“Some said such accusations will taint the revolution, which is false because those two men did not make the revolution famous; rather the revolution made them famous,” said Iman Shukri Abdel-Latif, one of the feminists and activists who criticized an internal investigation by Mr. Ali’s party that exonerated him. “We can’t truly oppose an oppressive regime with an opposition that is unjust and oppresses women,” she added.

It’s tempting to call this Egypt’s #MeToo moment. But it may prove just another example of Egyptian women speaking out against sexual violence. In 2005, female journalists and activists exposed the use of systematic sexual violence by the government of Hosni Mubarak to stop them from protesting.

Egypt’s first conviction for street sexual harassment came in 2008, when a 27 year-old named Noha al-Ostaz dragged a man to a police station after he grabbed her breast. Officers refused to file a complaint until the woman’s father arrived. Nobody had intervened to help her, and Egyptian media outlets accused her of cruelly “ruining the life” of her assailant, who was sentenced to three years in prison.

Less than a month after the 2011 uprising forced Mr. Mubarak to step down, the military subjected female activists to “virginity tests” — a form of sexual assault. Three women exposed the assaults. One tried, in vain, to sue the military.

I too became a victim. In November 2011, the riot police beat me, broke my left arm and right hand, and sexually assaulted me before I was detained by the Interior Ministry and then military intelligence. Later, I went on Egyptian television with both arms in casts and with X-rays of my injuries. I tried unsuccessfully to sue the regime.

Several other Egyptian women have shared stories of sexual assault by policemen or mobs during protests since then. Their goal was obvious: to reassert men’s dominance over hundreds of thousands of women now claiming a role in Egypt’s political life.

The police and the military are not alone in silencing women. A feminist group in Cairo told me that at least 12 other women who were sexually assaulted were too ashamed to speak or were silenced by their families. We still don’t know the name of a woman who was stripped to her bra by soldiers who then stomped on her chest in Tahrir Square in December 2011. That woman deserves a statue for her courage, not a silencing.