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The #MeToo Fight Is Entering Its Trench Warfare Stage
Two years after women started telling their stories in public, mass confession is giving way to legal actions
#MeToo was always a coming out. What if, actress Alyssa Milano asked on Twitter in October 2017, everyone who had been “sexually harassed or assaulted writes ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet”? Tweet #MeToo, come out: It wasn’t the first time that self-revelation started a political movement.
The whole two-year process has resembled nothing so much as that leading up to the first gay pride march in 1970, which started with a handful of brave souls in front of the Stonewall Inn. Every block they traversed brought out more gay and lesbian marchers, filling Sixth Avenue. Finally, when they reached the Sheep Meadow in Central Park, gay icon Franklin Kameny looked back and saw “a sea of humanity.”
In September 2019, Chanel Miller, the survivor of the Stanford campus rape, whose victim statement went viral, spoke her name. For three years she had been known only as “Emily Doe.” It doesn’t get much more out of the closet than that. And the revelations have not ended: Just this month, as the criminal trial of Harvey Weinstein began in earnest, Evelyn Yang, wife of presidential candidate Andrew Yang, revealed her abuse at the hands…
