And: a rumor that manages to be both “incendiary” and yet, in its contours, blandly familiar. In one way, certainly, the gossip that has followed Haley this week—despite her denial of an affair, and indeed because of it—suggests quintessentially contemporary anxieties: the impunity of fake news, the tyranny of the spectacle, the nihilism that triumphs when truth is treated as an impediment rather than the point. In another way, though, Wolff’s coy allegations against Haley (and ostensibly against Trump, as well—but the cost of such rumors, of course, is rarely distributed equally) are evocative of one of the stalest stereotypes there is: the strain of gossip that is used to advance the reputation of the spreader even as it attempts to reduce the reputation of the subject. The kind of rumor-mongering that has so often been weaponized, in particular, against women.

“The idea that these things come out, that’s a problem,” Haley told Politico, of the rumors being spread about her. “But it goes,” she added, “to a bigger issue that we need to always be conscious of: At every point in my life, I’ve noticed that if you speak your mind and you’re strong about it and you say what you believe, there is a small percentage of people that resent that and the way they deal with it is to try and throw arrows, lies or not.”

Reputation, to be sure, is an equal-opportunity good. Men and women alike, at work and far beyond, are seen and appraised and experienced and judged; men and women alike walk the world in constant risk of being assessed harshly—and even unfairly, even wrongly. Women, though, historically, have borne the brunt of the reputational risk. And they have borne it precisely in the way Wolff is summoning in his flippant-but-also-nationally-televised insinuations of a Haley/Trump affair: women, assessed not according to the workings of their minds, but according to the workings of their bodies. Women, shamed, specifically, about sex. Women, who can spend whole careers working hard and well, only to have the effort diminished by one knowing whisper about how she really accomplished what she did. Women, still, have relatively few ways to ascend; there are so many ways, though—still—for them to be brought down again.

It’s no surprise, then, that reputation, as a currency and as a constraint, has been a shadowy figure in so many of the stories that have been told during the current iteration of the #MeToo movement. Many of those who have been harassed and abused, but who have not spoken of that experience until now, have stayed silent in part because they have been concerned—with ample reason—for their own reputations. They haven’t wanted to be labeled as difficult. They haven’t wanted to be labeled as complicit. They haven’t wanted to be labeled at all.

Michael Wolff, bard of the sensational and the banal, began this saga with a rumor whose arrow aimed straight at Nikki Haley’s reputation. That she would defend herself against it, Wolff suggested—the suggestion is itself both sensational and banal—is its own proof that her reputation deserves diminishment: evidence of Haley’s opportunism, if not, indeed, her guilt. It’s a tautology that, as will usually be the case, reveals much more about the spreader of the rumor than it does about the subject. In Fire and Fury, Wolff anonymously quotes a White House senior staffer mocking the administration’s UN ambassador for being “as ambitious as Lucifer”—yet another person, apparently, who looks at Nikki Haley and finds her failing to behave “with requisite submission.”

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.