This was something that was online for less than 24 hours, and it has dominated my life for three months. “There’s this online spreadsheet of men in media.” “What they’re accused of doing, who they work for.” “It’s unverified, anonymous …” “It does raise these questions …” “Smearing someone …” I actively tried to avoid this. I’m a very private person. “How do they get their reputation back?” I did not want this kind of attention to be on me. I did not want to be a person who was sitting down with The New York Times. “Are you a little nervous right now?” Yeah! I created a Google spreadsheet called “Shitty Media Men” that could be shared and anonymously edited. The idea was that women could use it to name somebody who had behaved badly towards them, whether through sexual assault, or rape, or harassment. I shared it with some women colleagues and friends in my industry whom I knew had stories. And then from there, they sent it to people they knew had stories, and they sent it to people they knew had stories. And by the time I was forced to take it down, which is about 12 hours after I created it, there were more than 70 men named, and 14 had their names highlighted in red to denote that there were more than one woman who were accusing that particular person of violent physical assault. Some of the incidents that were described there gave me nightmares. Some of them were really very violent. When I was watching the spreadsheet fill up, it became clear to me that a problem I had already understood as widespread was, in fact, much, much broader. I didn’t really know what to do. I was overwhelmed. I was terrified. “What was your biggest fear about your name becoming known?” There is a long history of violence against women, and it’s particularly acute for women who speak out against misogyny and sexism. There are things like, I used to, like a lot of New Yorkers, just walk around with headphones in all the time. And I can’t do that anymore because I have to be more aware of my surroundings and who might see me or be following me. If you are accepting this as just the way things are, then you’re sort of accepting that you’re going to be treated badly, and your colleagues are going to be treated badly. And, you know, women you’ve never met are going to be treated badly. And I didn’t want to accept that anymore. So I decided to make a first attempt at trying something else. Listen, I made the decision to create this spreadsheet, so its flaws are my fault. But there was this obstacle because the conventional reporting avenues for women who have experienced sexual harassment, or assault, or rape are really not good ones. The document that I made was designed to be private, but it very quickly went viral. I want to emphasize, though, that I don’t even know who saw it, or who had it, added to it. Those women are anonymous to me as well. But at the same time, I could see that what was going on on this spreadsheet was also this act of real solidarity and community among the women who work in this industry to attempt to keep one another safe. So much of the conversation after the spreadsheet was made public was about the methodology of the spreadsheet and sort of the tactics that anonymous women were using to try and keep each other safe. People were more worried about a hypothetical man whose reputation might be damaged than real women who were really raped. “It’s not a hypothetical man, right? There were men who were named on this who had to suffer repercussions in their real life.” Some companies decided to conduct investigations. Not all, but some of them did result in men leaving their jobs or being fired because they were found to have committed wrongdoing. I think it’s their responsibility that they acted that way. Harassment, assault, rape. These things don’t happen like the weather. You know, they don’t happen by accident. They happen because people make a choice to do that to someone else. There are a lot of conversations to be had about sex. We’re not done talking about sex. “Hey hey, ho ho, sexual violence has got to go.” There’s #MeToo in 2017, 2018. In 2014, there was #YesAllWomen. And in 1991, there was “I believe Anita.” “I thought he respected my work and that he trusted my judgment.” So it can feel like we’ve been defeated, right? Because if anybody had listened to us the first time we wouldn’t have to say it again. But I think that every time we get a little louder, and we get a little closer to making the changes that actually need to be made. What I think is next is a lot of hard work for us all.