As many of us already knew, the painful effects of sexual harassment don’t just come during the harassing, but afterward.

Accusers are often revictimized when they tell their stories and are then blamed, humiliated, intimidated and discredited by the accused or through their proxies like lawyers and agents.

OPINION

In the wake of stunning accusations against Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Bill O’Reilly and now countless other powerful men, this is sadly happening all over again, despite so many women sharing so many stories that sound so similar. According to these men, we are meant to believe all these women are lying.

Weinstein, accused now by scores of women of either harassing or assaulting them on their roads to stardom, left rehab after a week and joked about avoiding Anthony Weiner’s “horse therapy.” He has promised to win Oscars again and shrugs off accusations of rape as having been “consensual” sex, another grotesque way of saying they either asked for it or wanted it.

Fox News’ O’Reilly, accused of sexual harassment by multiple women over 12 years — for which he or Fox have paid a whopping $45 million in publicly known settlements — has aggressively denied any wrongdoing. He’s blamed everyone from the media to God, and has intimidated his alleged victims publicly with threats to reveal “shocking” information about them.

He’s accused accusers of being disloyal to their company, in this case Fox, and is now effectively calling them liars by revealing thank you notes they had written him at various points in their careers, ostensibly to prove he could not have been harassing them.

Likewise, Weinstein’s one-time adviser Lisa Bloom suggested “photos of several of the accusers in very friendly poses with Harvey after his alleged misconduct” might be revealed to prove his innocence.

While it’s good that sunlight is finally disinfecting the widespread problem of sexual harassment, these desperate and despicable attempts to cast aspersions on the accusers show just how blithe or indeed ignorant men like Weinstein and O’Reilly are when it comes to the way sexual harassment works. After all, it isn’t about sex, it’s about power.Think about it. The fact that a woman might pose affectionately in a picture with a man who has harassed her, or send him a thank you note for some perceived show of kindness is hardly dispositive — in fact, it’s perfectly in keeping with the dynamic of sexual harassment, wherein the victim wants to keep on the good side of the powerful person who is harassing her.

When women are being sexually harassed or intimidated by a man in power, “women feel a responsibility to be emotional managers of relationships and often want to keep things friendly,” Antonia Abbey, a psychologist at Wayne State University, told the New York Times.

These photos and thank you notes are just as easily proof of a woman’s abject fear as they might be pf her affection. That O’Reilly thinks posting kind notes from two women who have complained they were sexually harassed while at Fox News makes them look bad shows just how obtuse and delusional he is.

To be clear, this revictimization of women doesn’t happen just by the men they have accused. Sometimes, they are given this treatment by other women.

Hillary Clinton performed the ultimate hit jobs on the women who accused Bill Clinton of sexual harassment and assault. Of one accuser, Clinton reportedly said in a meeting, “We have to destroy her story.” She dismissed Monica Lewinsky as a “narcissistic loony tune” and Gennifer Flowers as “some failed cabaret singer who doesn’t even have much of a resume to fall back on.” She said if she’d had the chance to cross-examine her, “I mean, I would crucify her.”

As more and more stories come out about other men in Hollywood and the media, corporate America and maybe even the White House, it’s important to know what we’re talking about when some look for ways to blame or discredit accusers.

“Sexual harassment is a subtle rape, and rape is more about fear than sex,” Dr. John Gottman, a psychologist at the University of Washington told the New York Times. “Harassment is a way for a man to make a woman vulnerable.”

Being nice, polite or even affectionate toward a man who has harassed you, made you vulnerable, kept you under his thumb, doesn’t prove anything, except that it might have worked.

Contact Cupp at thesecupp.com.

This column first appeared in the New York Daily News.