I hate to state the obvious, but apparently it needs to be done. Just because someone has never sexually assaulted you, it doesn’t mean they’ve never sexually assaulted someone else. Just because someone has been nice to you, it doesn’t mean they’ve acted the same way with everyone else in their life.

It’s not really a difficult concept to get your head around, is it? And yet, every time a man is publicly accused of sexual assault, the accusations are swiftly followed by a chorus of incredulous female friends, swearing the guy in question had always been angelic to them. “He’s a nice guy really. He’s one of my best friends. He’s always been a perfect gentleman. He would never do that.”

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Last week, following allegations that supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted a girl while he was a teenager, 65 women who knew Kavanaugh in high school testified to his character. I could not even name 65 people from my high school so this is quite a feat. Nevertheless, Kavanaugh did not stop there.

On Monday, after Christine Blasey Ford, Kavanaugh’s accuser, was named, two of Kavanaugh’s ex-girlfriends vouched for the judge. “He always conducted himself honorably with me at all times when we were together,” Maura Fitzgerald, who dated the nominee in college, said. Maura Kane, who dated Kavanaugh in high school, said that in every situation where the two were together he was “always respectful, kind and thoughtful”.

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I have no idea what Kavanaugh’s previous relationships were like, but I do know that there is no such thing as a two-Maura defence. Being “respectful, kind and thoughtful” to one person doesn’t immediately preclude you from having assaulted someone else.

Having said that, it’s also important to acknowledge how difficult it is to accept that a man close to you is capable of sexual assault. Not least because we live in a world in which we are constantly told that women are hysterical and men are rational. And we all internalize this idea to some extent, even if we are feminists. That is, after all, what patriarchy does; it pits women against women.

Just look at the example of Lena Dunham, for example. Last year Dunham defended Murray Miller, a writer on her HBO show Girls, after he was accused of sexual assault. Along with Girls’ executive producer Jenni Konner, Dunham released a letter saying: “Our insider knowledge of Murray’s situation makes us confident that sadly this accusation is one of the 3% of assault cases that are misreported every year.”

As was swiftly pointed out, Dunham’s statement (which she later apologized for), rather went against Dunham’s previous statements about always believing victims. Only a couple of months before, for example, she’d tweeted: “Things women do lie about: what they ate for lunch. Things women don’t lie about: rape.”

Another reason it can be so hard to accept that a man close to you, a man that has been nice to you, is capable of sexual assault, is because we live in a world in which many forms of male predatory behavior are normalized. Something as serious as sexual assault or rape, we are constantly told, should not be confused with something as silly as “youthful indiscretion”. It should not be confused with what one of Kavanaugh’s (female) supporters has described as “rough horseplay”.

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Take, for example, Brock Turner, the Stanford swimmer who was convicted of assaulting an unconscious woman behind a dumpster in 2016. At the time, Leslie Rasmussen, a childhood friend of Turner, wrote a letter to the judge, arguing that Turner wasn’t a rapist. “This is completely different from a woman getting kidnapped and raped as she is walking to her car in a parking lot,” she stated. “That is a rapist. These are not rapists. These are idiot boys and girls having too much to drink and not being aware of their surroundings and having clouded judgement.”

Despite the fact that the vast majority of rapes and sexual assaults are committed by people the victim knows, Rasmussen’s view of rapists as monsters who jump out at you from the shadows, is pervasive. One of the most powerful things about the #MeToo movement is that it is making it harder to hold on to that illusion. As more and more stories of supposedly good guys acting badly come out, it is getting harder pretend that sexual assault is something only monsters do.