Aurora Perrineau had planned to wait her turn. She’d been called for a second-round audition for a part in When They See Us, the much anticipated miniseries from director Ava DuVernay about the infamous Central Park Five case, in which five black and brown teens were charged with the rape and assault of a white jogger on scant evidence. Their convictions were later overturned, but after each had served extensive prison time. Ahead of their trial Donald Trump himself called for their execution in an ad in four major newspapers, The New York Times included. Raymond Santana was just 14 at the time of the incident in 1989 and was sentenced to up to a decade behind bars in 1990 for the crime. Perrineau was up for the role of his girlfriend.

DuVernay had cast her quintet, which meant Perrineau had to come in for a “chemistry read” with Freddy Miyares, who had been tapped to play the adult Santana. She was used to this; the recitation of lines with another actor so that a director or producer can evaluate how well the pair “melds.” This one was different. She’d expected to see a line of women there to audition for the part. That’s the point of a read—to see who tests best. But: “I got there and it was just me,” Perrineau recalls.

Someone called her in, and then DuVernay sat her and Miyares down. After a quick conversation about the role, the director turned to Perrineau. “I want you to be in this,” she said.

“I didn’t see many other people for that part,” DuVernay tells me later. “They had started to pull people for me, and I said, ‘Let me see her.’” She wasn’t familiar with much of Perrineau’s work. But like most people who’d been on the Internet in late 2017, DuVernay did know her name.

That November, The Wrap reported that Perrineau had filed a police report in Los Angeles, alleging that Girls writer and executive producer Murray Miller had assaulted her in 2012, when she was 17 and thus a minor. (He has denied all accusations. The legal team that represented Miller also claimed that Perrineau had tried to extract compensation from Miller, a characterization which his lawyer later retracted.) Perrineau had just under a dozen credits to her name; Miller was somewhat better known, for his work on American Dad! and Stacked. It was six weeks after The New York Times and The New Yorker had published their landmark Harvey Weinstein reports, and in that time more women had come forward with more accusations against more men. But the allegations about Miller took off when Girls cocreators Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner issued a statement.

The pair took pains to applaud the dozens of women who’d come forward to share their stories of sexual assault but insisted that Perrineau was not credible. “While our first instinct is to listen to every woman’s story, our insider knowledge of Murray’s situation makes us confident that sadly this accusation is one of the 3 percent of assault cases that are misreported every year,” Dunham and Konner wrote. “It is a true shame to add to that number, as outside of Hollywood women still struggle to be believed.”

It was not lost on feminists that Dunham and Konner had chosen to wield their formidable platform to cast doubt on Perrineau, a black woman. The statement kicked off a wave of think pieces and explainers; most focused on Dunham, who’s been open about her own experiences with sexual violence.