Long before tapes of Trump boasting about groping entered the picture, the Guardian took Jill Harth and others seriously. Help us continue in-depth reporting on these serious issues

When I first called Jill Harth back in the spring, she didn’t want to talk. Neither did a number of the other women I called who had crossed paths with Donald Trump. But few of them had documented their encounters as thoroughly as Harth, whose 1997 lawsuit alleging attempted rape against Trump is a matter of public record.

Harth had kept quiet for almost 20 years. But a few months after my call, her lawyer got in touch. The impetus, as Harth put it in an emotional hour-long interview at the Guardian’s New York office in July, was Trump’s repeated insistence that any woman alleging misbehavior on his part was lying.

Trump is still calling Harth and many others liars, even as the number of women accusing him of sexual misconduct has risen into the double digits.

Long before crass tapes of Trump boasting about sexual groping entered the picture – and Harth’s story suddenly became front-page news – the Guardian was the rare publication that took Harth’s story seriously. We were the first to publish her account last July, even as other outlets dismissed stories like it as too frivolous or implausible. We also published the accounts of fat-shamed beauty queen Alicia Machado and legally bullied Sheena Monnin, well before Trump’s mistreatment of women became the defining story of the presidential election.

Harth, who charged Trump with sexually assaulting her in one of his children’s bedrooms at his Mar-a-Lago estate in 1993, didn’t come to the Guardian by chance. She came to me because she knew the Guardian was committed to telling her story; and she sensed I had the time, flexibility and resources I needed to tell it.

She was right. When Trump clinched the nomination last spring, my editors asked me to dig deeply into Trump’s long history of misogyny, and gave me the support I needed to do so.

But the Guardian’s commitment to this kind of in-depth reporting is time consuming and expensive. That’s why I’m writing to ask for your support by making a contribution or becoming a member.

The business model for investigative journalism is broken. As comedian John Oliver explained recently in this brilliant segment, nobody in journalism has figured out a sustainable formula for making money on the internet. Online ads generate a tiny fraction of the revenue that print ads once did – and news publications like the Guardian are competing with tech giants Google and Facebook for digital advertising revenue.

From Bill Cosby to Roger Ailes to Donald Trump, this election year may go down as the moment our country finally started taking sexual assault seriously. These stories found an audience because of the brave women who told them, but also because of the journalists and the editors who listened first. We did that at the Guardian, and now we hope you’ll listen back.

Please support independent journalism at the Guardian by making a contribution or becoming a member today.