What has been lost in the relatively recent reckoning about sexual assault has been the steep cost — both literal and emotional — for those very people on whose testimony the movement has been built. We interviewed 25 of them MeToo
Illustration: Stevie Remsberg/New York Magazine; images courtesy of the subjects In the two years since the New York Times published a story detailing allegations against Harvey Weinstein, Me Too has become a verb, a movement, a flashpoint. What has been lost in the relatively recent reckoning about sexual assault has been the steep cost — both literal and emotional — for those very people on whose testimony the movement has been built.
The day I read a story about him and sexual harassment in The Information, and the days after, were some of the most gut-wrenching days of my life. I felt like I had some sort of duty to corroborate and elevate the issue. I don’t think I took a shower for two and a half days. I completely lost my appetite. I was obsessed with checking the news and Twitter, and I had all these Google alerts going.
I had text-message screenshots, I had voice-message audio, I had emails, and I had all sorts of documentation that could really back me up. That was part of why I also felt a bit more protected. I had a treasure trove of supporting evidence. In those days after I contacted Katie, I was writing things down fast and furious. I had this notebook, and I was both recalling and replaying and trying to dig out specific snippets.
Miller in 2015, the summer after she was assaulted. Photo: Courtesy of the Subject My advocate said, “If you get the verdict, you will get to read a victim impact statement.” And so anytime I had a thought related to the case, or remembered a very specific detail, I would jot it down in my phone and label it with Brock’s initials. The first drafts of my statement were almost too sarcastic and scathing and bitter. I had this fear that people would think I was crazy or out of line or aggressive.
My family and my friends were livid. They said, “Don’t worry, we’re going to figure out a way to tell your story.” Someone put us in touch with BuzzFeed. When the story went up, I was staying at my parents’ house. I was in my pajamas, just reading, looking at the BuzzFeed article and watching the count go up.
A few hours later, after the story published, my lawyer, Ari Wilkenfeld, called me and said, “Are you sitting down?” Brokaw had sent out an email. My lawyer read it out loud to me, and my first reaction was, Was he drunk when he wrote that? It sounded like someone who’s up at four in the morning writing some angry, drunken screed. It took a while for it to settle in just how misogynistic and malicious it was.
Those threats were what really caused rolling panic attacks. It’s not like I’m a shrinking violet. I used to report from war zones. I said to my lawyer, “We need to fight this. We know what he’s threatening to do.” And Ari said, “Here’s the thing, if you take him to court, if you try to sue him for libel, they can say anything they want about you, and it’s very hard.”
Other workers found out the case had been opened, and they said we should have stayed quiet because all Jessie did was do us the favor of paying us for our day’s work and it wasn’t right that we would pay him back in this way. One girl who continues working there—well, now it looks like she doesn’t because they rounded her up in the raids—won’t speak to me. She said it would have been better if I had stayed quiet.
When I found out about the raids, I felt tremendously sad for the children because the children end up being abandoned, left alone. They came home from school, and the first thing they heard was “Your father isn’t here, your mother isn’t here.” There were even nights that went by when the children didn’t have anywhere to sleep, without having their parents near.
I had seen other people who were courageous enough to speak out, and the backlash from that was something I was fearful of. I had to support my family, I needed the benefits. Those are the things I had to consider sacrificing in coming forward. But once my job had been lost, my benefits had been taken away, what would the penalty be for joining the lawsuit? They couldn’t come for me.
What I hoped would happen is that once HR saw from a valued employee that this was something she had experienced in the way of gender discrimination and harassment, and that she had reason to believe someone had been assaulted, there would be processes in place that would kick into gear. I do not know to this day whether change was made.
I don’t think I understood the necessity of the New York Times using my name. I felt like all control that I had over my own life was taken from me. I felt stripped of my right to privacy. Because my name was going to become two words in a newspaper and no longer my own. I associate my name in print with a fear of retaliation, with a loss of privacy, of losing any sense of agency over the way you might be perceived in the world by strangers or people you know.
To come forward is expensive in a way I had no idea about and has cost more than double my financial resources. Nine times out of ten, it will involve legal entanglements that cost money. I’ve come to learn how expensive it is to get a photo pulled down or out of print. Therapy is expensive. All in all, we’re talking easily six figures, even with some pro bono representation, and I’m still paying it off. I have questioned whether I would do it over again. It’s also emotionally expensive.
.youtube[data-uri="www.thecut.com/_components/youtube/instances/ck15srjl000313h650cotoo08@published"].border-top:before { content: 'Watch'; } Seo-Young Chu tells her story. I come from a family that didn’t talk about trauma, didn’t talk about bearing witness. That’s not the case anymore. The two people who have been most helpful to me in working through what happened at Stanford have been my father and brother.
Fast-forward: I get stashed literally in a broom closet in D.C. to keep me out of the news. There was an investigation that was going on, but it was absolutely stymied. Out of 5,000 men who were there, including all the top leadership, including the secretary of the Navy, nobody saw anything, nobody knew anything about what I was talking about.
There was no way my life was ever going to be normal going to work when everybody around me didn’t get their promotion because of me. It was over. When I left my squadron, not one single person walked me to my car.I was so infamous. This was when the internet was really taking off. There are still to this day websites dedicated to destroying my reputation. They know where I live; every time I move, it’s updated. My dad’s golf buddies from the Navy, they had a lot of crappy stuff to say about me.
There’s a whole level of examination that’s occurring within the gay male community about these kinds of dynamics. There has been a long history of older men and men in power abusing that power toward younger men and those who weren’t in power. But it’s been an accepted thing within the community. I ended up with no job or “No work available.” They were paying me through a grievance process after I complained, but they wouldn’t send my money regularly. And so I became homeless, and then I was asking the post office to hold my checks, which sometimes wouldn’t come for months at a time. When I lived in the car and the shelter, that was the most devastating thing.
I was having terrible dreams around that time about people following me, being intercepted on my way to my apartment. I started carrying pepper spray. When I got a New York Times text alert on my phone about Franken and women, I burst into tears. I really considered adding my voice. When Murray called for him to resign, I felt very proud.
I am the biggest of hypocrites. I work in a position where I am constantly trying to get people to tell their stories so we can make systemic change. But I’ve worked so hard to amass this small amount of power that I’m so terrified of that being taken away.“Other Democrats I’ve Worked With Before Wouldn’t Look at Me” Olivia Garrett says Alaska representative Dean Westlake groped her and made sexual comments to her while she was a legislative aide.
Saviano in 1964, the year the abuse started. He was 11. Photo: Courtesy of the Subject So I called the reporter at the Globe who had done the story. I was very worried because a gay man with AIDS in those days was something of a pariah. I thought, Maybe I’m going to get thrown out of my apartment. Plus, there was the whole embarrassment of talking publicly about being molested by a priest.
My lawyer later called him up, and the guy admitted to my lawyer that he’d been assaulted. He didn’t describe it as an assault, but he’d had some sort of sexual activity with a priest. And my lawyer said, “Can we take your deposition?” “Oh no, hell no, I’m not going to do that,” he said. “I’m not going to take sides with some fag who’s dying of AIDS.” And that’s a direct quote.
I went to the dean of my old law school, Edgar Cahn. We drafted a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee. It wasn’t something that was just thrown together. It was something that was very carefully thought out: I didn’t really want to emphasize anything I’d personally experienced with Clarence that would hint at sexual harassment. I think his behavior with females who worked for him was really pretty pathetic and really predatory in a lot of ways, but I didn’t want to deal with that.
I watched the entire Kavanaugh proceeding. It was like living through the whole Anita Hill situation all over again. Some of the very same players that were in the Anita Hill hearings were the same people who were in the Kavanaugh hearings. I looked at those hearings with great despair. I just thought, The struggle continues.“I Did Put Bullets in My Gun” In her book ‘What Do We Need Men For?’, excerpted in this magazine, E.
[data-uri="www.thecut.com/_components/subsection/instances/ck1547iv700nt3g63wuo7knf9@published"] p.intro{color:#5a5a5a;font-size:18px;line-height:20px} Harrell earlier this year. Photo: Courtesy of the Subject I was afraid to report it to my managers, and I got more afraid when they didn’t take it seriously. One said that I wanted it. Another one didn’t say anything. And one said that I was giving off sex appeal.
I didn’t think of myself as a sympathetic victim, and that was one of the reasons it was very important for me that the reporter use anything that could be used against me from Charlie. I think I sent her one of the more sycophantic emails I had sent him. What I’ve found is that precisely those things that I thought would discredit me most were those things that those who reached out to me after were most thankful about.
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