Article What Happened to the Women of #MeToo?
Article What Happened to the Women of #MeToo?
Jun 21 2025, 8:22 AM
https://archive.ph/Flyrr
Quote:Jessica Ramey Stender, the policy director at the nonprofit Equal Rights Advocates, told me, “We were seeing this disturbing pattern emerge: as more survivors came forward, the perpetrators who harmed them were using retaliatory defamation lawsuits to threaten them.” The plaintiffs in such suits didn’t have to win for the efforts to be successful. Powerful men often have more resources to wage legal battles than their accusers. And the suits allowed them to cloud public opinion about even the most verifiable claims. “These retaliatory lawsuits were designed to drain survivors of financial resources, re-traumatize them through lengthy proceedings, and really intimidate them into silence,” Stender said. Some men had the means to hire private investigators to find incriminating information on survivors, to deploy media campaigns designed by public-relations firms, and to mobilize their online followers. In the nineties, Jennifer Freyd, an expert on the psychology of sexual violence, developed a model called DARVO to explain the ways perpetrators deflect blame: “Deny, attack, reverse victim and offender.”
The article focuses mostly on former U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore and two of his accusers, Tina Johnson and Leigh Corfman. But many perps are mentioned, along with the harassment their accusers received. So many of the same patterns play out. If women do get justice, they're ostracized and harassed and threatened as if they were perpetrators.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/23/what-happened-to-the-women-of-metoo
https://archive.ph/Flyrr
Quote:Jessica Ramey Stender, the policy director at the nonprofit Equal Rights Advocates, told me, “We were seeing this disturbing pattern emerge: as more survivors came forward, the perpetrators who harmed them were using retaliatory defamation lawsuits to threaten them.” The plaintiffs in such suits didn’t have to win for the efforts to be successful. Powerful men often have more resources to wage legal battles than their accusers. And the suits allowed them to cloud public opinion about even the most verifiable claims. “These retaliatory lawsuits were designed to drain survivors of financial resources, re-traumatize them through lengthy proceedings, and really intimidate them into silence,” Stender said. Some men had the means to hire private investigators to find incriminating information on survivors, to deploy media campaigns designed by public-relations firms, and to mobilize their online followers. In the nineties, Jennifer Freyd, an expert on the psychology of sexual violence, developed a model called DARVO to explain the ways perpetrators deflect blame: “Deny, attack, reverse victim and offender.”
The article focuses mostly on former U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore and two of his accusers, Tina Johnson and Leigh Corfman. But many perps are mentioned, along with the harassment their accusers received. So many of the same patterns play out. If women do get justice, they're ostracized and harassed and threatened as if they were perpetrators.