She went on to describe one inadequacy of the movement and the journalists covering it: “There are also women who do want to go on the record, women who’ve summoned armies of brave colleagues ready to finally out their repellent bosses,” she noted. “To many of them I must say that their guy isn’t well known enough, that the stories are now so plentiful that offenders must meet a certain bar of notoriety, or power, or villainy, before they’re considered newsworthy.”

If #MeToo at its height cannot give a hearing to most victims of serious abuse, or trigger accountability or change in any industry sufficiently removed from the creative class, what happens when it fades from social media, headlines, and public consciousness? Absent a structural change, most employers and human-resources departments of the future are likely to remain inadequate to the problem—a judgment seemingly shared by the anonymous creators of the “Shitty Media Men” list, who sought to formalize the “whisper networks” that have long existed in different industries to warn against abusers outside of official channels.

Their approach was untenable, as observers quickly realized: The ability to publicly and anonymously accuse others of serious misconduct invites abuses and unjust outcomes, especially if it encompasses people unknown to one another personally—the scale necessary to effect significant reductions in sexual harassment.

Yet a different kind of third-party information sharing may still be possible.

A scholarly article published in 2012 by Ian Ayres and Cait Unkovic defined the challenge: Many are reluctant to be the first person to accuse someone of sexual harassment, in part because the accused “routinely responds by trying to impeach the credibility of the accuser.” Yet first accusations often lead to more accusers coming forward. That’s a dynamic that tends to protect recidivist harassers.

What if a system of “information escrow” existed instead?

We propose the use of an allegation escrow to allow victims to transmit claims information to a trusted intermediary, a centralized escrow agent, who forwards the information to proper authorities if (and only if) certain prespecified conditions are met. The escrow agent would keep harassment allegations confidential, unutilized, and unforwarded until the agent has received a prespecified number of complementary harassment allegations concerning the same accused harasser. For example, if the escrow agreement specified the accumulation of two additional allegations as a triggering event, then the agent would wait until the escrow had received three separate allegations concerning a particular alleged harasser before forwarding the information to specified authorities and initiating a complaint.

A variation on that idea is already being used by the nonprofit organization Callisto, a third-party reporting system for victims of sexual assault on college campuses.