Cissi Wallin was sitting in a TriBeCa diner this October when she first saw the story on Harvey Weinstein’s alleged sexual assaults and harassment of women. An actor and writer based in Stockholm, the 32-year-old Ms. Wallin had come to Manhattan on vacation with her husband and toddler son, and as she kept on reading, she silently asked herself:

“What if people would believe me now?”

Ms. Wallin had filed a police report in 2011, a few years after she was sexually assaulted, only to see it dismissed within weeks. Now she decided to do something different: She put the name of a well-known columnist for Sweden’s largest left-wing tabloid newspaper on her Instagram page, alongside a statement saying he had drugged and violently raped her in Stockholm more than a decade ago.

Soon more people came forward about the man. I was a co-author of an investigation into his behavior.

And suddenly, just as in the United States, stories of other national figures in the arts and media began pouring forth. About men who had used their professional power and influence to harass or abuse younger, often subordinate women, often at work. About situations in which “everyone knew,” but men viewed as indispensable had been protected by management for years (sometimes the perpetrators were management). In contrast to the situation in the United States, however, the wave quickly grew beyond accusations against the famous and powerful: Tens of thousands of Swedish women have signed a series of appeals in the national press detailing incidents of brutal sexual assault and harassment in almost every professional field, from law, medicine and academia to politics and defense. Committed by Swedish men.

So yes, it happens in Sweden, #too.

This reckoning in a country that sees itself as best in class on gender equality has been particularly painful. With a feminist government, a feminist foreign policy, a national agency tasked with upholding all things equality and a prime minister who calls himself a feminist, shouldn’t we be better than this? Shouldn’t these impossibly perfect-looking, tall men who go on government-paid paternal leave be a little, well, more evolved by now?