efforts to save her reputation now fail in the face of Tom’s self-assurance and knowledge about her own mismanagement. Eventually, she loses her temper and totally discredits herself in front of the board and the shareholders. When the CEO asks her to step outside a minute, she throws a last, livid glance at Tom, who dismissed her with a mute “bye-bye”.

In her last scene, Meredith, now fired, has recovered her composure and styles herself as the actual victim of this intrigue before Tom. She also brags about big job offers in the last hours and warns him that she may be back in ten years to buy this place. Tom reacts coolly and leaves a speechless and doubtful Meredith behind.

Trivia

• Demi Moore went on to play evil traitoress Madison Lee in the action film Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle.

Gallery

Meredith's legs, wearing black high heels