Two-and-a-half years ago, I experienced an on-the-job assault at the hands of the well-known Israeli journalist and author Ari Shavit. I had never intended to tell my story publicly, though in the days following the assault it was impossible to hide my distress from friends and colleagues. I had to call my editor the next morning and explain why I failed to get the interview I had promised her for that week’s paper; I was fortunate that she comforted and supported me. But other than a pardon for not filing that week, what else could be done? This man was on the ascending arc of his career, touted as the savior of the American Jewish left. What good would it do to expose him? What damage might it bring upon me?

American culture has not been kind to women who accuse powerful men of sexual misconduct. In 1991, when the attorney Anita Hill accused then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, her former boss, of sexual harassment in the workplace, many attempted to discredit her. Thomas called her testimony “a high tech lynching” and the pundit David Brock described her as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.” A few years later, 22-year-old Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern, became embroiled in a sex scandal with then-President Bill Clinton. She was roundly derided; shamed for being a promiscuous temptress, and later, for cashing in on her ill-begotten fame.

No one wants to be the woman who comes forward; it’s like affixing your own scarlet letter.

“Not uncommonly, when a woman says something that impugns a man, particularly one at the heart of the status quo, especially if it has to do with sex, the response will question not just the facts of her assertion but her capacity to speak and her right to do so,” Rebecca Solnit wrote in her 2014 book Men Explain Things to Me. “Generations of women have been told they are delusional, confused, manipulative, malicious, conspiratorial, congenitally dishonest, often all at once.”

There was a moment last summer when it seemed this cruel curse might lift. Weeks before the Trump tape leaked, I wondered if a sea change was occurring, beginning to favor victims of sexual assault. On June 3, a reporter for BuzzFeed posted the wrenching letter to the court written by the 23-year-old woman sexually brutalized by Stanford University freshman Brock Turner. The letter went viral, transforming the voice of the victim into an engine of moral conscience. A month later, the Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson announced she had filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against the network’s chairman and CEO Roger Ailes, triggering a volcanic eruption at the network. Scores of women came forward to accuse Ailes of harassment and exploitation, which led him to resign in disgrace. And just as director Nate Parker’s Birth of a Nation was about to hit theaters, the writer and activist Roxane Gay limned an op-ed for the New York Times on “The Limits of Empathy,” discussing Parker’s past as an accused rapist. As a victim of sexual assault herself, she wrote, “It is my gut instinct to believe the victim because there is nothing at all to be gained by going public with a rape accusation except the humiliations of the justice system and public scorn.” As for Parker, “We’ve long had to face that bad men can create good art,” she wrote. “Some people have no problem separating the creation from the creator. I am not one of those people.”