I’ll admit it, I’m shocked: Harvey Weinstein was found guilty of rape.

Yes, Weinstein was acquitted of the two most serious charges leveled against him: predatory sexual assault is a class-A felony. But the crimes he was convicted of are extremely serious, and Weinstein now faces as long as 25 years in prison. He’s also facing additional charges in Los Angeles.

The Weinstein verdict is a major victory in the age of #MeToo, given that Weinstein himself was one of the men whose predations opened the floodgates. Two New York Times reporters, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, as well as Ronan Farrow of the New Yorker, reported extensively on Weinstein’s alleged abuses, telling the stories of dozens of women who said Weinstein harassed, groped, sexually assaulted and even raped them. In the aftermath of the Weinstein stories, many, many more women came forward to talk about all kinds of abusive men – some of them famous, many of them not.

Harvey Weinstein went from untouchable to behind bars. Thank #MeToo | Moira Donegan Read more

One of the biggest questions of the #MeToo movement has been: what now? In a handful of the highest-profile and most extreme cases, the answer has been criminal charges. This remains a vastly imperfect solution, but in cases like Weinstein’s, it is the appropriate one – even if it took far too long, and as a result the claims of many of the women he allegedly abused were beyond the statute of limitations.

But even the Weinstein criminal case demonstrated the limits of that system. Weinstein’s lawyer, who has made a specialty out of getting men accused of sexual assault off by impugning the women who say they were assaulted, made victim-blaming her go-to defense in this case, too. Let’s be clear here: every criminal defendant is entitled to vigorous defense. But defendants and their clients also have to make choices about what a vigorous and fair defense looks like. Weinstein, via his lawyer Donna Rotunno, chose to portray the women as career-grubbing sluts who had transactional sex with Weinstein to get what they wanted, and then called it rape later. Rotunno continued to suggest that women who are raped are at fault for their own assaults, telling the New York Times that she had never been sexually assaulted because “I would never put myself in that position”.

What happens in cases when the whole country isn’t watching?

Thankfully, the Weinstein defense strategy didn’t work. But this was also an incredibly high-profile case. What happens in cases when the whole country isn’t watching?

My hope is that one lesson of the Weinstein case is that attacking women who come forward to report assault is a losing strategy. My hope is that we all understand that the cultural shifts under way thanks to #MeToo are as important – and I would say more important – than any single criminal conviction. My hope is that we don’t pin all of our hopes on the criminal justice system to keep women safe, or even ensure that justice is done.

Women’s rights advocates should take wins where we can get them. But history isn’t a straight line, and this verdict does not unquestionably propel us into a fairer world for sexual assault survivors. The criminal justice system will remain an imperfect venue for most of these cases, many of which do come down to individual testimony in a place where the scales are rightly weighted in favor of the presumed-innocent defendant. Nor does jailing people for extreme lengths of time necessarily feel like the best form of justice.

What would feel like real justice for sexual assault survivors? That is the next big question for #MeToo. The answer won’t be a single one-size-fits-all thing. There is no perfect solution here. But at the very least, Weinstein’s conviction despite one of the ugliest, most misogynistic defenses in recent memory suggests we’re ready to start figuring it out.