IDEAS

Matt Lauer’s Woman Problem

The allegations against the Today show host have disgusted and unsettled me like few others in the #MeToo era.

Caitlin Flanagan

Contributing writer at The Atlantic and author of Girl Land

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In 2006, when my first book was published, I was invited to go to New York to discuss it on the Today show. While I was sitting in the studio’s makeup room, something unusual happened. At the end of the row of chairs, sitting in the one closest to the wall, was a relatively new newswoman who was quietly reading through some notes. Suddenly Matt Lauer appeared at the door.

He practically ran across the room to her, zeroing in on her and bantering with her as though they were the only two people around. His behavior was intense and odd because of its brazenness and because of the setting. She matched it in kind, and they laughed as though they were at a cocktail party, although I noticed that as soon as he left the room—the show was live, and he had to go to the plaza for an outdoor segment—she went immediately back to her work.

Well, I guess those two are having an affair, I thought to myself. I wasn’t particularly shocked; Lauer was known to have a rocky marriage.

Read: The ghost of Matt Lauer

My other, very brief experiences over the years with Lauer were perfectly professional. Once I wrote an essay about Today that he really liked, and he called me up to tell me so, which was generous. On the phone, he’d been the same person he was on the air: warm, curious, encouraging. Still, that exchange in the makeup room had been … odd.

NBC News management now claims that it had no idea whatsoever that Lauer had a problem with women until it received a lone harassment report in 2017 that led to his firing. But that is hard to countenance. I was in that studio for just 20 minutes before I observed Lauer behave oddly with a woman. Women are coming forward with disturbing and believable stories; the network is under enough pressure that it has agreed to release former employees from the nondisclosure agreements they signed before leaving Today. Critics are demanding that NBC hire a team of outside investigators to examine exactly what was going on during Lauer’s 20-year tenure at Today. All of this has come to light because of Ronan Farrow’s new book, Catch and Kill, which is as tautly plotted as a Robert Ludlum thriller and has a surprise on just about every page. The book is in part about his investigation into Harvey Weinstein, but it also contains important new revelations about Lauer’s behavior. The network has denied Farrow’s allegations, but it is difficult to read this carefully reported book and not conclude that NBC News is either the most incompetent journalistic enterprise in the country, or one that both suppressed a story about Harvey Weinstein and sided with a sexual abuser over his victim.

The focus of Farrow’s reporting on Lauer is an extended interview with Brooke Nevils, whose 2017 report of sexual harassment prompted Lauer’s firing. It is a lurid and wretched account. Nevils alleges that in 2014, when she and Lauer were in Sochi covering the Olympics—she in a very junior capacity, he as the news division’s biggest star—he sexually assaulted her. They had been drinking in the hotel bar, and she’d had at least five shots of vodka. She went to his hotel room where, she says, he pushed her against a door and kissed her. She says Lauer then forced her to have sex, although she was far too drunk to consent. At one point, he sodomized her. She told Farrow, “It hurt so bad. I remember thinking, is this normal?” This part of the account—that he forced this act on her against her will—is the centerpiece of the rape claim, and it is credible. She told Farrow that eventually she stopped saying “no,” and wept until it was over. Nevils says that when they returned to New York, they had an ongoing sexual relationship, which was purely “transactional” on her part; she was frightened Lauer could derail her career.

In response to the allegation, Lauer made his first public comments on the firing in the form of an open letter that simmers with anger and the insistence that the relationship, including the night in Sochi, was fully consensual. He implies that Nevils was motivated to make her report by a dangerous combination of sexual jealousy, romantic disappointment, and avarice. “I admit, I ended the affair poorly,” he writes; “I simply stopped communicating with her.” He adds that after the relationship ended, she repeatedly reached out to him, and—the lament of every man trying to dump his mistress—“she called me late at night while I was home with my family in an effort to rekindle the affair.” He denies having any kind of managerial role over her: “At no time during our relationship did Brooke work for me, the Today Show, or NBC News. She worked for Meredith Vieira (who had not worked for the Today Show in several years) in a completely different part of the network, and I had no role in reviewing Brooke’s work.”

Read: The ongoing horror of #MeToo

The central question is whether that first encounter constituted assault. We’ll never have a definitive answer on that, but Nevils’s account lends authority to her argument. She asserts that the day after the encounter, Lauer emailed her a joke about “not writing or calling.” She told him everything was fine, and he ignored her for the rest of the trip. The impression I take from that exchange is that Lauer was anxious that she might be angry about what happened and was checking in to see whether she was going to be a problem. Once he knew she wasn’t, he carried on with his work in Sochi. At one point, Nevils says, Lauer asked her whether she had told Vieira about what happened. She said no. He then responded, “Don’t.”

Farrow characterizes Nevils as having a “gangly adolescent quality.” When Farrow and Nevils met, she nervously gave an unflattering description of herself, saying she was “tall, awkward and flat-chested.” Lauer was famously associated with very beautiful and sophisticated women, and he treated Nevils as a kid sister. She says that prior to the night in Sochi, Lauer had never taken any sexual interest in her, and that on various reporting trips she had been to his hotel room “lots of times” and never as the object of his sexual attention. There is something particularly cruel about this aspect of the story: the handsome man with his pick of women giving his brief attentions to a young woman he’s not really interested in, and then dumping her.

We don’t know whether Lauer raped Nevils in Sochi, but without a doubt he sexually harassed her there—and it was sexual harassment of a type that falls into a narrative pattern I encountered often when I was researching the field of human resources earlier this year. In fact, it’s almost textbook: the conference or meeting that takes colleagues away from home; alcohol; the hotel-room sexual encounter between a man and a woman who is junior to him; his conviction that because they don’t work in the same department, he’s in the clear. Having the affair linger after they return to work is not uncommon either.

The workplace may be the last place in America where expectations regarding sex are crystal clear, repeatedly explained, and enforced by the larger culture. If an HR department won’t respond to such a claim, a woman can get a lawyer, and if she has enough evidence—text messages are often enough—the company will probably settle with her to protect itself. But despite how clearly and how regularly a workplace explains its sexual-harassment policy, there are men who don’t think it applies to them. It does. Most medium and large-size employers have the same workplace policy regarding sexual harassment: Senior people cannot have sexual relationships with junior ones. The power difference between Lauer and Nevils is about as large as you can find in any company.

Catharine A. MacKinnon: Where #MeToo came from, and where it’s going

Nevils may not be the first NBC employee to have been harassed by Lauer. In Catch and Kill, Ann Curry is quoted as having told NBC management during her time as co-host of Today that “he had a problem with women.” Farrow has uncovered seven NDAs between NBC News and women at the network, and a widening group of women has been coming forward with allegations. A roast of Lauer that took place before the #MeToo movement—a roast attended by his colleagues and bosses—included well-received and knowing jokes about his tendency to become involved with young women at the network. It seems many people in positions of authority believed that Lauer, as Curry put it, “had a problem with women.” If NBC finally does cave to the considerable pressure to hire outside investigators to look into Lauer’s tenure, they might come back with a damning report.

The revelations about Lauer have disgusted and unsettled me like few other stories in the #MeToo era. That is because Today had a single, unvarying ethos: respect for women. From its earliest incarnation more than 65 years ago, that show has served the women all across the country who are at home raising children and taking care of people. Even with the tremendous changes in family life that have taken place, the show’s core audience is female, at home, and engaged in work that the show treats as important—in a way that few other significant cultural institutions do. How many generations of American children were raised while their nearby mothers sipped coffee and paused to watch a Today segment about how to make a household budget, or wean a baby, or help a child cope with bullying? There was uplift and distraction and information in that show, all of it created for the women who quietly did some of the most important work in the country. Everyone knew that it was a performance on the part of the hosts—highly paid media celebrities in New York don’t really care about the right way to shop with coupons. But it was a performance to which they gave their all—especially Lauer, who was excellent in the role. But now it looks like that ethos of respect was fraudulent, and that at NBC News, women—those who worked there, and those who watched its morning program—didn’t really matter very much at all.

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IDEAS

Caroline Calloway Isn’t a Scammer

Her Instagram account reads like Brideshead Revisited meets Twilight meets Vanity Fair magazine circa 1988, when greed was good and having money was a golden superpower.

Caitlin Flanagan

Contributing writer at The Atlantic and author of Girl Land

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Updated at 10:10 a.m. ET on September 29, 2019.

Let us begin with the 45 servings of eggplant salad made in the tiny kitchen of a studio apartment in Greenwich Village, transported to a Brooklyn loft, and served as a homemade lunch to ticketed guests. It was so tasty that many people asked for—and were generously given, at no extra cost—second helpings. And let us acknowledge that if this labor-intensive, potentially money-losing endeavor were part of a “scam”—as many people insist that it was—its architect may not be suited to the life. If you are running a short con that involves driving eggplant salad to another borough, you might as well find honest work, because you lack the grifter mentality.

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Now let’s back up.

Caroline Calloway came crashing into my awareness, and maybe into yours, this month when a former friend of hers, Natalie Beach, published a revenge essay in The Cut titled “I Was Caroline Calloway.” It was a sensation, as there are only two possible positions vis-à-vis this young woman: You’ve never heard of her, or you possess a nearly encyclopedic amount of information about her. She is an Instagram “influencer” with close to 800,000 followers, and it seemed as though within 24 hours every single one of them had blazed through the piece and made some kind of comment about it on social media. The majority of her followers are young white women, a demographic not underrepresented in the world of media, and so—improbably enough—this micro-event was covered just about everywhere, including in The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC, you name it.

Natalie chose her moment wisely and kicked Caroline when she was down: First, Caroline had sold a book proposal for a large sum of money, then failed to deliver the manuscript and had to pay back the portion of the advance she’d been given. In January, she’d had the idea to host a series of “creativity workshops” for her fans, offering to spend time with them; giving them gifts, some of them handmade; and serving lunch—including that eggplant salad. But the organizational skills required to manage these events overwhelmed her. She ended up canceling most of the workshops, and the ticketing agency Eventbrite refunded everyone. For this, she has become known as an internet scammer, on a par with the men who organized the notorious Fyre Festival. Any time investors or ticket holders are given a prompt, full refund, you are not anywhere near the land of the scam, but the internet didn’t care.

Read: Why people paid thousands of dollars to attend a doomed music festival

All influencers live on the knife’s edge. To display the details of an appealing life is to gather fans and jealous toads at about a 5-to-1 ratio. Get big enough, and then make a mistake, and the toads will rise up. Female internet rage is not nearly as frightening as male internet rage, which can include threats of extreme violence and sexual harm. But what it lacks in physical threats, it can make up for in intensity. Once it is unleashed on a new victim, all she can really do is lie low and wait it out; although, this is not the way of an Instagrammer, who inevitably prolongs the attack by repeatedly posting about it.

The venom of Natalie’s essay in no way matches her claims against Caroline, which amount to these: For a short period, Natalie helped edit Caroline’s posts, a service for which she was compensated, and she ghostwrote the book proposal, for which she requested the astronomical fee of 35 percent. For the toads, this news of a ghostwriter was the last straw. Caroline’s creativity workshops had been a scam, and now it seemed that she herself was a fraud.

Grotesquely, two days after the publication of the story in The Cut, the bloated body of Caroline’s mentally ill father was discovered in his home, a possible suicide. He may have been dead for more than a week. Some of the toads announced, in what they seemed to think was a high-minded stance, that they would not discuss the death. Others felt no need to hold back. On the day Caroline announced her father’s death, someone commented on her heartfelt post: “Just fucking deleted your social media. Nobody gives a shit about your [sic].” I started to worry. With a gathering sense of unease, it occurred to me that these bitches might actually kill her.

Caroline Gotschall was born in the middle-class but by no means glamorous suburb of Falls Church, Virginia. “It, wasn’t one of those REALLY bougie suburbs,” she tells us, “where the politicians live, with the sweeping lawns and the azaleas.” Rather, it was more “parking lots and Best Buys and craft stores.” Falls Church is one of those American towns determined to think of itself, in terms both gently self-mocking and obviously self-congratulatory, as a Mayberry R.F.D. kind of place. In Falls Church, the ethos of swim teams and Little League games and Reunion Sundays prevails, and despite profound changes in the racial demographics of the Washington, D.C., metro area, it remains overwhelmingly white. Caroline was the only child of an unhappy mother and a mentally ill father. (Unless otherwise noted, all information about Caroline comes from her Instagram account. I don’t know if it is all the truth, but as we say today, it is “her truth,” and I read it as such.)

When Caroline was 7, her parents separated. Her mother moved herself and her daughter out of the family house, a place that quickly became a monument to her father’s illness, a site of hoarding and disrepair. It was in this house that his body was discovered. He had a terrible temper, which was surely frightening to the little girl who, in the way of all daughters, wanted only approval, protection, and love from the most powerful man in her life. She understood him to be profoundly intelligent—“a rain man savant”—and clearly his belief in the value of education pursued at the most elite and storied institutions was a preoccupation he impressed upon his daughter. He insisted that Caroline attend a fancy private school in Alexandria, 45 minutes away from Falls Church. Caroline’s mother objected, but she was worn down by him, and thus began a ritual, born of necessity, of the father driving the little girl to and from school. That so much of their private time unfolded in the course of pursuing an elite education is entirely fitting. It is the force that allied them most powerfully.

Once, Caroline asked her father what had been the happiest day of his life. It took him a long time to think of an answer, presumably not because there had been so many of them, but rather because the taxonomic consideration of “happiest days” was not one he dwelled on very often. Finally, he came up with the perfect answer: the day she was born. Of all of the things I have learned about this tragic man through his daughter’s various accounts of him, this was the most poignant. When an only child asks you about the happiest day of your life, there is only one right one, and he had found it.

Secure in her father’s affections, Caroline told him she wanted to hear a story that didn’t involve her, and he told her that the second-happiest day of his life had been the day he was admitted to Harvard. He’d sat on his bed with the course catalog, marveling at all the classes in all the many departments, the whole world revealed to him in this book of offerings. But her father did not simply love Harvard for the education it could offer him. He loved it for all the old reasons: its history and traditions and rituals. He told her that he had been “number two” at the Crimson, filling her mind with lore about the rivalry between the Crimson and the Lampoon. He had gone to Harvard from Exeter, a double cynosure. Only when she was a young woman did she learn from one of his boarding-school classmates that he’d been somewhat of a laughingstock there, nicknamed “Briefcase Bill” for the uncool way he carried his books and notes to class in an attaché case. Preppies can be their own kind of toad.

As a child, Caroline was sad and desperately lonely. She was bullied at school, upset about the divorce, and trying her best to contend with her father’s mental illness and depression. She became the kind of girl who rebelled against these things not by getting in trouble, but by building an imaginary world for herself and then moving into it. She filled her bedroom with art supplies and books about princesses and fairies and magic. She had a Union Jack on the wall, and she went through a Titanic phase. She loved Harry Potter, and she kept a framed photograph of her very favorite aristocrat, Empress Sisi of Austria, who was known for her great beauty, her slender figure, and her luxuriant long hair, into which she sometimes braided flowers. Caroline stared out her bedroom windows—which gave way only to a boring suburban street in boring Falls Church—and thought about her future. She spent all her time “waiting, waiting, waiting” for her life to begin.

Read: The college-admissions scandal and the warped fantasy of the American scam

She applied to Exeter, but she was rejected. It’s a delicate thing for the child of an alumnus to get rejected from the parent’s school. What most parents do is move on very quickly and settle the child in a different school, but Caroline says she was rejected over and over by the institution. That’s a punishing process, and one born of obsession. Whose was the obsession—Caroline’s, or her father’s? Or was it a shared obsession, one Caroline adopted to draw closer to her father? And how does a teenager ever gain a sense of real belonging at an elite institution—Exeter is widely regarded as the most prestigious boarding school in the country—if it has rejected her so many times? If you have to push harder and harder on the golden door until it is grudgingly wedged open just wide enough and long enough for you to dart through it, have you sullied the project? Finally, the door swung open just wide enough for her to dart in for her senior year. At age 17, she changed her name to Caroline Calloway—it sounded more like that of a writer, she has said. Maybe it also sounded more like that of someone who would have been admitted to Exeter the first time around.

Her college-admissions process, as she describes it, was similar to the failure-is-not-an-option war she waged on Exeter. She applied to Yale, Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge not once, but apparently four times over four years. Finally, St. Edmund’s College—which she had strategically chosen, she says, because it was the least desired of the Oxbridge colleges and therefore gave her the best odds—waved the white flag and admitted her, a 22-year-old “first year student.” Life could begin.

Caroline characterizes the three years between boarding school and Cambridge as a series of gap years, which is straining the term of art to the breaking point, and also a flagrant denial of something that happened IRL: enrolling at NYU, which most people would consider putting an end to the gap years and starting college. Not Caroline. It was just one of those things that happened while you were staring out the bedroom window, waiting. But we must not pass over these years, because this is where she met her future, poisonous diarist, when both enrolled in a creative-nonfiction class. Let that be a lesson on creative-nonfiction classes.

And let us now admit Natalie’s essay to our list of sources. Here she is, telling us that Caroline arrived “late to the first day of class, wearing a designer dress, not knowing who Lorrie Moore was but claiming she could recite the poems of Catullus in Latin.” Not having heard of Lorrie Moore does not strike me as an especially black mark on the intellectual range of a college student, nor does knowing some Catullus seem wildly improbable for an Exeter graduate. But Natalie’s essay “I Was Caroline Calloway” is a small masterpiece of a certain form: an aggrieved young woman’s account of being repeatedly wronged, often by slights so minor that only someone very young could have nursed them so long and then decided that they demanded a public airing. One of her main beefs with Caroline is the amount of attention Caroline received from the world, when it was she, Natalie Beach, who had arrived on time and known about Lorrie Moore.

Both girls wanted to be writers, and they became fast friends, hanging out and getting high in Caroline’s West Village apartment, where, Natalie reports, the walls were painted Tiffany blue and the place was filled with “fresh orchids and hardcovers,” which is both an appealing way to decorate an apartment and a stylish way to describe it. You can already see, in this simple detail, how the girls could fuse together, one of them making a beautiful life, the other deeply attuned to its component parts.

Caroline admitted to Natalie that her heart had been broken when she was denied admission to Yale, which gave Natalie the inspiration for a gag gift. She was a New Haven townie, and her mother had once come across three plates stamped with the Yale crest discarded outside a campus building. Natalie took a Sharpie and wrote “Fuck Yale” on the back of each one, wrapped them up, and gave them to Caroline, who seemed pleased. But shortly thereafter, the plates disappeared from Caroline’s apartment. Natalie says that Caroline said they’d been stolen, which was obviously not true, as nothing else from the apartment crammed with valuable items had been taken. Natalie was miffed, and remains so to this day. But there is no sentiment Caroline Calloway is less likely to hold than “Fuck Yale.” Yale was the point; Harvard was the point; Cambridge was the point. Caroline once told Natalie that she would “rather die than go through life with an NYU alumni email address,” which is a very Caroline thing to say. It showed her devotion to prestigious institutions, and it was also thoughtless and cutting. Natalie wasn’t transferring; Natalie would have to make peace with a life lived in the shadow of a crappy email address.

Let’s make one thing perfectly clear: Caroline Calloway is the kind of friend who, even if paired with a relative equal, could atomize your ego in less time than it takes to order a double macchiato. Natalie’s fusing herself to Caroline was bound to end in her profound unhappiness. Caroline is self-involved, very pretty, able to bend strangers—especially male strangers—to her will; and Natalie, in her telling, is none of these things. Caroline is also very, very careless: with people’s emotions, with her belongings, with the opportunities presented to her. But Natalie is the one who forced herself into Caroline’s creative projects, out of envy and desire. She’s been seething with jealousy for a long time.

Natalie took a semester abroad in London, at the end of which Caroline joined her for a holiday in Sicily. Natalie initially recalled the trip as fun, but later she read a journal entry that revealed it hadn’t been such a good time. Reading her diary, Natalie “realized how bitter I’d been.” She’d written that she wished “something bad would happen … a humiliation, like the one I feel always,” concluding, “There has to be a price for getting everything you want. For never being embarrassed.” Years later, the essay in The Cut was the price.

While Natalie was abroad, Caroline did something fateful: She started an Instagram account. Right away, Caroline realized that it could be a vehicle for magnifying herself and her talents to a larger world. As terrible as she would turn out to be at moneymakers such as delivering manuscripts and hosting workshops, Caroline had a deep and intuitive understanding of Instagram. She realized that it could be more than what people were then calling it: Twitter for people who couldn’t read. She was far ahead of most in recognizing that the site allowed users to add long, novelistic captions to the images they posted. She was interested in becoming a writer and she was interested in herself—she was made for Instagram. She decided the account would serve as a venue for an extended work of creative nonfiction, and that the imminent start of her Cambridge education would be a perfect subject for it.

Read: The Instagram aesthetic is over

She paid for roughly 20,000 followers. Moreover, she was one of the early vanguard of users who understood that buying ads, if done correctly, could be a huge boost to an account. Imagining that her proposed subject would have particular appeal to the YA market, she bought ads on the fan accounts of successful YA books including The Hunger Games and The Fault in Our Stars.

Most important, she bought ads on Harry Potter fan sites.* That series is based on the great British boarding-school books, such as Enid Blyton’s beloved Malory Towers series and the novels of Angela Brazil, who all but invented the form. J. K. Rowling’s stories built on that popular tradition by adding the element of wizardry. Soon, the world discovered the pleasures of reading about growing up within one of those historic, tradition-bound places, with their elaborate rituals, their formal robes, their generations-long sense of continuity. In writing about Cambridge, Caroline showed a mostly American audience that the dream world they had encountered in Rowling’s series was not all invention and didn’t end at age 18. Her account presented followers with a beautiful female protagonist beginning at a storied and ritual-laden English institution not at 12, but at 22.

This is what made Caroline Calloway’s Instagram account famous: her Cambridge years, expressed as Brideshead Revisited meets Twilight meets Vanity Fair magazine circa 1988, when greed was good and having money was a golden superpower. She gave herself the persona of a rich, careless, happy American girl who falls utterly in love with Cambridge.

So here is Caroline, in ball gown after ball gown, sitting at candlelit dinners in great halls, her head inclined toward one handsome young man or another, or punting on the Cam wearing an orange gown and sunglasses and shielding her face from the sun with a pink parasol, a handsome young man in a dinner jacket sprawled at her feet. Here is the Henley Royal Regatta, and the Oxford Hunt Ball.

And here is the principal romance of the Cambridge years, Oscar, who opens his dormitory door to Caroline one morning, wearing only Ralph Lauren boxers, seeming to already know her, to have been waiting for her. And all of this—the languor with which she approaches her days, her apparent nonconcern about her future—takes her account out of time. Typically, an American girl who attends a top boarding school and then Cambridge is on the superhighway to becoming a “global leader,” a leaner-inner, a person who drives herself every day to get to the top. But Caroline’s attitude toward Cambridge, as presented on Instagram, is as relaxed as a pale hand trailing through the waters of the Cam.

She seems like a spoiled golden girl of yesteryear, someone whose life path and material comforts were so predestined that she could spend the days of her precious youth making flower crowns. She is in a dreamland of met desires, majoring in art history and writing her undergraduate thesis—if this were really a novel, not a writer in the world could have gotten this so exactly right—on the notebooks of Cecil Beaton.

But that is not the only thing that makes her Instagram account feel out of time. The other is that it is crammed full of ravishing images of great European paintings and architecture, as well as endless, admiring references to aristocrats—all without any attempt to place them within the contemporary concerns of race, class, and gender; all without any consideration of Europe as a malevolent and colonial force. Seeing an educated young person take in European art and culture with unconflicted admiration is so unusual that the first time I breezed through her account, I wondered if it was possibly an invention of someone from the “alt-light” world of young people who have taken about half of the red pill. But no, her politics turn out to be as doctrinaire as those of any other hyper-educated New York–dwelling Millennial. It seems, simply, that she’s the very last student to approach Western art not as the by-product of oppression, but only for its beauty, its power to move the viewer. She is eager to immerse herself only in the sensual experience of it; she is the Walter Pater of Instagram.

So here is Girls After the Ball, by József Borsos, and John Singer Sargent’s little girls with paper lanterns and a Pompeii fresco. Here is a Hans Holbein portrait, and the July page of Très Riches Heures. Painting after painting—not the greatest hits from a survey course, but rather works that show some range and hint at her tastes. Here, too, are the Great European Ideas and the Great European Families. Here she is wondering if hoarding might run in a family, “like hemophilia in the House of Hanover, and insanity in the Hapsburgs?” And here she is seeking to comfort herself by tending to her own garden and keeping her mind on “the Voltarian sense of soul.”

However unintentionally, she seems to be staging a one-girl defense of Western culture, territory she pretty much has to herself at this point. The West! What a fantastic back catalog!

To this day, she regularly posts works of art and pairs them with thoughtful and sensitive observations. It comes at you, perforce, interleaved with endless posts dedicated to her self-obsession; her various dramas; her endless, endless selfies. All of that is tedious. It’s the art and her ideas about it that get my attention and elevate her intentions.

Taken all together, her account is a kind of madhouse, which suggests that Instagram is pretty good at exposing the range of a young person. There’s the great Cambridge romance novel, the endless stories of hurt feelings and social triumphs, the selfies without number, and the glowing images of the greatest paintings and architecture in the history of the world—all of this is presented in the Instagram form, which is nonlinear, marked by short bursts of narration, and richly illustrated.

The 1990s introduced us to the idea that the “memoir” wasn’t the sole province of presidents and dowagers, and that any 26-year-old woman with a boatload of problems and a humanities degree could write an engaging account of her experiences thus far. But the published book, as a medium, is perhaps too much and too little for the life and times of an extremely young person. Instagram, like Baby Bear’s porridge, is just right. In this form, the past—which, let’s face it, is a pretty slim chunk of time in the life of a 20-year-old—repeats itself, amends itself, inscribes new details on old stories; it’s a form in which the triumphs and hurts of yesterday or yesteryear can be called up, reworked, reintroduced to the narrative as though they are as real and as present as anything happening in the actual moment. Just as important, the platform allows photographs to have equal weight with prose, which is essential for a young person who has grown up in the smartphone generation. All of it spools forward and backward, with no regard to linear time, like a postmodern novel.

But everything exacts a price, and Instagram is no different. It ends up flattening young women, taking whatever was original in them and slowly forcing it into the language and tropes of the site. In Cambridge, Caroline created someone out of time, sexually sophisticated but withholding of every secret detail. Lately, though, she is becoming like everyone else: She holds up her middle finger to the camera, posts about her great, “juicy” ass, decides that her signature phrase is “Suck my big fat cock.” Yawn.

Read: Instagram is the new mall

Moreover, the successful Instagram accounts of young women inevitably develop a common, unplanned, and dull theme: the emotional toll that the online haters exact from them and how to cope with it. Always, these young women choose the same three approaches and cycle through them during periods of duress. There’s the badass: “Fuck people who don’t understand me.” There’s the Judy Garland: “All I ever wanted to do was sing ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow.’ All I ever wanted to do was make people happy.” And there’s the spreading of memes by professional uplifters. When Caroline began posting the sayings of Schlockmeister General Glennon Doyle, it was a low day for her account. Where was Cecil Beaton? Where, for that matter, was Voltaire?

The publication of Natalie’s essay has been rich fodder for new content created by fans and toads, by journalists and tweeters. The two principals have been speaking to each other in oblique ways. To The New York Times, Natalie played the executioner’s song—“I haven’t been looking at her feed right now in part because I feel a deep guilt about causing her pain”—while also revealing that her inbox is so full of possibilities, she can hardly contend with it. And she offers Caroline a strange crumb of gratitude. “It’s a small thing,” she told the Times, “but Caroline was the one who introduced me to the man who did me the great honor of relieving me of my virginity. Which was very nice of her. And I’ll be eternally grateful.” Finding a man willing to take the virginity of a healthy, young NYU student hardly seems like one of the labors of Hercules.

As for Caroline, that Gatsby-like figure—the name changed to something less ethnic; the Oxbridge obsession; the conviction that you can transform your life and rewrite its origin story if you can just peg them to a few solid and impressive facts—she’s been rocked by the events of the past weeks.

When her father died, she wasn’t sure what to do. It had been so long since she’d known what to do about him. She ended up taking the train to Harvard, the only place the spirit of the man might linger. She met a boy and had “the most perfect date.” She toured the archives of the newspaper, where she made a shocking discovery: Her father hadn’t been “#2 at the Crimson.” He’d only ever gotten a single letter to the editor published in the paper. But Caroline is quick on her feet in such matters; Caroline will never be daunted by an unwelcome truth. “It turns out I misremembered,” she tells us. “My Dad was second-in-command at The Exonian, Phillips Exeter Academy’s student newspaper.”

She went to a late-night party at the Lampoon, and then two new friends took her somewhere she wanted to go: Adams House, where her father had lived, and where there were no records to check, no mean nicknames to be told. She could be in the present, and she could conjure the past; and she could fuse the two and make them beautiful and perfect, a daughter’s coda that could have come right out of Gatsby:

He died in the house I grew up in, in debt, in pain, alone, surrounded by his hoarded mess. But in Adams House he was young, bright, and still hadn’t done any of the things for which I have forgiven him.

As for Caroline herself, she’s back in her cluttered studio apartment, where the art supplies and candles and paper cutouts threaten to overwhelm the place, still pumping out posts that trade extreme self-obsession with considered comments about art. The toads think the apartment is a hoarder’s squat. The fans think it’s a gem. Caroline wants all of them to lift their sights.

“Shoebox? Jewel box?” she asks rhetorically. Neither is right for this dreamer, this girl who has seen Venice and endured Falls Church.

“Sainte Chapelle, anyone?”

* This article originally stated that Caroline Calloway bought followers from the fan accounts of successful YA books. She bought ads on these accounts.

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IDEAS

Tarantino’s Most Transgressive Film

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood celebrates values that have been repeatedly dismissed as dangerous and outdated.

Caitlin Flanagan

Contributing writer at The Atlantic and author of Girl Land

REGIS DUVIGNAU / REUTERS

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As soon as I heard that Quentin Tarantino was making a movie about the Manson killings, I knew I would be there on opening night. As the release date neared, and the ravishing still photography of Andrew Cooper, Tarantino’s regular photographer, began to appear—beginning with a January spread in Vanity Fair, which operated like an injection of Narcan on that slumbering magazine—I wondered whether I would be able to make it to July.

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I knew that the film would not be a biopic in any conventional sense, and that it would explore the sexually louche Hollywood of the late 1960s alongside the sinister element of the once-joyful hippie movement, an element that was hardly in its infancy before it crested in the Manson murders. (“Just in time,” everyone told Joan Didion when she went to San Francisco to report on depravity in the Haight in 1967; “the whole fad’s dead now, fini, kaput.”) And I knew that Sharon Tate—cipher, beauty, Texas pageant girl, and Euro sophisticate—was a character Tarantino could have invented. I assumed that the film would, in the director’s characteristic way, include digressions, set pieces, flights from narrative logic so prolonged they would bring the viewer to points of murderous rage, and that the director would reemerge in the third act, fully in possession of his narrative powers, to stick the landing. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a swoon of a movie. It’s full of so much beauty and menace and humor and intelligence that I couldn’t do anything but sit flattened while it rolled over me. In anyone else’s hands, the long middle section would have walked the room. In Tarantino’s, I just kept watching, helplessly. Eventually that long digression ends and you’re back in business, back in the place of childhood daydreams and nightmares. I was 7 years old when the Manson killings happened, a child up in Berkeley who, like all children at the time, heard words—Manson, Tate, the killings, something about words written in blood—before radios were switched off and mothers changed the subject.

Every generation has its crime that looms over the children, its details slowly making their way into their nightmares. Leopold and Loeb in the 1920s, the Black Dahlia in the ’40s. For my generation—Tarantino’s generation—the Manson murders were the crime that had the children’s attention. In Berkeley, we lived through Patty Hearst’s kidnapping—which everyone had some small connection to, and which dominated the city’s life—but when it was over, we went right back to Manson. It’s deep in our imagination. The justice critics, the ones who want to count up every movie’s sins against approved sensibilities, say that the film is nostalgic, a term intended to damage it. Only another artist would understand the way that Tarantino has deployed that potent force. Guillermo del Toro tweeted that the movie was “[chock-full] of yearning,” that it was “a tale of another time that probably never was but feels like a memory.”

Read: What Quentin Tarantino’s box-office success says about Hollywood

The justice critics aren’t interested in fictions that feel like memories. They want movies that adhere to their vision of the way the world should be. To them, the movie is too white, too violent toward women, and too uninterested in Margot Robbie, whose Sharon Tate has few lines. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody reviled the picture, calling it “ridiculously white.” But Charles Manson was a white supremacist, a fact that does tend to put a lot of white people in a movie. The majority of these white people are drugged-out sadists who live in filth, and scrounge in garbage, entirely repellent. And the Hollywood of the time was a deeply insular place from which progressive values flowed easily, but that never stopped to examine itself as a racially exclusive enterprise. Depicting it as inclusive would give the lie to the decades of hard work that have gone into changing that fact, work that is finally beginning to pay off.

As to violence against women, what can I tell you? If you don’t like it, don’t go to a movie about the Manson killings. Say what you will about Charles Manson; he really empowered women to pursue excellence in traditionally male-dominated fields. From armed robbery to sadistic murder at knifepoint, he put women in positions from which they had been traditionally excluded, and ultimately helped them to break that hardest, highest glass ceiling, the one that makes death row such a male purview. The Manson crimes became famous because of the savagery of the killings, the killers became famous because so many of them were women, and the most famous of the victims was a very specific woman, so particularly feminine—and at the height of femininity, the peak of her young beauty, and eight-and-a-half months pregnant—that her slaughter instantly assumed a mythic importance. Moreover, without giving away the ending, for many of us the violent scene that the justice critics hate was something we’ve been waiting 50 years to see. As for me, I closed my eyes during part of it, an option available to any ticket holder.

Sharon Tate doesn’t get many lines, a fact that may not make feminist sense, but which absolutely makes artistic sense. We didn’t know her. All we knew were the facts of her murder and of her impossible beauty. We created her from the endless publicity photographs that would appear and reappear in newspapers throughout our childhoods. She was living in the midst of the ascendant and dangerous new Hollywood, and yet she was also living a very conventional life. Two photographs in particular, both of them shot in the back seat of a limo, came to stand for those things. In one she is wearing a wedding dress and veil, orange blossoms in her hair, her groom beside her. In the other she’s holding up a tiny knit sweater, as though on her way home from a baby shower.

For a very brief moment it seemed possible to be a sexually free woman of the new era and also to round out that period of freedom with the old, square punctuation points. She was part of the new Hollywood royalty, at the height of the youth movement, and yet she was also a girl living out the dreams of Enid Haupt’s Seventeen magazine. Because of this, and because of the blunt force of her beauty, she stood for two of the most powerful forces in history: sexuality and femininity. Hence the scenes of her dancing, first at the Playboy mansion and then in the sun-drenched privacy of her bedroom. In truth, even the most beautiful girls of 1968 didn’t spend much time putting on shorts and dancing alone in bedrooms while drenched in the golden light of a California afternoon—but we weren’t interested in sociological observations. We were deep into mythic territory.

Caitlin Flanagan: The problem with HR

Tate was an interesting person, the daughter of an Army colonel, a pageant winner at six months—Miss Tiny Tot of Dallas—someone who moved regularly because of her father’s job and who was therefore lonely and shy. She went to her senior year of high school at the American School in Italy, already famous in her father’s world because a photograph of her in a bathing suit had been published in Stars and Stripes. Margot Robbie’s evocation of her as a happy, sexy, beautiful girl who basked in the attention her beauty brought her brings to life exactly the dream girl we loved so fiercely. And Tarantino has paid Tate the ultimate compliment: When Robbie goes to a movie theater to watch herself in one of her few movie roles, he didn’t reshoot that film with the modern actress in the role. We’re watching Margot Robbie watching Sharon Tate, and the half century that separates those two real women looms over the scenes. Why are Robbie’s feet, slipped out of immaculate white go-go boots and slung over a movie seat in front of her, so filthy? That is between Quentin Tarantino and his God.

What’s really got the justice critics worked up, however, isn’t the violence or the nostalgia or the silencing of Sharon Tate. What’s rattling them more than they realize is that this movie is transgressive as hell. Only Tarantino would have the balls to make something like it, something that embraces values that have repeatedly been proved—proved!—to be dangerous, outdated, the thing that people don’t want anymore. Box-office poison. And only Tarantino could do it so skillfully that it’s not until you’re back in the car that you realize what he’s done: made a major motion picture in 2019 about a man with a code, a man who hews to the old values of the Western hero.

The movie is about Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Rick Dalton. But this is Brad Pitt’s picture, and he carries it so easily that you don’t realize it until the end. Rick is the washed-up star of a TV Western, whose career has wound down to guest-star appearances on other actors’ Westerns (in the career-killing role of villain), heavy drinking, and indulging in fits of crying. He’s weak. Pitt is Cliff Booth, Rick’s stunt double, the one who does all the dangerous things and who—literally—takes no credit. Rick is so dependent on Cliff that he has hired him as driver and houseman, a role that should diminish Cliff in our eyes—1968’s Kato Kaelin—but doesn’t. Cliff is cool, funny, laconic, and tough. His competence and emotional reserve make us more aware of Rick’s weakness. So it’s a depth charge of misgiving to learn that he’s not welcome on some television sets. He brings a bad energy, apparently, because many people believe he killed his wife. It’s an anvil dropping: Is he a threat? Did he do it? In the one flashback, the truth is never revealed. For most of the picture, we know we can’t trust him, and Pitt plays with us throughout, one moment charming, the next lost in something inward.

At the end of the movie, after he’s redeemed tenfold, we realize who he was all along and why we couldn’t help falling for him—a hero. Rick spent the movie trying to portray a hero; Cliff spent it being one—and like all heroes, he didn’t spend any time bringing attention to the fact. The beautiful teenager who keeps trying to get him to give her a ride finally succeeds, but when she tries to seduce him, she doesn’t have a chance. He spares her feelings by telling her that it’s because she doesn’t have a photo ID to prove she’s over 18, but that’s not the reason. He doesn’t need “affirmative consent.” He has a code: A man doesn’t sleep with teenagers.

Read: Quentin Tarantino has made his best movie in a decade

Cliff faces great danger at the Manson compound to make sure an elderly man of his slight acquaintance is safe. He doesn’t start fights, but if he gets into one, he’ll lay out the challenger. His dog loves him, he doesn’t like to see a man crying, and he’s got his passions under control. One afternoon, he climbs to Rick’s roof to fix his television antenna, a potent symbol of Rick’s failing television career, but also one more reminder of their relationship: Rick’s things are broken, and Cliff repairs them. In the bright sun, he takes off his shirt (heaven help us) and then he hears music from the house next door. It’s Tate, alone in her room. He glances over—does he see her? Maybe. But he’s not a man who climbs on roofs for a peep show, and he turns back to his work. Most of all, he’s loyal—even when Rick might not deserve that loyalty. In the end, he’s Gary Cooper facing Frank Miller all by himself.

We can’t have a movie like this. It affirms things the culture wants killed. If men aren’t encouraged to cry in public, where will we end up? And the bottom line is the bottom line: Audiences don’t want to see this kind of thing anymore. The audience wants the kind of movies the justice critics want. But the audience gave Once Upon a Time in Hollywood the biggest opening of Tarantino’s career. The critics may not get it, but the public does. Is Tarantino making a reactionary statement at a dangerous time? Or does the title tell the truth, that the whole thing—including those old masculine values—was always just a fairy tale, a world “that never really existed, but feels like a memory”?

In the sexiest scene in the movie, Cliff roars out of Rick’s driveway up in the canyons in his rusted blue Karmann Ghia, Bob Seger blaring—“I was born lonely, down by the riverside”—taking mountain turns at impossible speeds, racing across the old L.A. freeways late at night, bound for Van Nuys and sliding across lanes with ultimate cool. But in a TMZ video clip, you see Pitt surrounded by a large crew, trying to make the easiest part of the journey—the three-point turn out of Rick’s driveway—at about five miles an hour and falling short every time, despite a closed road. Over and over the crew pushes the car back up the driveway, while Pitt sits in it miserably, much more Rick than Cliff.

What’s real? Who knows? It’s all Hollywood.

This article is part of “The Speech Wars,” a project supported by the Charles Koch Foundation, the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, and the Fetzer Institute.

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IDEAS

Little Women’s Real Feminist Problem

The film reveals that there was, and is, something powerful about domestic life, and that women are particularly attracted to it.

Caitlin Flanagan

Contributing writer at The Atlantic and author of Girl Land

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WILSON WEBB

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Not again, I thought. How did Greta Gerwig get herself mixed up in this? I was at a movie theater, realizing that the trailer unspooling before me was for yet another adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. I loved the book as a child, but as an adult I’ve always found it cloying. Movie versions have tended to be even worse. The thought of doing the stations of the cross one more time—the cutting of the hair; the burning of the manuscript; the catching of the scarlet fever—was out of the question.

But could that many critics be wrong? I bought a ticket to see the movie, settled down for a long winter’s nap—and from the opening scene was in its thrall. Gerwig laid the story flat, cut it apart, and rearranged it; she added new sections and then turned the whole thing into a paper lantern—beautiful, unexpected, and glowing. She recognized what few filmmakers do when they approach a widely known story: Fans won’t countenance cutting major episodes, but they will happily see the story expanded in new directions. She understood that the wide familiarity with the story wasn’t a challenge but a fantastic opportunity. She’s given us Once Upon a Time ...in Concord, Massachusetts. The novel had an ending all of us hated, and she created one that changes everything.

When a movie is this much of a triumph, there are bound to be complaints. “Little Women Has a Little Man Problem,” Vanity Fair; “Men Are Dismissing ‘Little Women.’ What a Surprise,” The New York Times; “Dear Men Who Are Afraid to See ‘Little Women’: You Can Do This,” The Washington Post. The male gaze is back! Only now we want it. Try to keep up.

It seems to me that the real feminist problem of this new Little Women is not that so many men don’t want to see the movie; it’s that so many women do. The movie has some explicitly feminist passages, dealing with the nature of marriage in the 19th century, and they are very good. The heart of the movie, though, is the private lives of the March girls, who are making a home together and following their natural talents in writing and acting in plays and painting and taking care of small children. Their STEM dreams are not being thwarted. Jo is not up in the attic making a rocket ship that the stupid patriarchy will ignore. If, as Christopher Lasch claimed, second-wave feminism represented the incursion of capitalist individualism into the life of the home, Little Women reveals that there was, and is, something powerful about domestic life, and that women (see the makeup of the audience) are particularly attracted to it.

Men might not feel great after seeing Little Women, because the movie, like the book, takes a dim view of them. As in the Laura Ingalls Wilder books—another world of women in which the household is more a unit of production than consumption— the much-adored father is a bit like Joseph in a Renaissance painting: a slumbering and irrelevant figure. He’s often absent, and when he appears he is usually ineffectual. Marmee is the indestructible leader of the family, no matter what comes her way. The two principal men in the story, Laurie and his grandfather, are largely without purpose until their lives intersect with those of the girls. Fan-favorite Jo can do very well without men at all. I can’t have been the only kid who assumed  she was a lesbian—or, as they were called in 1968, a tomboy. In the novel, her father calls her “my son Jo”; she cuts her hair short; her only romantic possibility is with someone named Laurie, who often addresses her as “my dear fellow”; and she is completely uninterested in getting married to a man she does love, except … not in that way. Little Women is about the resourcefulness, power, and imagination of women; the notion that Gerwig’s movie needs male ticket buyers to affirm its quality is ridiculous.

The other complaint is that the movie has been overlooked during awards season. As the writer Kristy Eldredge noted in a Times op-ed, Little Women has thus far garnered just “two Golden Globe nominations and zero Screen Actors Guild nods” (one for Best Actress, one for Best Original Score, nothing for Gerwig). Perhaps this fact has less to do with the gender of the creative talent than with the fact that Little Women is the whitest movie I’ve seen since The Swiss Family Robinson. It has the same attitude toward the past that is at the core of the American Girl business: history is not a nightmare to wake up from; it’s a beautiful wonderland where there is always some girl whose life circumstances allow her to have a jolly and guilt-free time.

Gerwig is clearly aware of and anxious about the intersectional challenges presented by her source material. If ever there were an illustration of “white feminism,” it has to be Jo’s excitement at getting the better of her male publisher—while 700 miles to the south, African American women her age were confronting the new “black codes” and all that came with them. Gerwig has tried to indemnify herself against the unbearable whiteness of Little Women by grafting snippets of critical race theory into a couple of lines of dialogue, but they clang to the floor like trays of silverware. If the movie is aware that—as a young African American girl patiently explains to a soberly listening young white girl—the North benefited from and was therefore complicit in the original sin of slavery, it must account for it in the world it creates. If Jo and the girls understand that their delicious Christmas breakfast has been provided to them through a market economy dependent on slave labor, I don’t want to see them eat it. You can’t have it both ways. Either you take characters from the past on their own terms, or you create a story that acknowledges modernity in some significant way.

The objections about the movie’s few nominations may disappear when the Oscar nominations are announced—I can hardly imagine Gerwig’s work being ignored. Certainly the Academy has lately been more eager to notice films made by women than it was in the past. But the clear intention lately has been to recognize more films that are by and about nonwhite people, films that the Oscars might once have overlooked entirely and that studios might never have funded. Three of the past six Best Picture winners—Green Book, Moonlight, and 12 Years a Slave–have specifically addressed aspects of the African American experience. Against these imperatives, the story of four white girls making magic together during the Civil War may not amount to a hill of beans.

Little Women has found an audience, and it’s selling tickets. But it breaks no sociopolitical ground, and men don’t like it. If it earns Oscar nominations, how are the filmmakers to know that they are the result of the movie’s excellence, not of the campaign conducted by angry white women in the prestige newspapers? Perhaps the film may suffer the lowest fate of all in the outrage economy: to be understood, principally, as a work of art.

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CULTURE

Kobe Bryant’s Unfinished Business

It’s tragic that a superstar known for his thoughtfulness and willingness to learn never fully reckoned with his life’s darkest off-court episode.

ROSS ANDERSEN

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Yesterday afternoon, the shocking news that Kobe Bryant had died in a helicopter crash, alongside his daughter Gianna and seven others, ripped through my social-media feeds and group texts. Like many Lakers fans, I spent the first hour stunned and mostly silent, just trying to come to grips with the unreality of the first reports. But by the time night fell, I could no longer dwell on the tragedy’s scope, the lifelong heartbreak coming to Bryant’s family and so many others, the complexity of an off-court legacy left unfinished. As was so often the case during Bryant’s tenure as basketball’s most polarizing superstar, it was easier to think about the singular virtuosic beauty of his game.

Pro basketball can sometimes seem like a contest of upper bodies. Because the spectator’s eye follows the ball, it focuses easily on the jump shooter’s clean release or the controlled violence of a tomahawk dunk. But underneath, a player’s legs are always moving, creating space for the more dazzling work of the hands. Younger players use speed to conjure up these micro-islands of space on crowded hardwood, but fast-twitch muscles fade with age. To keep scoring at will, veterans must develop deceptive footwork, and few players had craftier footwork than Bryant.

In my mind’s eye, I can see him squaring up on an isolated defender, out near the free-throw line. He leads with a jab step, feinting a drive that was, even in his final years, still quick enough to streak by people. Bryant’s man would bite and backpedal a step, enough to give him room for a shot. But Bryant always wanted more. More touches. More shots. More championships. He’d spin away from the basket for more space and gather the ball, all in one fluid sequence, his one-man ballet fooling the defender into thinking it would end with Bryant reclining into one of his patented fadeaways. But this, too, was a fake. By the time the defender recognized the ruse, he was already midair, having lunged forward to block a fadeaway that would never come. Meanwhile, Bryant was pivoting toward the basket for an easy 12-footer. That was the thing about Bryant: He always seemed to have one more pivot.

In recent years, an aura of legend has surrounded Bryant, one that will only grow now, given the tragic circumstances of his death. But he wasn’t always as widely beloved as yesterday’s outpouring would suggest. When Bryant entered the league, he was seen as self-consumed. In those naive years before social media, his obsession with his own narrative of destined greatness felt both novel and off-putting. But he was still growing up, still in his teens, still in possession of his own fandoms, expressed most poignantly by his mimicry of Michael Jordan’s physical tics, down to the loping movements of the elder man’s gait (and least poignantly by his Jordan-esque cruelty to teammates).

When Bryant’s feud with Shaquille O’Neal broke into public in 2000, during their first championship run, it was easy to side with the big man, who seemed more at ease with himself, especially for a fan base who’d grown up on Magic’s smile. By comparison, Bryant came off as calculated. He seemed like basketball’s answer to Mark Zuckerberg. Some suspected that his carefully controlled demeanor concealed something more sinister, a suspicion that seemed prophetic in 2003, when Bryant was charged with felony sexual assault in Colorado.

The facts on record from that night in Colorado aren’t great for Bryant, and they must be looked at, squarely: After a brief encounter in Bryant’s hotel room, a 19-year-old front-desk clerk left with a bruise on her jaw and blood—hers—on her clothing and Bryant’s. The next day, a rape exam would reveal vaginal injuries. In the run-up to trial, Bryant’s legal team would make much of her sexual history. The case was dropped just days before opening arguments when the woman, who later received a settlement in a separate civil case, refused to testify.

It’s hard to know how “the Colorado incident,” as Bryant coolly described it in a 2014 New Yorker profile, would have played out in today’s media environment. After the charges were filed, he lost many of his sponsors, but Nike stuck around, and in time others came back. By the decade’s end, journalists had mostly stopped asking him about the alleged assault, except as a means to frame his comeback. Even as late as 2018, when Bryant won an Oscar at an Academy Award ceremony that was haunted by that year’s #MeToo scandals, he managed to avoid a sustained public relitigation of the case.

As he began the second half of his career, Bryant seemed to relish a new role as the NBA’s villain, jutting his chin out cartoonishly after buzzer beaters, giving himself the absurd nickname of Black Mamba. He redoubled his dedication to the embodied art form that is basketball. He shot endless jumpers in the gym before dawn, burrowing the micro-movements of his shot deeper into his muscle memory. He ran endurance drill after endurance drill, layering new strength onto his body, making sure he’d still have his wind in the fourth quarter, on the second night of a road back-to-back. “Load management” wasn’t a thing for Bryant. He liked to set up chairs in elaborate configurations, so he could dribble around them, perfecting new moves for his already baroque arsenal. When he wasn’t working out, Bryant mainlined video footage of his opponents. He knew their feints and pivots, cold.

Bryant had worn his youthful precocity awkwardly, but middle age seemed to suit him. His base—Lakers fans—were, naturally, the most susceptible to the rebrand. They embraced the flintiness of late-period Bryant. He became a YouTube legend for not flinching when Matt Barnes pretended to throw a ball into his face. And again when he snapped his Achilles mid-game, and hobbled out to the free-throw line to sink two. He played for nearly 20 years in L.A., imprinting championship memories on multiple generations of Angelenos, during an era when superstars hopped from city to city for three-year super-team stints.

In time, Bryant’s relentless ethic of self-improvement seemed to bleed from his basketball game into his personality. He appeared to realize that there was more to life, or at least more to legacy-building, than competitive aggression. Bryant softened in a human way that has so far eluded Michael Jordan, who, despite being celebrated at every turn, could not conceal his odd, ultra-competitive streak of bitterness at his own Hall of Fame induction.

Jemele Hill: The Kobe Bryant I knew became a champion for others

Bryant began to give back, with charitable donations—most notably, a gift of at least $1 million to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture—but also by redistributing his extensive basketball knowledge. He put in long hours mentoring younger players, who seemed, to a man, grief stricken by his death. He spoke about basketball from a craftsman’s perspective, in interviews and videos about the game’s intricacies for ESPN.com. That basketball has lost its preeminent player-scholar is one of his death’s lesser tragedies.

After leaving the league, Bryant, who had four daughters, found an animating cause in women’s sports. According to Rebecca Lobo, an announcer and former player for the WNBA, no other NBA player matched Bryant’s support for women’s basketball. In December, he was filmed court-side at an NBA game, talking to his daughter Gianna, pointing animatedly, instructing her on the game’s finer points. She smiled at him with a 13-year-old’s loving contempt. These things are hard to discern from afar, especially through the mediated lens of celebrity, but in that video and others, Bryant always seemed like a gentle father.

In recent years, as Bryant showed us more of his thoughtful side, it became possible to wonder if he might one day revisit that night in Colorado, even if only in private, perhaps in response to persistent questioning from his girls. Bryant always seemed to have one more pivot in him. Maybe, had he lived, he would have tried to confront the contradictions that marked his relationships with women, including his accuser. Maybe he would have worked to make amends in a way that changed the perspective of all those young players who admire him. That we’ll never know is now one more tragedy among many.

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BOOKS

The Ongoing Horror of #MeToo

She Said, Catch and Kill, and other new books tell stories of monsters brought to account. But their defining mood is not exultation—it’s terror.

MEGAN GARBER

What these books share is a sense of abiding fear—fear that is infrastructural and architectural.PHOTOGRAPHY TRISTAN BRAZIER / GETTY

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Updated at 11:07 a.m. ET on October 25, 2019.

Horror is often a matter of architecture. The crowded cabins of Friday the 13th, the cramped spaceship of Alien, the mansion of Get Out—they are spaces that have ways of trapping people inside. At every turn, the vulnerable characters, who are proxies for the audience, find themselves prevented from escaping the monster, from finding relief from their fear. I recently watched The Shining, and was struck by how effectively the film makes its physical luxuries into a menace: Gilded corridors ensnare people within them. Gleaming mirrors play tricks of vision. There is nowhere to hide at the Overlook Hotel, because it is the building itself that is doing the stalking. The Shining takes horror’s defining claustrophobia to its most anxious conclusion: It makes the environment itself into a monster.

I thought of The Shining when reading a spate of recent books that add new reporting to #MeToo’s ever expanding collection of literature—among them Catch and Kill, She Said, The Education of Brett Kavanaugh, All the President’s Women, and Know My Name. The first two books are stories about the stories—details of how investigative reporters brought to light Harvey Weinstein’s decades of abuses against women in his orbit. The next two are deep-dive expansions of existing reporting—about the controversial Supreme Court confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, and about the many allegations of sexual harassment and abuse that women have made about Donald Trump. The fifth is a memoir, lyrically told, of Chanel Miller’s own assault on the Stanford campus. These works include stories of revelations made and accountabilities enforced. They are wrapped in the warm comforts of hindsight.

For all those triumphal dimensions, though, the defining mood of these books is not exultation. It’s horror. What the books share is a sense of abiding fear—fear that is, just like the Overlook’s, infrastructural and architectural. Fear that derives not only from the alleged villains themselves, but also from the environments that have given them their power. The memoirs tell stories not only of monsters, but also of the spaces that the monsters roam. The basements with no windows; the hallways with no doors; the rooms that emphasize the utter lack of escape or egress. These books explore how easily familiar places can be made into places of fear—and how readily familiarity itself can transform into an agent of danger. “You can’t get away,” Jack Torrance, a man made monstrous by his surroundings, says in The Shining. “I’m right behind you.”

“He was like an octopus,” Jessica Leeds, a woman from Donald Trump’s ever growing contingent of accusers, has said, describing how Trump allegedly groped her while she was seated next to him on an airplane. In All the President’s Women, Karen Johnson claims that during a party at Mar-a-Lago in the early 2000s, Trump grabbed her from behind one of the resort’s elaborate tapestries, kissing her against her will—the man and the space that contained him grotesquely fused together. (Trump has denied the claims of sexual abuse made against him.) One of Charlie Rose’s former employees shared the nickname that staffers created to describe the unwanted massages he would allegedly offer to some of them: “the crusty paw.” (Rose has denied some of the claims made against him; of others, he noted in 2017, “I always felt that I was pursuing shared feelings, even though I now realize I was mistaken.”) Miller, who until this year was best known as the “Stanford rape survivor,” describes in Know My Name the unique horror of realizing that she had been assaulted while she was unconscious. In the hospital, when Miller is providing evidence for her rape kit—another kind of nightmare—she realizes that she is covered in pine needles. It’s further evidence of what her assailant had done to her as she lay on the ground, unable to speak or move. As Miller walks through the sterile rooms of the hospital, she leaves a trail of pine needles in her wake.

These details double as pleas for empathy. Just as the horror movie establishes an emotional connection between the audience and the characters who fight on-screen for their lives, the stories told in these public accounts engage in small acts of radicalism: They center the survivors. They preempt the impulse to minimize the severity of sexual abuse. The New York Times recently promoted a story about Deborah Ramirez’s allegation against Brett Kavanaugh—he thrust his penis in her face at a party at Yale, Ramirez claims—with a tweet that began like this: “Having a penis thrust in your face at a drunken dorm party may seem like harmless fun …” (Kavanaugh has denied the allegation, and the paper quickly deleted and apologized for the tweet.) In Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill, the reporter quotes Noah Oppenheim, the president of NBC News, who was overseeing Farrow’s investigation into Weinstein for the network. Oppenheim wasn’t sure, Farrow suggests, that the stories Farrow’s sources were telling him about Weinstein’s alleged predations were, in the end, that egregious. Hearing of the recording Farrow had obtained—in which Weinstein seemed to admit to having groped the model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez—Oppenheim asked, in Farrow’s telling, “How serious is this stuff, really?”

The rest of Catch and Kill offers an answer—and a sharp rebuke—to that question. So have many of the other stories that preceded the book’s publication.

He “grabbed me by my hair, holding a fist of it at the base of my scalp.”

“I thought he might inadvertently kill me.”

“I said, ‘No, no, no’ … It’s twisted. A big fat man wanting to eat you. It’s a scary fairy tale.”

“At that point, you’re a trapped animal ... Your life is flashing before your eyes.”

Monsters are reflections of the ages that create them. They give bodily form to a culture’s deepest anxieties—about technological progress, about environmental destruction, about economic collapse and nuclear annihilation and the banality of evil. #MeToo’s monsters are all the more frightening because their stories aren’t told as fiction. These monsters walk among us. They shape our worlds. They exert their will, often, still, with impunity.

And they use shared spaces to their advantage. The writer E. Jean Carroll, who alleges that Trump forcibly penetrated her during a chance encounter in the mid-1990s, says that he did so in a tiny dressing room in the Bergdorf Goodman department store—where it was extremely easy for him to pin her against the wall, with little recourse. (The president has denied her charge.) Farrow and the authors of She Said, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, describe the almost scientific precision with which Harvey Weinstein transformed his hotel rooms into hunting grounds: He’d lead women who thought they were there for business meetings ever farther from a means of escape. (Weinstein has denied through representatives “any allegations of non-consensual sex.”) Matt Lauer recently denied that his office at NBC had a button he could push to lock his door remotely. In Catch and Kill, however, Farrow describes Lauer using that button after Farrow visited the former anchor in that office in 2016—before Lauer’s own #MeToo reckoning. The escape route, closing at Lauer’s behest.

That alleged abusers would use physical confinement to their advantage is not a surprise; the architecture contributes to the horror. Leaving Neverland, the HBO documentary that shares the stories of two men who accused Michael Jackson of molesting them when they were boys, includes details about the layout of the Neverland mansion. A network of corridors and closets, where children could be hidden from their families, even as those families were nearby, helped enable Jackson’s alleged abuses. (Jackson, throughout his life, denied the accusations; his family maintains his innocence.) A recent episode of the Cut on Tuesdays podcast told the story of a woman, Alison Turkos, who was allegedly raped and sexually trafficked by her Lyft driver—another kind of confinement, another kind of helplessness. Alison describes trying to escape his car, the doors refusing to open. She suspects the driver used child-safety locks to hold her captive until he decided she would be freed.

The horror abides. The fear extends. When Christine Blasey Ford came forward with her allegations of sexual assault* against Kavanaugh (which he denies), one of the reasons the professor was able to document her claim—through notes taken by a therapist—was that she and her husband had gone to counseling while fighting about a remodel of their home in Palo Alto, California. Ford had insisted on including a second means of egress in their bedroom, and her husband couldn’t understand why she’d need such a thing. Ford remembered a time when she had been trapped—when she thought Kavanaugh, drunk and used to getting what he wanted, might crush her under his weight. The feeling of raw helplessness lingered long after Ford finally made her escape.

The doorless hallway comes in many forms. There are so many ways to be confined. “He often tried to control every aspect of my life including who I would see and where I would go,” Tracy Sampson, one of the many women who have accused R. Kelly of a range of sexual abuses, has said. “I’ve been carrying this since 2003,” Lanita Carter, another Kelly accuser, said earlier this year. (Kelly has repeatedly denied the claims against him; “I didn’t do this stuff,” he told CBS This Morning’s Gayle King during an interview in March.) And one of the arguments common to both She Said and Catch and Kill is that alleged abusers have become savvy at using the law to prevent survivors from fully escaping them. Nondisclosure agreements, which Weinstein and his expansive legal team used for so long, function in their own way as traps.

Rowena Chiu, a former Miramax staffer who says she was assaulted by Weinstein in 1998 at the Venice Film Festival, describes wearing two pairs of tights in anticipation of what Weinstein might do to her. But she alleges that even that measure failed to deter his advances. “In the end,” Chiu writes, “I was able to wriggle off the bed and leave; I believe this is because Harvey thought there would be another night to play the game, and half the fun was the chase—the opportunity to prolong a situation in which he could exert power.” Chiu left the company, and in the process signed a nondisclosure agreement that involved such punishing terms that, until recently, Chiu did not reveal her story even to her husband. Unable to explain her abrupt departure to prospective new employers, however, and still wanting to maintain a career in entertainment, Chiu eventually returned to Miramax for a stint. “I lived in constant fear of Harvey’s abuse, control, and power,” Chiu writes; “that the story would come back to haunt me; that I would inadvertently slip up on my promise to never speak of this.”

This is why so many survivors eventually regret coming forward. This is why #MeToo remains an urgent movement. “Systemic dread” is how the writer Rebecca Traister describes the stories told in Catch and Kill. A 2017 New York Times investigation documented rampant harassment and abuse at two Ford plants in Chicago. The horrors faced by the women who worked at those plants were pervasive. They were environmental. They were inescapable. “Those who complained said they faced retaliation from co-workers and bosses,” the investigation noted. “Some women were frightened after harassers warned them to watch their backs. An Army veteran who accused a man of groping her was physically blocked by his friends from doing her work, she said. Later she found her car tires slashed in the parking lot.”

Horror, traditionally, does not ask its audiences to question the motives of the monsters. The monsters are what they are. They do what they do. Their abuses are tautological. This is another way the logic of horror makes its way into our world. “Boys will be boys” remains a common refrain among those inclined to prefer excuses over accountability. Power still protects itself, constructing narrower hallways from which the relatively powerless will try, and fail, to escape. “He’s the money man. He can do whatever he wants,” a young woman says about Donald Trump in All the President’s Women. That is another element of the horror that lurks: She was, in spite of it all, correct.

* An earlier version of this story mischaracterized Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation against Brett Kavanaugh.

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

Me Too movement

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"MeToo" redirects here. For other uses, see Me Too (disambiguation).

Not to be confused with MeTwo movement.

#MeToo does not redirect here due to technical restrictions.

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The Me Too movement (or #MeToo movement), with a large variety of local and international related names, is a movement against sexual harassment and sexual assault.[1][2][3] The phrase "Me Too" was initially used in this context on social media in 2006, on Myspace, by sexual harassment survivor and activist Tarana Burke.[4]

Similar to other social justice and empowerment movements based upon breaking silence, the purpose of "Me Too", as initially voiced by Burke as well as those who later adopted the tactic, is to empower women through empathy and strength in numbers, especially young and vulnerable women, by visibly demonstrating how many women have survived sexual assault and harassment, especially in the workplace.[4][5][6]

Following the exposure of the widespread sexual-abuse allegations against Harvey Weinstein in early October 2017,[7][8] the movement began to spread virally as a hashtag on social media.[6][9][10] On October 15, 2017, American actress Alyssa Milano posted on Twitter, "If all the women who have ever been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘Me too.’ as a status, then we give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem," saying that she got the idea from a friend.[11][12][13][14] A number of high-profile posts and responses from American celebrities Gwyneth Paltrow,[15] Ashley Judd,[16] Jennifer Lawrence,[17] and Uma Thurman, among others, soon followed.[18]

Widespread media coverage and discussion of sexual harassment, particularly in Hollywood, led to high-profile firings, as well as criticism and backlash.[19][20][21]

After millions of people started using the phrase and hashtag in this manner, it spread to dozens of other languages. The scope has become somewhat broader with this expansion, however, and Burke has more recently referred to it as an international movement for justice for marginalized people in marginalized communities.[22]

Contents

- 1Purpose

- 1.1Awareness and empathy

- 1.2Policies and laws

- 1.3Media coverage

- 1.4Issues with social norms

- 1.5Reform and implementation

- 1.6Role of men

- 2Timeline

- 2.12006 (Tarana Burke)

- 2.22015 (Ambra Gutierrez)

- 2.32016: Russia and Ukraine (Anastasia Melnichenko)

- 2.42017 (Alyssa Milano)

- 3Impact

- 3.1US media and fashion industries

- 3.2Churches

- 3.3Education

- 3.4Finance

- 3.5Politics and government

- 3.5.1ME TOO bill in the US Congress

- 3.6Silicon Valley

- 3.7Sports

- 3.8Medicine

- 3.9Music

- 3.10Social Justice and Journalism

- 3.11Military

- 3.12Pornography

- 3.13Animal Advocacy

- 3.14Astronomy

- 4Financial support

- 5International response

- 5.1List of local alternative hashtags

- 5.2Afghanistan

- 5.3Australia

- 5.4Belgium

- 5.5Canada

- 5.6Chile

- 5.7China

- 5.8Ethiopia

- 5.9France

- 5.10Germany

- 5.11Iran

- 5.12India

- 5.13Israel

- 5.14Palestine

- 5.15Italy

- 5.16Japan

- 5.17Kenya

- 5.18Nepal

- 5.19Nigeria

- 5.19.1Culture

- 5.19.2Role of power and privilege

- 5.19.3Brenda Uphopho case

- 5.20Norway

- 5.21Pakistan

- 5.21.1Zainab rape-murder case

- 5.21.2Film industry

- 5.21.3Stand-up comedy

- 5.21.4Charity sector

- 5.22Philippines

- 5.23South Korea

- 5.24Spain

- 5.25Serbia

- 5.26Sweden

- 5.27Tunisia

- 5.28United Kingdom

- 6#HimToo

- 7Criticism

- 7.1False accusations

- 7.2Undefined purpose

- 7.3Overcorrection

- 7.4Possible trauma to victims

- 7.5Exclusion of sex workers

- 7.6Not addressing police misconduct

- 7.7Lack of representation of minority women

- 7.8Overemphasis on specific cases

- 7.9Disregard for incarcerated women

- 8See also

- 9References

- 10External links

Purpose

The original purpose of "Me Too" as used by Tarana Burke in 2006 was to empower women through empathy, especially young and vulnerable women. In October 2017, Alyssa Milano encouraged using the phrase as a hashtag to help reveal the extent of problems with sexual harassment and assault by showing how many people have experienced these events themselves.[4][5]

After millions of people started using the phrase, and it spread to dozens of other languages, the purpose changed and expanded, and as a result, it has come to mean different things to different people. Tarana Burke accepts the title of "leader" of the movement, but has stated that she considers herself more of a "worker." Burke has stated that this movement has grown to include both men and women of all colors and ages, as it continues to support marginalized people in marginalized communities.[19][22] There have also been movements by men aimed at changing the culture through personal reflection and future action, including #IDidThat, #IHave, and #IWill.[23]

Awareness and empathy

Analyses of the movement often point to the prevalence of sexual violence, which has been estimated by the World Health Organization to affect one-third of all women worldwide. A 2017 poll by ABC News and The Washington Post also found that 54% of American women report receiving "unwanted and inappropriate" sexual advances with 95% saying that such behavior usually goes unpunished. Others state that #MeToo underscores the need for men to intervene when they witness demeaning behavior.[24][25][26]

Burke said that #MeToo declares sexual violence sufferers are not alone and should not be ashamed.[27] Burke says sexual violence is usually caused by someone the woman knows, so people should be educated from a young age that they have the right to say no to sexual contact from any person, even after repeat solicitations from an authority or spouse, and to report predatory behavior.[28] Burke advises men to talk to each other about consent, call out demeaning behavior when they see it and try to listen to victims when they tell their stories.[28]

Alyssa Milano described the reach of #MeToo as helping society understand the "magnitude of the problem" and said, "it's a standing in solidarity to all those who have been hurt."[29][30] She stated that the success of #MeToo will require men to take a stand against behavior that objectifies women.[31]

Policies and laws

Burke has stated the current purpose of the movement is to give people the resources to have access to healing, and to advocate for changes to laws and policies. Burke has highlighted goals such as processing all untested rape kits, re-examining local school policies, improving the vetting of teachers, and updating sexual harassment policies.[32] She has called for all professionals who work with children to be fingerprinted and subjected to a background check before being cleared to start work. She advocates for sex education that teaches kids to report predatory behavior immediately.[28] Burke supports the #MeToo bill in the US Congress, which would remove the requirement that staffers of the federal government go through months of "cooling off" before being allowed to file a complaint against a Congressperson.[32]

Milano states that a priority for #MeToo is changing the laws surrounding sexual harassment and assault, for example instituting protocols that give sufferers in all industries the ability to file complaints without retaliation. She supports legislation making it difficult for publicly traded companies to hide cover-up payments from their stockholders and would like to make it illegal for employers to require new workers to sign non-disclosure agreements as a condition of employment.[31] Gender analysts such as Anna North have stated that #MeToo should be addressed as a labor issue due to the economic disadvantages to reporting harassment. North suggested combating underlying power imbalances in some workplaces, for example by raising the tipped minimum wage, and embraces innovations like the "portable panic buttons" that are mandated for hotel employees in Seattle.[33]

Others have suggested that barriers to employment must be removed, such as the job requirement by some employers to sign non-disclosure agreements or other agreements that prevent an employee from talking about their employment publicly, or taking disputes (including sexual harassment claims) to arbitration rather than to legal proceedings. It's been suggested that legislation should be passed that bans these types of mandatory pre-employment agreements.[1]

Some policy-based changes that have been suggested include increasing managerial oversight; creating clear internal reporting mechanisms; more effective and proactive disciplinary measures; creating a culture that encourages employees to be open about serious problems;[1] imposing financial penalties for companies that allow workers to remain in their position when they have repeatedly sexually harassed others; and forcing companies to pay huge fines or lose tax breaks if they decide to retain workers who are sexual harassers.[34]

Media coverage

In the coverage of #MeToo, there has been widespread discussion about the best ways to stop sexual harassment and abuse - for those who are currently being victimized at work, as well as those who are seeking justice for past abuse and trying to find ways to end what they see as a culture of abuse. There is general agreement that a lack of effective reporting options is a major factor that drives unchecked sexual misconduct in the workplace.[35]

False reports of sexual assault are very rare, but when they happen, they are put in the spotlight for the public to see. This can give the false impression that the majority of the reported sexual assaults are false. However, false reports of sexual assault only make up 2%–10% of the total number that are reported.[36][37] These figures do not take into account the factor that the majority of victims do not report when they are assaulted or harassed. Misconceptions about false reports are one of the reasons why women are scared to report their experiences with sexual assault - because they are afraid that no one will believe them, that in the process they will have embarrassed and humiliated themselves, in addition to opening themselves up to retribution from the assailants.[38][39]

In France, a person who makes a sexual harassment complaint at work is reprimanded or fired 40% of the time, while the accused person is typically not investigated or punished.[40] In the United States, a 2016 report from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission states that although 25–85% of women say they experience sexual harassment at work, few ever report the incidents, most commonly due to fear of reprisal.[35] There is evidence that in Japan, as few as 4% of rape victims report the crime, and the charges are dropped about half the time.[41][42]

There is a discussion on the best ways to handle whisper networks, or private lists of "people to avoid" that are shared unofficially in nearly every major institution or industry where sexual harassment is common due to power imbalances, including government, media, news, and academia. These lists have the stated purpose of warning other workers in the industry and are shared from person-to-person, on forums, in private social media groups, and via spreadsheets. However, it has been argued that these lists can become "weaponized" and be used to spread unsubstantiated gossip - an opinion which has been discussed widely in the media.[43]

Defenders say the lists provide a way to warn other vulnerable people in the industry if worried about serious retribution from the abusers, especially if complaints have already been ignored. They say the lists help victims identify each other so they can speak out together and find safety in numbers.[43][44] Sometimes these lists are kept for other reasons. For example, a spreadsheet from the United Kingdom called "High Libido MPs" and dubbed "the spreadsheet of shame" was created by a group of male and female Parliamentary researchers, and contained a list of allegations against nearly 40 Conservative MPs in the British Parliament. It is also rumored that party whips (who are in charge of getting members of Parliament to commit to votes) maintain a "black book" that contains allegations against several lawmakers that can be used for blackmail.[45][46][47] When it is claimed a well-known person's sexual misconduct was an "open secret", these lists are often the source.[43] In the wake of #MeToo, several private whisper network lists have been leaked to the public.[43][44]

In India, a student gave her friends a list containing names of professors and academics in the Indian university system to be avoided. The list went viral after it was posted on social media.[48] In response to criticism in the media, the authors defended themselves by saying they were only trying to warn their friends, had confirmed every case, and several victims from the list were poor students who had already been punished or ignored when trying to come forward.[49][50] Moira Donegan, a New York City-based journalist, privately shared a crowd-sourced list of "Shitty Media Men" to avoid in publishing and journalism. When it was shared outside her private network, Donegan lost her job. Donegan stated it was unfair so few people had access to the list before it went public; for example, very few women of color received access (and therefore protection) from it. She pointed to her "whiteness, health, education, and class" that allowed her to take the risk of sharing the list and getting fired.[44]

The main problem with trying to protect more potential victims by publishing whisper networks is determining the best mechanism to verify allegations in a way that is fair to all parties.[51][52] Some suggestions have included strengthening labor unions in vulnerable industries so workers can report harassment directly to the union instead of to an employer. Another suggestion is to maintain industry hotlines which have the power to trigger third-party investigations.[51] Several apps have been developed which offer various ways to report sexual misconduct, and some of these apps also have the ability to connect victims who have reported the same person.[53]

Issues with social norms

In the wake of #MeToo, many countries such as the U.S.,[54] India,[55] France,[56] China,[57] Japan,[41] and Italy,[58] have seen discussion in the media on whether cultural norms need to be changed for sexual harassment to be eradicated in the workplace.

Dr. John Launer of Health Education England stated leaders must be made aware of common "mismatches of perceptions" at work to reduce incidents where one person thinks they are flirting while the other person feels like they're being demeaned or harassed.[59] Reporter Anna North from Vox states one way to address #MeToo is teach children the basics of sex. North states the cultural notion that women do not enjoy sex leads men "to believe that a lukewarm yes is all they're ever going to get", referring to a 2017 study which found that men who believe women enjoy being forced into sex are "more likely to perceive women as consenting".[60] Alyssa Rosenberg of The Washington Post called for society to be careful of overreaching by "being clear about what behavior is criminal, what behavior is legal but intolerable in a workplace, and what private intimate behavior is worthy of condemnation" but not part of the workplace discussion. She says "preserving the nuances" is more inclusive and realistic.[61]

Professor Daniel Drezner stated that #MeToo laid the groundwork for two major cultural shifts. One is the acceptance that sexual harassment (not just sexual assault) is unacceptable in the workplace. The other is that when a powerful person is accused of sexual harassment, the reaction should be a presumption that the less powerful accuser is "likely telling the truth, because the risks of going public are great." However, he states society is struggling with the speed at which change is being demanded.[62]

Reform and implementation

Although #MeToo initially focused on adults, the message spread to students in K–12 schools where sexual abuse is common both in person and online.[63] MeTooK12 is a spin-off of #MeToo created in January 2018 by the group Stop Sexual Assault in Schools, founded by Joel Levin and Esther Warkov, aimed at stopping sexual abuse in education from kindergarten to high school.[64][65] #MeTooK12 was inspired in part by the removal of certain federal Title IX sexual misconduct guidelines.[66] There is evidence that sexual misconduct in K–12 education is dramatically underreported by both schools and students, because nearly 80% of public schools never report any incidents of harassment. A 2011 survey found 40% of boys and 56% of girls in grades 7–12 reported had experienced some type of negative sexual comment or sexual harassment in their lives.[64][66] Approximately 5% of K–12 sexual misconduct reports involved 5 or 6-year-old students. #MeTooK12 is meant to demonstrate the widespread prevalence of sexual misconduct towards children in school, and the need for increased training on Title IX policies, as only 18 states require people in education to receive training about what to do when a student or teacher is sexually abused.[65]

Role of men

There has been discussion about what possible roles men may have in the #MeToo movement.[67][68][69] It has been noted that 1 in 6 men have experienced sexual abuse of some sort during their lives and often feel unable to talk about it.[70] Creator Tarana Burke and others have asked men to call out bad behavior when they see it,[68][69] or just spend time quietly listening.[19][71] Some men have expressed the desire to keep a greater distance from women since #MeToo went viral because they do not fully understand what actions might be considered inappropriate.[72][73] For the first few months after #MeToo started trending, many men expressed difficulty in participating in the conversation due to fear of negative consequences, citing examples of men who have been treated negatively after sharing their thoughts about #MeToo.[74]

Author and former pick-up artist Michael Ellsberg encourages men to reflect on past behavior and examples of questionable sexual behavior, such as the viral story Cat Person, which is written from the perspective of a twenty-year-old woman who goes on a date with a much older man and ends up having an unpleasant sexual experience that was consensual but unwanted. Ellsberg has asked men to pledge to ensure women are mutually interested in initiating a sexual encounter and to slow down if there is ever doubt a woman wants to continue.[75][76]

Relationship instructor Kasia Urbaniak said the movement is creating its own crisis around masculinity. "There's a reflective questioning about whether they’re going to be next and if they’ve ever hurt a woman. There's a level of anger and frustration. If you’ve been doing something wrong but haven't been told, there's an incredible sense of betrayal and it’ll provoke a backlash. I think silence on both sides is incredibly dangerous." Urbaniak says she would like women to be allies of men and to be curious about their experience. "In that alliance there's a lot more power and possibility than there is in men stepping aside and starting to stew."[77]

In August 2018, The New York Times detailed allegations that leading #MeToo figure Asia Argento sexually assaulted actor Jimmy Bennett.[78] The sexual assault allegedly took place in a California hotel room in 2013 when he was only two months past his 17th birthday and she was 37; the age of consent in that state is 18.[78] Bennett said when Argento came out against Harvey Weinstein, it stirred memories of his own experience. He imparted he had sought to resolve the matter privately, and had not spoken out sooner, "because I was ashamed and afraid to be part of the public narrative."[79] In a statement provided to The Times, he said: "I was underage when the event took place, and I tried to seek justice in a way that made sense to me at the time because I was not ready to deal with the ramifications of my story becoming public. At the time I believed there was still a stigma to being in the situation as a male in our society. I didn't think that people would understand the event that took place from the eyes of a teenage boy." Bennett said he would like to "move past this event in my life," adding, "today I choose to move forward, no longer in silence."[79] Argento, who quietly arranged a $380,000 nondisclosure settlement with Bennett in the months following her revelations regarding Weinstein, has denied the allegations.[80] Rose McGowan initially expressed support for Argento on and implored others to show restraint, tweeting, "None of us know the truth of the situation and I'm sure more will be revealed. Be gentle." As one of the most vocal advocates of the Me Too movement, McGowan faced criticism on social media for her comments, which conflicted with the movement's message of believing survivors.[81] MeToo founder Tarana Burke responded the Asia Argento report, stating "I’ve said repeatedly that the #metooMVMT is for all of us, including these brave young men who are now coming forward. Sexual violence is about power and privilege. That doesn't change if the perpetrator is your favorite actress, activist or professor of any gender."[3]

Timeline

2006 (Tarana Burke)

Tarana Burke, a social activist and community organizer, began using the phrase "Me Too" in 2006, on the Myspace social network[4] in order to promote "empowerment through empathy" among women of color who have been sexually abused.[14][82][83] Burke, who is creating a documentary titled Me Too, has said she was inspired to use the phrase after being unable to respond to a 13-year-old girl who confided to her that she had been sexually assaulted. Burke said she later wished she had simply told the girl: "Me too".[4][27]

2015 (Ambra Gutierrez)

In 2015 The New York Times reported that Weinstein was questioned by police "after a 22-year-old woman accused him of touching her inappropriately."[84] The woman, Italian model Ambra Gutierrez, cooperated with the New York City Police Department (NYPD) to obtain an audio recording where Weinstein admitted to having inappropriately touched her.[85] As the police investigation progressed and became public, tabloids published negative stories about Gutierrez that portrayed her as an opportunist.[86] American Media, publisher of the National Enquirer, allegedly agreed to help suppress the allegations by Gutierrez and Rose McGowan. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. decided not to file charges against Weinstein, citing insufficient evidence of criminal intent, against the advice of local police who considered the evidence sufficient.[87] The New York district attorney's office and the NYPD blamed each other for failing to bring charges.[87]

2016: Russia and Ukraine (Anastasia Melnichenko)

In July 2016, a social media post by Ukrainian journalist Anastasia Melnichenko went viral. Thousands of women, and some men, in Russia and Ukraine began posting their personal stories of sexual harassment and assault on social media using the hashtag #IAmNotAfraidToSpeak (#яНеБоюсьСказати‬ in Ukrainian; #яНеБоюсьСказать in Russian).[88][89][90][91] Her original post in Ukrainian[92] was about a sexual harassment in family, on the streets, with ex-boyfriend, but not in the workspace. Also she updated her post with the words: "Цей допис писала, лютуючи на коменти чоловіків під цим дописом: <...>. Тому і дозволила собі досить агресивний випад у бік чоловіків вкінці посту. Звісно ж, не хотіла образити хороших і адекватних. Як з*ясувалося, їх більше, ніж я думала." ("I wrote this post, raging at the comments of men under this post: <...> That is why I let myself aggressive enough attack towards men at the end of the post. Of course, I did not want to offend good and adequate ones. As it turned out, there are more of them than I thought.").

2017 (Alyssa Milano)

Following widespread exposure of accusations of predatory behavior by Harvey Weinstein, and her own blog post on the subject, on October 15, 2017, actress Alyssa Milano wrote: "If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.", and reposted the following phrase suggested by a friend: "If all the women who have ever been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote 'Me too.' as a status, then we give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.",[12][11] encouraging spreading the phrase "Me Too." to attempt to draw attention to sexual assault and harassment.[14][5] The next day, October 16, 2017, Milano wrote: "I was just made aware of an earlier #MeToo movement, and the origin story is equal parts heartbreaking and inspiring", providing the link to site of Ms. Burke.[4][27][93] Milano credits her identification with the Me Too movement to being personally affected by sexual harassment during a concert when she was 19.[94]

Alyssa Milano encouraged use of the hashtag after accusations against Harvey Weinstein surfaced in 2017.

Several hashtags related to sharing stories of workplace sexual harassment were in use before #MeToo, including #MyHarveyWeinstein, #WhatWereYouWearing (on March 12, 2014 there was a question on Twitter "What Were You Wearing When You Were Assaulted?" and there were answers what they wore;[95] there were posts with the #whatwereyouwearing as late as of 2010, not related to any kind of sexual harassment or workplace[96][97][98]), #SurvivorPrivilege (in June 2014 the #SurvivorPrivilege was about alleged lies of rape survivors to get privileges and denial of that by females, especially by students[99]) and #YouOkSis (on August 2, 2014 there was #YouOkSis about street harassment[100]).[101][102][103]

Impact

US media and fashion industries

See also: Weinstein effect and Sexual abuse in Hollywood

The phrase "Me too" was tweeted by Milano around noon on October 15, 2017, and had been used more than 200,000 times by the end of the day,[104] and tweeted more than 500,000 times by October 16.[105] On Facebook, the hashtag was used by more than 4.7 million people in 12 million posts during the first 24 hours.[27] The platform reported that 45% of users in the United States had a friend who had posted using the term.[106]

Tens of thousands of people, including hundreds of celebrities, replied with #MeToo stories.[107] Some men, such as actors Terry Crews[108] and James Van Der Beek,[109] have responded to the hashtag with their own experiences of harassment and abuse. Others have responded by acknowledging past behaviors against women, spawning the hashtag #HowIWillChange.[110]

In addition to Hollywood, "Me Too" declarations elicited discussion of sexual harassment and abuse in the music industry,[111] sciences,[112] academia,[113] and politics.[114]

Feminist author Gloria Feldt stated in Time that many employers are being forced to make changes in response to #MeToo, for example examining gender-based pay differences and improving sexual harassment policies.[115] Others have noted there has been pressure on companies, specifically in the financial industry, to disclose diversity statistics[clarification needed].[116]

In January 2019, actress Emma Thompson pulled out of the production "Luck" based on the production company's decision to hire former Disney Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter. Lasseter had been accused of harassing women while at Disney.[117] Thompson wrote a letter in February 2019 to the American production company Skydance, to explain her reasons for leaving "Luck". Among others, Thompson stated: "If a man has been touching women inappropriately for decades, why would a woman want to work for him if the only reason he’s not touching them inappropriately now is that it says in his contract that he must behave "professionally"?[118]

The 2019 rerelease of Toy Story 2 had a blooper scene during the credits removed due to sexual misconduct concerns.[119]

Churches

In November 2017, the hashtag #ChurchToo was started by Emily Joy and Hannah Paasch on Twitter and began trending in response to #MeToo as a way to try to highlight and stop sexual abuse that happens in a church.[120][121] In early January 2018, about a hundred evangelical women also launched #SilenceIsNotSpiritual to call for changes to how sexual misconduct is dealt within the church.[122][123] #ChurchToo started spreading again virally later in January 2018 in response to a live-streamed video admission by Pastor Andy Savage to his church that he sexually assaulted a 17-year-old girl twenty years before as a youth pastor while driving her home, but then received applause by his church for admitting to the incident and asking for forgiveness. Pastor Andy Savage then resigned from his staff position at Highpoint Church and stepped away from ministry.[124][125][126] Many have argued that one of the biggest crises in the history of the Catholic Church is the current child sexual abuse that is being reported, according to Tom Inglis in his book Are the Irish Different?.[127]

Education

See also: Francisco J. Ayala § Sexual harassment investigation and resignation; and University of California, Irvine § Internal and political controversies

The University of California has been no stranger to sexual harassment, with substantial accusations reported yearly in the hundreds at all nine UC campuses, notably UC Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, and San Diego.[128] However, a landmark event at the University of California, Irvine spearheaded the removal and reprimand of several campus officials and professors accused of sexual harassment and discrimination. In early July 2018, UC Irvine removed millionaire benefactor Francisco J. Ayala's name from its biology school, central science library, graduate fellowships, scholar programs, and endowed chairs after an internal investigation substantiated a number of sexual harassment claims. The results from the investigation were compiled in a 97-page report, which included testimony from victims enduring Ayala's harassment for 15 years.[129][130][131][132][133][134][135] His removal promptly sparked the removal of Professor Ron Carlson in August 2018, who had led the creative writing program at UC Irvine. He resigned after substantiated reports of sexual misconduct with an underage student were unearthed.[136] UC Irvine upon learning about the report accepted Professor Carlson's immediate resignation.[137] Additionally, four additional professors in the School of Biological Sciences at UC Irvine between June and August 2018 were put under sanctions or terminated for violating the UC Policy on Sexual Harassment including Thomas A. Parham, former vice chancellor at UC Irvine and former president of the Association of Black Psychologists.[138]

To address harassment within scientific settings, BethAnn McLaughlin started the #MeTooSTEM movement and hashtag.[139] She called for the National Institutes of Health to cut funding to anyone who has been found guilty of harassment charges.[139][140] McLaughlin shared the MIT Media Lab Disobedience Award with Tarana Burke and Sherry Marts for her work on Me Too in STEM.[141][142]

There are still many places of education such as high schools, however, where legal intervention is not readily enforced for situations where sexual assault takes place. Pamela Y. Price in her book Directions in Sexual Harassment Law describes how "a major argument for why [laws against] sexual harassment won't work in education is that issues of sexuality can't be regulated (similar to the debate in employment) or that adolescent behavior is too unpredictable to be legally controlled" (Price 62).[143]

Finance

It has been noted that, although the financial industry is known to have a wide prevalence of sexual harassment,[144] as of January 2018, there were no high-profile financial executives stepping down as the result of #MeToo allegations.[145] The first widely covered example of concrete consequences in finance was when two reporters, including Madison Marriage of the Financial Times, went undercover at a men-only Presidents Club event meant to raise money for children. Because women were not allowed to attend except as "hostesses" in tight, short black dresses with black underwear, Financial Times reporter Madison Marriage and another reporter got jobs as hostesses and documented widespread sexual misconduct. As a result, The Presidents Club was shut down.[145]

In March 2018, Morgan Stanley broker Douglas E. Greenberg was put on administrative leave after a New York Times story outlined harassment allegations by four women, including multiple arrests for the violation of restraining orders, and a threat to burn down an ex-girlfriend's house. It has been called the #MeToo moment of Portland's financial service industry.[146]

Only about a quarter of top positions are held by women at several major banks, and there is evidence there may be wide disparities in some financial institutions between how much men and women are paid on average.[116][relevant? – discuss]

The authors of a December 2018 Bloomberg News article on this topic interviewed more than thirty senior Wall Street executives and found that many are now more cautious about mentoring up and coming female executives because of the perceived risks involved. One said, "If men avoid working or traveling with women alone, or stop mentoring women for fear of being accused of sexual harassment, those men are going to back out of a sexual harassment complaint and right into a sex discrimination complaint."[147]

Politics and government

Statehouses in California, Illinois, Oregon, and Rhode Island responded to allegations of sexual harassment surfaced by the campaign,[148] and several women in politics spoke out about their experiences of sexual harassment, including United States Senators Heidi Heitkamp, Mazie Hirono, Claire McCaskill and Elizabeth Warren.[114] Congresswoman Jackie Speier has introduced a bill aimed at making sexual harassment complaints easier to report on Capitol Hill.[149] The accusations in the world of Spanish politics have also been published in the media,[150] and a series of allegations and research on MPs and political figures of (all major British political parties) regarding sexual impropriety became a nationwide scandal in 2017; this research was undertaken in the aftermath of the Weinstein scandal and the Me Too movement.[151][152][153]

Detective Leslie Branch-Wise of the Denver Police Department spoke publicly for the first time in 2018 about experiencing sexual harassment by Denver Mayor Michael B. Hancock. The detective provided sexually suggestive text messages from Hancock sent to her while working for Hancock's security detail in 2012. After six years of keeping the secret, Detective Branch-Wise credited the Me Too movement as an inspiration to share her experience.[154]

Congressman John Conyers was the first sitting United States politician to resign in the wake of #MeToo.[155][156][157] Later in 2019, Katie Hill resigned from Congress[158] due to an affair with a staffer after the House Ethics Committee opened an investigation into her conduct, stemming from these new rules.[159]

ME TOO bill in the US Congress

Jackie Speier proposed the Member and Employee Training and Oversight on Congress Act (ME TOO Congress Act) on November 15, 2017.[160] The full language of the bipartisan bill was revealed by the House on January 18, 2018 as an amendment to the Congressional Accountability Act of 1995.[161] The purpose of the bill is to change how the legislative branch of the U.S. federal government treats sexual harassment complaints. Under the old system, complaints regarding the legislative branch were channeled through the Office of Compliance, which required complete confidentially through the process and took months of counseling and mediation before a complaint could actually be filed. Any settlement payments were paid using federal taxes, and it was reported that within a decade, $15 million of tax money had been spent settling harassment and discrimination complaints. The bill would ensure future complaints could only take up to 180 days to be filed. The bill would also allow the staffers to transfer to a different department or otherwise work away from the presence of the alleged harasser without losing their jobs if they requested it. The bill would require Representatives and Senators to pay for their own harassment settlements. The Office of Compliance would no longer be allowed to keep settlements secret, and would be required to publicly publish the settlement amounts and the associated employing offices. For the first time, the same protections would also apply to unpaid workers, including pages, fellows and interns.[162][163][164]

Silicon Valley

In the months preceding the NY Times story on Harvey Weinstein, Travis Kalanick (CEO of Uber at the time) came under fire for enabling a misogynist culture at the company, and having extensive knowledge of sexual harassment complaints at the company, while failing to do anything about them.[165] After an initial blog post by a former Uber Engineer detailed her experiences at the company, more employees came out with their own stories, as documented in a follow-up article by the NY Times in late February, 2017. In it, they detail how they had notified senior management including Kalanick about incidents of sexual harassment, and that their complaints had gone ignored.[166] A few months later, in June of 2017, Kalanick himself came under allegations of sexual harassment, as it was reported that he visited an escort bar in Seoul, bringing fellow female employees of the company along with him. [167] One of the female employees filed a complaint to Human Resources about how she felt forced to be there, and was very uncomfortable in that environment, where women were made to wear tags with numbers on them, as if in an auction. [168] Fresh allegations of sexual harassment at the company surfaced one year later, implicating Uber's Corporate Development Executive Cameron Poetzscher. The allegations made it clear that Uber was not taking this issue seriously enough. [169]

On October 25, 2018, the New York Times released a detailed report on the prior behavior of Andy Rubin at Google. The allegations cite that Google knew of a sexual misconduct claim against Rubin, and yet still decided to pay him a $90 million separation package at his departure from the company.[170]

Sports

Soon after #MeToo started spreading in late 2017, several allegations from a 2016 Indianapolis Star article resurfaced in the gymnastic industry against former U.S. Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar of Michigan State University. Nassar was called out via #MeToo for sexually assaulting gymnasts as young as 6 years old during "treatments".[171] Rachael Denhollander was the first to call him out.[172] Though nothing was done after the initial allegations came out in 2016, after more than 150 women came forward, Nassar was effectively sentenced to life in prison. The president of Michigan State University, Lou Anna Simon, resigned in the wake of the scandal.[171]

At around the same time, WNBA star Breanna Stewart publicly revealed that she had been a victim of child sexual abuse from age 9 to 11.[173]

In late November 2017, Lui Lai Yiu, a hurdler from Hong Kong, recounted in a Facebook post instances of having been sexually assaulted by her male coach when she was 14, sparking off mass controversy in Hong Kong.[174] Her coach was arrested in late January 2018,[175] but acquitted in mid-November 2018.[176]

In 1996, while attending the University of Tennessee, former American football player Peyton Manning was accused of sexual assault by trainer Jamie Ann Naughright after he pressed his genitals against Naughright's face during a foot examination. Manning claims that he was just pulling a prank by "mooning" another athlete in the room as Naughright bent over to examine him. Both Naughright and the other athlete deny Manning's story. Naughright settled with the university for $300,000 for its alleged failure in four incidents, and resigned from the school. She had initially made a list of 33 complaints about the school.[177] Naughright filed a defamation lawsuit against Peyton Manning and three other parties in 2002. Manning defamed her in a book he wrote with his father and author John Underwood. The lawsuit was settled after the court ruled there was sufficient evidence for it to be heard by a jury. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed due to confidentiality terms.[178][179]

Medicine

MeToo has encouraged discussion about sexual harassment in the medical field.[59][180][181] Research had indicated that among U.S. academic medical faculty members, about 30% of women and 4% of men have reported experiencing sexual harassment, and it has been noted that medical staff who complain often receive negative consequences to their careers.[69][181] Other evidence has indicated 60% of medical trainees and students experienced harassment or discrimination during training, though most do not report the incidents.[59]

Music

Several prominent musicians have expressed support for the Me Too movement and have shared their own experiences of sexual assault and harassment.

Before the Me Too Movement, in 2017, Jessie Reyez released the song "Gatekeeper" about her experience of harassment by a famous producer, describing the conversations men in power have with young women working in the music industry.[182] This song inspired female artists in the music industry to speak up against sexual harassment, contributing to the start of the Me Too movement.[183]

Actress Alyssa Milano's activism for the Me Too movement began because she was harassed at the age of 19 during a concert.[184] On October 15, 2017, she started a viral twitter thread by tweeting "If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet." Musicians such as Sheryl Crow, Christina Perri and Lady Gaga responded and contributed their own personal experiences.[185]

Amanda Palmer and songwriter Jasmine Power composed "Mr. Weinstein Will See You Now", a song that takes listeners through a story of a woman being invited to the office of a man in power.[186] A music video with an all-woman crew, cast and production team was released on the anniversary of the New York Times's reporting on sexual abuse allegations against Harvey Weinstein, with profits donated to #TimesUp, a movement against sexual harassment.[187]

The band Veruca Salt used the #MeToo hashtag to air allegations of sexual harassment against James Toback,[188] and singer-songwriter Alice Glass used the hashtag to share a history of alleged sexual assault and other abuses by former Crystal Castles bandmate Ethan Kath.[189][190]

Singer Halsey wrote a poem, "A Story Like Mine", which she delivered at a 2018 Women's march in New York City. The poem describes incidents of sexual assault and violence throughout her life, including accompanying her best friend to Planned Parenthood after she had been raped and her personal experiences of sexual assault by neighbors and boyfriends.[191]

Allegations against figures in the music industry

In January 2019, the Lifetime documentary Surviving R. Kelly aired, describing several women's accusations of sexual, emotional, mental, and physical abuse by singer R. Kelly. The documentary questioned the "ecosystem" that "supports and enables" powerful individuals in the music industry.[192] In February 2019, Kelly was arrested for 10 alleged counts of sexual abuse against four women, three of whom were minors at the time of the incidents.[193] His former wife Andrea Kelly has also accused him of domestic violence and filed a restraining order against him in 2005.[194]

Singer Kesha has accused her former producer Dr. Luke of sexually, physically, and emotionally abusing her since the beginning of her music career.[195] Dr. Luke denied the allegations and a judge refused her request to be released from a contract with Sony Music due to the alleged abuse.[196] Kesha described her response to this experience in the song "Praying", which she performed at the 2018 Grammys. The song was seen as offering encouragement to sexual assault survivors that the world can improve.[197]

A documentary was also instrumental in publicizing accusations in the case of late singer Michael Jackson. Child sexual abuse allegations against Jackson were renewed after the airing of the documentary Leaving Neverland in 2019. The documentary focuses on Wade Robson and James Safechuck and their interactions with Jackson, especially the sexual interactions they say they endured for years during their childhood.[198] Both had previously testified in Jackson's defense — Safechuck as a child during the 1993 investigation, Robson both as a child in 1993 and as a young adult in 2005.[199][200] In 2015, Robson's case against Jackson's estate was dismissed on the grounds that it was filed too late.[201][202][203] The documentary resulted in a backlash against Jackson and a reassessment of his legacy in some quarters, while other viewers dismissed it as one-sided, questioned its veracity and viewed it as unconvincing due to factual conflicts between the film and the 1993 and 2005 allegations against Jackson, and his acquittal at trial.[204]

Removal of music

In November 2018, Cleveland, Ohio radio station WDOK Star 102 announced that it had removed the song "Baby, It's Cold Outside" from its playlist because listeners felt that the lyrics were inappropriate. The station's host commented that "in a world where #MeToo has finally given women the voice they deserve, the song has no place".[205] The streaming service Spotify removed music by XXXTentacion and R. Kelly from Spotify-owned playlists after allegations of "hateful conduct",[183][206] but later reversed course due to the fact that the allegations against the artists were unproven.[207]

Social Justice and Journalism

Eventually, the Me Too Movement became analyzed under a journalistic viewpoint, as writers and editors began to push the movement into larger news networks and labor sectors. Particularly, Sarah Lyons, who wrote "Hands Off Pants On," illustrated the importance of allowing an open space for victims of sexual assault in the work place to heal.[208] Further, the article also revealed the creation of the campaign, "UNITE HERE," which has a driving goal to protect women who felt threatened by sharing their stories and creating devices to stop assault before it happens.

Another scope that is critical to understand in order to lift up survivors of sexual violence is that of the legal system. In Sarah Jaffe's article, she analyzed victims thought the extent to which they are forced to follow through with police departments, and they (possibly) the court systems.[209] This path is currently struggling, and was constructed to fail those who need assistance the most.

Military

See also: Sexual assault in the United States military

Poster created by the U.S. Army's Sexual Harassment/Assault Response & Prevention

In the wake of #MeToo, #MeTooMilitary came to be used by service men and women who were sexually assaulted or harassed while in the military,[210] appearing on social media in January 2018 the day after remarks by Oprah Winfrey at the Golden Globe Awards honoring female soldiers in the military "whose names we'll never know" who have suffered sexual assault and abuse in order to make things better for women today.[211]

A report from the Pentagon indicated that 15,000 members of the military reported being sexually assaulted in the year 2016 and only 1 out of 3 people assaulted actually made a report.[212] Veteran Nichole Bowen-Crawford has said the rates have improved over the last decade, but the military still has a long way to go, and recommends that women veterans connect privately on social media to discuss sexual abuse in a safe environment.[211][213]

There was a "#MeTooMilitary Stand Down" protest, organized by Service Women's Action Network, which gathered at the Pentagon on January 8, 2018. The protest was endorsed by the U.S. Department of Defense, who stated that current service members were welcome to attend as long as they did not wear their uniform.[214][215][216] The protest supported the Military Justice Improvement Act, sponsored by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, which would move "the decision over whether to prosecute serious [sex] crimes to independent, trained, professional military prosecutors, while leaving uniquely military crimes within the chain of command".[215]

Pornography

There have been discussions about how pornography is related to the emergence of the #MeToo movement, and what changes, if any, should be made to the porn industry in response.[217][218] The deaths of five female porn actresses during the first three months of 2018 inspired demands that workers in the industry be included as part of the #MeToo movement.[219] It has been pointed out that many women and men have been sexually assaulted on set.[220] Some high-profile pornographic performers have been accused of assault since the emergence of #MeToo, including James Deen and Ron Jeremy.[219][221][222] The porn industry has overall been supportive of #MeToo, with the topics of harassment and bodily autonomy being addressed at the 2018 AVN Awards.[223] There have been calls for the industry to police itself better in the wake of #MeToo.[220] However, when gay actor Tegan Zayne accused fellow actor Topher DiMaggio of rape in a #MeToo post, and four other men came forward with their own allegations of sexual misconduct against DiMaggio, very little happened and there was no official investigation.[224]

Several groups of Christians, conservative women, and radical feminists have argued that #MeToo demonstrates pornography causes women to be viewed as sexual objects and contributes to the prevalence of sexual harassment. As a result, these groups believe the production and consumption of pornography should be greatly restricted or made illegal.[217]

Other social advocates and feminists have responded by pointing out that attempts to suppress pornography in the U.S. have historically never been effective at reducing consumption. They note that porn consumption in the U.S. is currently at what is likely the highest levels in history, but overall levels of sexual violence and rape are far lower today than when the anti-pornography movement in the U.S. first emerged during the 1960s. Additionally, many feminists argue that laws which make pornography illegal only further restrict women as far what they are and are not allowed to do with their bodies.[217]

Many feminists have stated that pornography can be empowering or enjoyable for women and depicting female sexuality is not always objectification.[217][225] Others point out that a lot of porn is made by women and for women.[226] Award-winning porn actress and director Angela White says there is a "large positive shift within the industry" to more women directing and producing their own content and "to represent women as powerful sexual beings."[219] Anti-porn activist Melissa Farley has said this ignores the "choicelessness" faced by many actresses in porn.[217] Liberal advocates argue that anti-pornography movements in the U.S. have historically never tried to increase choices for vulnerable adult performers, and taking away a person's right to act in porn may hurt them economically by reducing their choices. Many adult performers have stated that the social stigma surrounding their type of work is already a major barrier when they're seeking help, and making porn illegal would leave them few options if they are suffering from sexual abuse.[219]

As a result of #MeToo, many adult performers, sex worker advocates and feminists have called for greater protections for pornographic actresses, for example reducing social stigmas, mandating training courses that teach performers their rights, and providing access to independent hotlines where performers can report abuse. They argue that making porn illegal would only cause the production of porn to go underground where there are even fewer options for help. Some liberal activists have argued to compromise by raising the legal age of entry into adult entertainment from 18 to 21, which would prevent some of the most vulnerable women from being taken advantage of, while allowing adult women to still do what they want with their own bodies.[219]

Some have pointed out that many young people who do not receive a sex education adopt ideas about sex and sexual roles from pornography, whose fantasy depictions of those behaviors are not accurate to life, as they are designed for purposes of adult entertainment, and not educating the public on the reality of sexual behavior.[227] Some areas of the United States teach birth-control methods only by abstinence from sex. In a 2015 article for the American Journal of Nursing David Carter noted that a study found that abstinence-based education was "correlated with increases in teenage pregnancies and births". Multiple people have voiced support for comprehensive sex education programs that encompass a wide range topics, which they state leave children more informed.[228] Several feminists have argued it is crucial to provide children with basic sex education before they are inevitably exposed to porn. Sex education can also effectively prepare children to identify and say no to unwanted sexual contact before it occurs, and gives parents an opportunity to teach children about consent.[229]

Animal Advocacy

The #MeToo movement has had an impact on the field of animal advocacy. For instance, on January 30, 2018, Politico published an article titled, "Female Employees Allege Culture of Sexual Harassment at Humane Society: Two senior officials, including the CEO, have been investigated for incidents dating back over a decade."[230] The article concerned allegations against then- Humane Society of the United States CEO, Wayne Pacelle; and a well-known animal protection activist named Paul Shapiro.[231] Mr. Pacelle soon resigned.[232] Mr. Shapiro also soon left the Humane Society of the United States.[233] Both men have nonetheless continued to hold leadership positions either in, or adjacent to, the animal protection movement.[234][235]

Astronomy

The #astroSH twitter tag was used to discuss sexual harassment in the field of Astronomy, and several scientists and professors resigned or were fired.[236][237][238][239]

Financial support

In May 2018, The New York Women's Foundation announced their Fund to Support the Me Too Movement and Allies, a $25M commitment over the next five years to provide funding and support survivors of sexual violence.[240]

In September 2018, CBS announced that it would be donating $20 million of former Chairman Les Moonves' severance to #MeToo. Moonves was forced to step down after numerous sexual misconduct accusations.[241][242]

International response

The hashtag has trended in at least 85 countries,[243] including India, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom. Direct translations of #MeToo have been shared by Spanish speakers in South America and Europe and by Arabic speakers in Africa and the Middle East, while activists in France and Italy have developed hashtags to express the attitudes of the movement.[244] Communicating similar experiences and "sharing feelings in some form of togetherness" connects people and can lead to "formation of a process of collective action" (Castells).[245][246] The campaign has prompted survivors from around the world to share their stories, and name their perpetrators. The European Parliament convened a session directly in response to the Me Too campaign, after it gave rise to allegations of abuse in Parliament and in the European Union's offices in Brussels. Cecilia Malmström, the European Commissioner for Trade, specifically cited the hashtag as the reason the meeting had been convened.[247]

List of local alternative hashtags

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- Arab League Arabic: #أنا_كمان (en: MeToo)[248]

- Canada, French-speaking areas: #MoiAussi (en: MeToo)[249]

- China, Mainland: #我也是 and #WoYeShi (en: MeToo)[250]

- Finland: #memyös (en: WeToo)

- France: #balanceTonPorc (en: DenounceYourPig,[251] ExposeYourPig[252]) #noustoutes (en: All (of) us (women))

- India: #मैंभी (en: MeToo)[253]

- Iran: #من_هم_همینطور (en: MeToo)

- Italy: #QuellaVoltaChe (en: ThatTimeThat)[248]

- Israel: #גםאנחנו (en: UsToo) גםאני#, גמאני# (en: MeToo)

- Japan: #私も and #WatashiMo (en: MeToo)

- Kazakhstan: #МенДе or #MenDe (en: MeToo)[254]

- North Macedonia: #СегаКажувам (en: NowTelling)

- Norway: #stilleføropptak (en: SilentUntilRecorded), #nårdansenstopper (en: WhentheDanceStops), #nårmusikkenstilner (en: WhentheMusicQuiets)

- Pakistan: #میں_بھی (en: MeToo)

- Russia: #МеняТоже or #Ятоже (en: MeToo)

- South Korea: #나도당했다 (en: MeToo)

- Spain: #YoTambién (en: MeToo)[248] (

Catalonia: #JoTambé) (

Basque Country: #NiEre) (

Galicia: #EuTamén)

- Taiwan: #我也是 and #WoYeShi (en: MeToo)

- Tunisia: #EnaZeda (en: MeToo)[255]

- Vietnam: #TôiCũngVậy (en: MeToo)

Afghanistan

The #MeToo hashtag initially spread in Afghanistan where it is estimated about 90% of women experience sexual harassment in public, at school, or at work, but was quickly silenced when those who shared their stories started fearing for their life.[256][257] Less than 1% of police officers or military members are women, and sexual assault is often ignored by law enforcement and the military.[258] Rape threats and other types of harassment are common on Facebook and other social media in Afghanistan. Sharing stories of sexual abuse against higher-ranking men is especially dangerous for women in the country, and may result in the killing of the victim or her family members.[257] Some women are also punished or killed to by their own family for speaking out, to redeem their "honor" after being tarnished by rape.[257] Despite the risks, some notable people such as Sarienews journalist Maryam Mehtar, and presidential advisor Shaharzad Akbar have shared their own #MeToo stories on social media. Mehtar experienced extreme abuse and several death threats for sharing her story about being sexually harassed in public on a daily basis, and was publicly called a "whore" in an interview with The New York Times by Afghan writer Jalil Junbish. He also called the NYT reporter a whore in the same interview. He later denied making the comments.[258] Other women only share their first name or a fake name, and typically describe the story without naming the perpetrator for fear of reprisal.[258] Sexual harassment was first defined in Afghanistan in 2016, though there has been little effort made to enforce laws against it.[256] Rod Nordland and Fatima Faizi of The New York Times reported that a colonel in the Afghan Air Force was secretly and clearly videotaped sexually assaulting a subordinate in November 2017, and the video quickly went viral, but despite an alleged investigation, the colonel has not been formally accused of misconduct.[258] The Ministries of Interior and Communications set up a phone hotline to for women to call to report sexual misconduct from law enforcement officials, but a call to the line revealed the hotline will offer advice only about phone harassment, and stated if a person harasses you in person, to "slap them".[258]

Australia

In October 2017 reporter and journalist Tracey Spicer announced on Twitter that she was launching an investigation into reports of sexual harassment by powerful Australian men in the media in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse allegations and the rise in public awareness of the #MeToo movement. Earlier that same year, Spicer had released a memoir, The Good Girl Stripped Bare, where she wrote about her own experiences of sexual harassment in the work place.[259] Spicer later reported that she had received responses from 470 people about people in the industry, including Australian television presenter and producer Don Burke.[260] The extent of the claims against Burke were published by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and The Sydney Morning Herald in a joint investigative piece on November 26, 2017, where it was reported that "One name kept recurring – Don Burke."[261][262] Spicer, along with Kate McClymont, Lorna Knowles and Alison Branley, won the 2018 Walkley Awards in the print/text journalism and Television/Video Current Affairs Short (less than 20 minutes) categories for their investigation and on Australia Day in 2018, Spicer was appointed as a Member of the Order of Australia "for significant service to the broadcast media as a journalist and television presenter, and as an ambassador for social welfare and charitable groups".[263][264] Later that same year, Spicer and Melinda Schneider launched NOW Australia, a campaign aimed at helping connect people with legal support and counselling.[265]

Since then the #MeToo movement has now expanded beyond Australian media and the Australian Human Rights Commission has launched an independent search into workplace sexual harassment that is the first of its kind in the world.[266]

It has been hypothesised by The Age that Australia's strict defamation laws make it difficult for more victims to come forward.[267] Yael Stone made an accusation against Geoffrey Rush[268][269] who then successfully sued her for defamation; this may have a chilling effect on the #MeToo movement due to the lack of protection for freedom of speech.[270]

The #MeToo movement was announced the winner of the 2019 Sydney Peace Prize. The award will be presented to Tarana Burke and Tracey Spicer on November 14, 2019.[271]

Belgium

In May 2019, Julie Van Espen was the victim of a homicide in Antwerp. Her death has led to political protests against sexual violence. That month, over 15,000 people walked a 'silent march' in Antwerp for Van Espen. The hashtags '#enough', '#MeToo' and '#JulieVanEspen' were used by people on social media to command attention to the case, to raise awareness on sexual violence, and to address that the suspect of her murder had been convicted of rape twice before.[272]

Canada

Éric Salvail, accused of sexual harassment

In French-speaking parts of Canada, the campaign is done under the hashtag #MoiAussi.[273] A minister of Quebec, Hélène David, said she believed a global movement was in the works and we should salute this change.[274] It was reported that calls to rape and women's crisis centers have increased dramatically, up to 553% above normal levels,[275] since #MoiAussi started trending in October 2017, causing problems with staffing and budgeting.[276] Quebec has contributed $1 million to help support these crisis hotlines.[275] Hundreds of people marched to promote #MoiAussi at an event in Toronto in December 2017.[277] In the wake of #MoiAussi, a candidate for mayor of Plateau-Mont-Royal dropped out of the race in response to allegations of sexual misconduct from several women.[278] Montreal police set up a phone hotline for people who have been raped or harassed to call.[274] Radio and TV presenter Éric Salvail was accused by 11 people of either being sexually harassed, or witnessing harassment from Salvail.[274] He lost several endorsements and was suspended from most projects he was involved with.[279] Humorist Gilbert Rozon resigned from all his positions and tried to sell his company in the wake of several sexual misconduct allegations, including one from producer Julie Snyder, a class action lawsuit from several women, and a sexual assault report filed with the police.

A newly popular hashtag, #EtMaintenant (#AndNow or Now What?) has started spreading as the "second part" to #MoiAussi to discuss what to do now that the magnitude of the problem with sexual misconduct in the workplace has been exposed. #EtMaintenant is represented by a yellow heart. It was unveiled on the show Tout le monde en parle in January 2018, with the stated purpose of determining which attitudes related to society, politics, institutions, and media need to be changed to ensure equity between all people.[280]

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been a vocal advocate and supporter of the #MeToo movement. In a speech at the World Economic Forum in January 2018, Trudeau called for critical discussion on issues brought up by the #MeToo, Time's Up, and Women's March movements.[281] Trudeau has also advocated and acted upon a high standard set for himself and members of his government. Trudeau stated that he holds a "zero tolerance for sexual assault, harassment or other forms of misconduct by his employees or caucus colleagues".[282] As leader of the Liberal party, Trudeau initiated investigations on several members of parliament resulting in the dismissal of cabinet minister Kent Hehr, the resignation of MP Darshan Kang, and the suspension and later expulsion of MPs Scott Andrews and Massimo Pacetti.[283] In an interview, Trudeau explained that the zero tolerance standard applied to himself as well and stated, "I've been very, very careful all my life to be thoughtful, to be respectful of people's space and people's headspace as well."[284]

However, an editorial written in August 2000 resurfaced during his premiership regarding an alleged incident where an author accused Trudeau of groping a reporter and in July 2018 Trudeau publicly rejected the accusations.[285][286] The piece stated Trudeau provided a "day-late" apology to the reporter, saying, "If I had known you were reporting for a national paper, I never would have been so forward."[287] On July 6 Trudeau stated there was no need to conduct an investigation into the allegations against him.[288]

Chile

In April–June 2018, female students marched around Chile and occupied universities in protest against sexual harassment.[289] Multiple actresses levelled accusations of Weinstein-like behaviour at telenovela director Herval Abreu in April and film director Nicolás López in June; both men have denied any wrongdoing.[290]

China

On Chinese social networks, hashtags #WoYeShi or #metoo are sometimes used to denote the #Metoo hashtag. Mi tu pronounced in Mandarin, meaning "rice bunny", is also used with a hashtag of #RiceBunny.[291]

In mainland China, the Chinese internet censorship service has slowed down the Chinese MeToo posts via censorship.[292] So far, the #MeToo debate appears to be limited to universities.[293]

An article appearing on the state-run China Daily newspaper states that sexual misconduct is rare in China due to superior education and culture has caused considerable Internet outrages.[294]

A recent study from a pair of professors from City University of Hong Kong indicated that about 80% of working women in China have experienced sexual harassment at some point in their career,[250] and there were strong reactions of anger online following the report. The article has since been taken down.[295] Activist Feng Yuan points out that China does not have national laws prohibiting sexual harassment, and uses state media to encourage women to focus on family and stay home. New laws recently made it illegal for television programming to contain images of a women's cleavage, sexual acts outside of marriage, or any topics that present "Western lifestyles" in a positive light. #MeToo has received extreme governmental censorship online.[57][295]

Sophie Richardson, the Human Rights Watch director for China, stated the Chinese government regularly suppresses discussion of women's rights, for example an incident in 2015 where Li Tingting and four other activists were arrested when the government learned they planned to hand out stickers about preventing sexual harassment on public transportation.[295]

In Hong Kong, track and field athlete Vera Lui Lai-Yiu posted her case of sex abuse alongside #metoo on her Facebook fanpage on her 23rd birthday. She posted in response to a similar action by gymnast McKayla Maroney. Lui posted a picture of herself holding a piece of paper with the handwritten words "#metoo lly" (her initials).[296][297][298][299][300] In January 2018, student Zheng Xi publicly started a campaign against sexual harassment in response to #MeToo.[250]

Dr. Luo Xixi, an academic, revealed being sexually assaulted by a professor at Beihang University when she was in her 20s. Luo gathered extensive evidence from many women, including recordings, and presented it to the institution. She waited until the professor was already suspended before going public with the story. Her post was viewed over 3 million times within 24 hours. She said that #metoo gave her the courage to speak up. She is currently living in the US.[57]

Zhou Xiaoxuan, a 25-year-old screenwriter in Beijing, stated that the China Central Television host and anchor Zhu Jun assaulted her in his dressing room while she was an intern of his in 2014. When she went to the police, she was urged her to drop her report, telling her that her parents, who both work for government institutions, could lose their jobs. So for years, Ms. Zhou kept what had happened a secret, only known by herself, her parents, and some close friends. That was until one day, where she saw a "#MeToo" post, and decided to share her own story. Her intentions were to share with her friends that this happens to people close to themselves, but instead her post was shared rapidly over the Chinese internet, until the Chinese government intervened and banned state-run media from covering the story.[301]

Yue Xin, an undergraduate of Peking University in Beijing, led a campaign to uncover information regarding the alleged assault and subsequent suicide of Gao Yan, a student who was allegedly assaulted by former professor Shang Yang.[302] Peking University took measures to attempt to dissuade Yue from pursuing her investigation.[303][304] Yue Xin would eventually participate in the Jasic Incident.

Ethiopia

Alyssa Milano specifically called for supporting the victims in Ethiopia in an interview with Rolling Stone.[31] In Ethiopia, up to 40% of students may have experienced sexual violence.[305] In November 2017, nine middle-school aged girls organized together and spoke out about an abusive teacher in their school, saying they got the idea from the "Me Too" movement. The teacher was dismissed and referred to law enforcement. UNICEF's Amanda Westfall said the teacher likely would have gotten away with it just a few years ago.[305]

France

Variants of the phrase trended in France,[104] especially #BalanceTonPorc (#DenounceYourPig),[273] which encouraged users to share the names of their alleged abusers.[306][307] #BalanceTonPorc was first used by Sandra Muller. She was requested to take down her tweet by two lawyers.[308] In France, 93% of complaints against criminal sexual harassment are dropped or never followed up on by law enforcement.[309] Prosecutions are extremely rare, and only 65 of 1,048 sexual harassment lawsuits from 2014 actually led to a conviction.[308] In 40% of workplace sexual violence cases, the person who makes the complaint is reprimanded or fired, while the accused person is typically not investigated or punished.[309] There is no French equivalent to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which gives victims a place to report workplace sexual violence if the employer and/or law enforcement refuses to address the complaint.[309] Brigitte Macron, wife of French President Emmanuel Macron, expressed support for the #MeToo movement.[308][310]

Initially the hashtag went viral, but there was an almost immediate media backlash.[311] Soon after, 100 high-profile French women, including actress Catherine Deneuve, former pornographic actress and radio host Brigitte Lahaie, art critic and author Catherine Millet, signed an open letter by Abnousse Shalmani which criticized the #MeToo / #BalanceTonPorc campaign. It was noted the letter is poorly edited with several typos and unclear or clumsy passages.[56][312]

The people who signed the letter, especially Deneuve and Millet, were criticized for saying men should have the "right to pester" women.[313] The letter also told people not to be bothered by small amounts of sexual harassment, for example men who rub against women on public transportation. The letter states women should "consider it as the expression of a great sexual misery, or even as a nonevent".[312] French politician Marlène Schiappa said some aspects of the letter were "profoundly shocking" and "we have immense difficulty convincing young women that when a man rubs his genitals against a woman in the Métro without her consent, it is an act of sexual assault that can lead to three years in prison and a 75,000 euro fine."[308][312]

A week after its publication, Deneuve issued a letter of clarification, and said although she still agrees with the spirit of the original letter, she wants to clarify that she does believe sexual harassment and assault are real problems, and apologized to all victims of unpleasant sexual acts who read the letter and felt hurt by it.[314][315]

Political commentator Anastasia Colosimo said the movement to prevent sexual misconduct at work is more accepted by younger women in France because they take sexual freedom as a given, while older feminists are afraid #MeToo may hurt the sexual revolution.[56] Legal professional Marilyn Baldeck noted that when people are given "concrete examples" of sexual misconduct, they often "change their minds and acknowledge how harmful some situations can be".[312] French politician Sandrine Rousseau said that the #MeToo movement will continue because French women have been silenced for too long.[308] A petition aimed at President Emmanuel Macron demanded sexual harassment to be taken more seriously in France, and received more than 100,000 signatures in three days.[309]

Singer Tom Connan said in an interview published by L'Obs that he had been the victim of sexual harassment and claimed that men (not only women) were also affected by the problem.[316]

NousToutes

In 2018, 30,000 women marched in Paris with the #NousToutes, dressing in purple.[317][318]

Ten of thousand of men and women demonstrated the 23rd of november 2019 in more than 30 cities.[319]

Ligue du LOL

In February 2019 prominent male Parisian journalists were accused of forming a group, called the "Ligue du LOL", which – over a 10-year period – ran online harassment campaigns against feminists, female journalists, writers of colour and gay people. The group's founder, Vincent Glad [fr], was suspended by the daily newspaper Libération, whose own fact-checking unit broke the story.

The NGO SOS Racisme called for a judicial investigation.[320][321]

Germany

MeToo was not particularly popular in Germany until January 11, 2018, when it started trending after the Die Zeit weekly newspaper published reports about three German former actresses who alleged that award-winning TV director Dieter Wedel had committed sexual assault.[322][323] There have been official concerns about the alleged long-time coverup of Wedel's actions because most of his work was done through public broadcasting and received government money.[323] The report detailed a months-long investigation into the three allegations, and included 50 interviews.[322] Wedel has not responded to the allegations in Die Zeit, stating through a spokesperson he is in the hospital and having heart trouble.[323] Another high-profile German case concerned the former president of the Munich Academy of Music, Siegfried Mauser.[324] In a study of 2000 Germans conducted after the initial spread of #MeToo, it was found that 43% of women and 12% of men have experienced sexual harassment or abuse, most commonly inappropriate touching.[325]

Iran

In the Islamic Republic of Iran, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a message stating the "disaster of countless sexual assaults on Western women – including incidents leading to #Metoo campaign" can be solved with the Islamic solution of hijab.[326][327]

India

Main article: Me Too movement (India)

The use of the #MeToo hashtag on social media spread quickly in India,[328][329] where sexual harassment is commonly referred to by the word 'eve-teasing', a term described as misleading, tame, and diluting the seriousness of the crime.[330] In response to #MeToo, there have been attempts to teach Indian women about workplace rights and safe reporting, as well as educate men about the scope of the problem.[328][331] Some have likened #MeToo to a 2012 social movement which followed a violent gang rape in New Delhi that later resulted in a woman's death, which caused the Indian government to institute harsher punishments for rape.[329][332][333] Others have suggested there was underlying public anger over a Delhi rape conviction that was overturned by Judge Ashutosh Kumar a month before against filmmaker and writer Mahmood Farooqui, ruling that a "feeble" no was not enough to revoke consent because it was typical for one partner to be less willing. The case is being appealed to the Supreme Court.[332][334] Activist Jasmeen Patheja, head of Blank Noise, stated #MeToo's power is in demonstrating India can no longer ignore the scope of the problem.[329] Kaimini Jaiswal, a lawyer at the Supreme Court of India, stressed the importance of teaching women how to read, especially in rural villages, because most women in these areas are illiterate and completely financially and emotionally dependent on a male relative.[333]

Blogger Sheena Dabholkar's viral #MeToo tweet resulted in the boycott of Khodu Irani's popular Pune pub, High Spirits, by several well-known performers.[328][335][336] Several women mentioned Mahesh Murthy, which initiated a police case in January 2018.[248][337] The Trends Desk of The Indian Express wrote many Indian men are speaking up as a part of #MeToo, including discussions about consent and how some men are also abused.[338][339] Rina Chandran of Reuters said that #MeToo is ignoring the 600,000 women in India who are currently involuntary sex workers, and are typically poor, uneducated or lack a family.[340]

There were reports of mass sexual assaults during the 2018 new year's celebrations in Bangalore, which have been associated with #MeToo. The incidents were initially dismissed by the police until someone uploaded CCTV footage of the assaults to social media.[333] Home Minister G. Parameshwara, Abu Azmi, and other officials came under fire for stating "western" women's clothing and values were the cause of the rapes and that women's families should not allow them to go to parties or major celebrations.[333]

Several lists of alleged rapists and harassers started spreading on social media in India, including "The List" which initially included the names of about sixty highly respected academic men. The List of Sexual Harassers in Academia ("LoSHA") was posted on October 24, 2017, by activist Inji Pennu and an Indian student in California named Raya Sarkar, who alleged they personally confirmed every incident.[341][342] This list has resulted in criticism against #MeToo because the allegations were unverified before they started spreading on social media. Some of the victims from the list have come forward to explain they were ignored, mistreated or retaliated against when they tried to pursue action.[343] Sarkar has defended The List, saying that she posted it only to warn her friends about professors and academics to avoid (mostly upper caste men), and had no idea it could become so popular.[342] A second list came out a week later that was made by women from a lower caste background and included more names, raising the total to around 70.[341]

Twelve prominent Indian feminists dismissed The List in a formal letter, saying they understand that the justice system is typically tilted against victims, but unverified claims make things harder for the feminist movement.[341][344] Writers Rhea Dangwal and Namrata Gupta responded that most victims from the list were poor students who tried to go through official channels without success or recourse, while every single man on the list has the ability to defend himself socially and legally.[341]

On September 27, 2018, former actress Tanushree Dutta accused Nana Patekar of sexual harassment,[345] which was the catalyst of the "Me Too" movement in India. The accusation by Dutta stirred a row of accusations from many women in industries including media and politics.[346][347][348] In October 2018, the Minister of state for External Affairs, MJ Akbar was accused of sexual harassment by several female colleagues through the 'Me Too' Movement in India.[349]

On October 21, 2018, former music director Anu Malik was suspended from the jury panel of Indian Idol 2018, after facing multiple allegations of sexual harassment made through the movement.[350]

Israel

In Israel, the Hebrew hashtag גםאנחנו# (#UsToo) began trending on October 18, 2017, with a front page spread in the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth.[273] Asi Levi said at the Ophir Award ceremony that unlike America, in Israel the status of those accused do not change.[351] A hashtag for men, #HowIWillChange, has also become popular.[352]

Palestine

#AnaKaman or وأنا كمان# (#MeToo) has also been used by Palestinian women from refugee camps.[353]

Italy

In Italy, women posted stories of assault and harassment under the hashtag #QuellaVoltaChe, which translates literally as "TheTimeThat".[354][355] The phrase was launched by the journalist Giulia Blasi.[356] Italian journalist Simona Siri wrote in The Washington Post that the initially popular movement quickly died out in Italy. She stated that Italian politician and former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who is known for his role in wild parties (Bunga Bunga bacchanals) with underage women and prostitutes,[357][358] has contributed to a strong sexist culture with few female politicians in positions of power.[58] Movie directors Fausto Brizzi and Giuseppe Tornatore were accused of harassment by more than a dozen women but did not face any significant consequences or media scrutiny.[359][58]

The New York Times described the movement in Italy as "Meh" due to the lack of discussion. Laura Boldrini, the president of the lower house of Parliament, has declared that the movement cannot touch Italy because although there is much harassment, victims are often silenced and there's also a belief that "in our country, there are no harassers".[357] It has been reported that nearly 70% of female university students have been sexually harassed, and it is widely accepted that Italy is behind other countries when it comes to gender rights.[358] In response to #QuellaVoltaChe, one article from Libero was titled, "First they put out, then they whine and pretend to regret it."[358]

Italian Fabrizio Lombardo, an employee and friend of Harvey Weinstein, was widely covered by the media after he was accused of allegations that he aided Weinstein in sexually harassing Italian actress and former model Asia Argento, though he denies all wrongdoing.[360] Argento said of Italy, "Nothing has changed", and described her life after going public with the allegations as living a nightmare. She has made plans to leave Italy. Conservative TV news editor Alessandro Sallusti [it] criticized Argento for being an accomplice to Weinstein for not reporting him immediately, and several other public figures and politicians questioned her innocence.[357]

The Non Una di Meno group (Not One Woman Less), which is dedicated to stopping violence against women, wrote a letter in support of Argento and organised a protest in November 2017 where tens of thousands of people gathered in Rome.[358] Blogger Abbatto i muri (I Break Down Walls), journalist Ida Dominijanni, Cagne sciolte (literally, Loose Bitches), and author Michela Marzano also strongly supported Argento publicly.[358] Italian women's rights activist Lorella Zanardo has stated that it is taken for granted that women must give or sell their body in order to get high-profile positions in politics, film, and media.[357]

Maria Elena Boschi, a politician who has created governmental initiatives aimed at teaching women it's okay to say no to sexual advances, has been targeted in the news and on social media for her support of the #QuellaVoltaChe movement.[356] She has been impersonated in several fake interviews where the actresses portray Boschi in unflattering ways.[357] There are also photoshopped images of Boschi that have been shared widely on social media, including a doctored image with her underwear showing during her swearing-in ceremony, which never occurred.[357][361] Francesca Puglisi, the chair of the Commission of Inquiry into Femicide in Italy, said that one woman is killed every two days on average by male violence, and the problem is severely under-reported, though she credited the #QuellaVoltaChe hashtag and the work by Boschi with making a positive difference.[362]

Argento, herself, was accused of sexual misconduct in 2018 by actor Jimmy Bennett. Following this allegation, Argento was fired from her work on The X Factor Italy.[363]

Japan

In Japan approximately 4% of rapes are reported in Japan due to social stigmas against sexual assault survivors, of which half of the criminal charges are dropped by prosecutors.[41] Many rape myths in Japanese culture typically hold women accountable for sexual assaults instead of the assaulter, creating an environment where even if victims come forward "Japanese society wants them to stay silent."[41] Political Scientist Mari Miura argues that a lack of solidarity among women and the complicated, stigmatized and lengthy process of prosecuting rapists deters sexual assault survivors from speaking out.[364] In fact, the word "rape" is taboo in Japan, instead described with less threatening words like saying an underage victim was "tricked," or a woman was "violated" thus contributing to a public lacking comprehensive understanding of the pervasiveness of the problem.[41] The legal age of consent in Japan is 13.[365] Women in Japan are regularly exposed to harassment from a young age,[366] for example, on public transportation[41] it is called chikan.[367] Prior to 2017, laws regarding the treatment of sexual assault had remained unchanged since 1907. It previously failed to consider oral and anal rape as assault. Despite the definition of assault being expanded in 2017, rape is criminalized and prosecutable under law only if there is clear evidence of physical force and resistance being involved in the act.[368]

Multiple other authors and public figures have criticized what they saw as Japan's silence on the topic of sexual assault, such as Kyoko Nakajima, Mayumi Mori,[41] Kirsten King,Akiko Kobayashi,[369][370] Hakuo Au (née Haruka Ito).[371] BuzzFeed Japan writer Takumi Harimaya has stated that by sharing these stories, other victims of sexual assault and harassment can know they are not alone.[371] Another journalist, Keiko Kojima stated that the movement is necessary to let people know that it is okay to say no to sexual violence, including male victims. She further remarked that despite how it is attacked in Japanese media, that #MeToo is not an "anti-man" campaign and that it is simply about anti-violence and anti-harassment. Kojima also believes it is extremely important for men to call out behaviors in others such as sexual harassment or having sex with someone who is unconscious and that every person who is not committing sexual violence is part of the #MeToo movement, whether they are male or female.[367]

As part of the #MeToo movement, Shiori Itō went public alleging that she was raped by Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a prominent TV journalist and acquaintance of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe,[372] an admission she says was unthinkable for a woman to do in Japan. Yamaguchi rejects her accusations, and says that sex was consensual.[372] She said her experience with Japan's legal system showed her that victims of sex crimes were undermined and ignored. She called for the Japanese parliament to update Japan's laws regarding rape, which were over a century old. She explains how she could not get information on which hospital provides rape kits without going through a preliminary interview in person. When she went to the police, she was discouraged from filing a report, and informed her career would be ruined for no reason if she did this. She was told she did not act like a victim, and had to be interviewed by several officers, including one who made her reenact the rape with a dummy while he took pictures. Although they initially said they would arrest Yamaguchi, the case and charges were unexpectedly dropped. Itō then went to the media, but no one would take her story. When she spoke about the experience at a press conference, she made national news and immediately started receiving a negative backlash, hate mail, and threats.[41][373] She has been unsuccessful in her attempts to have criminal charges brought against Yamaguchi, but as of 2018 she was still pursuing a civil case against him, which he was defending.[372] After reflecting on her experience with reporting sexual assault, Itō notes that there "is little concept of sexual consent in the law or in society" which indicates a need for more education in schools especially given the prevalence of rape culture and power imbalances in Japanese society.[41] Itō further stated that the #MeToo Movement was small in Japan but that "what’s happened in the United States and elsewhere has provided an opening in our media to discuss sexual harassment and assault here, and to raise awareness".[41][374]

In 2018, Junichi Fukuda, a deputy finance minister in the Abe Administration, resigned after being accused of sexual harassment by his former subordinates and an anonymous TV Asahi reporter.[375][376] TV Asahi warned against their employee making this allegation and going public with the allegedly incriminating conversation between her and Fukuda. Fukuda was publicly defended by his boss, Finance Minister Aso Taro, who stated that Fukuda was unjustly reprimanded since sexual assault is not a punishable crime in Japan.[368] Aso Taro retained his job despite commenting that replacing female reporters with men should stop sexual harassment.[376]

A former member of the Japanese idol group Niji no Conquistador pressed charges against Pixiv representative director, Hiroaki Nagata, for sexual harassment during her time with the group, motivated by the #MeToo movement.[377] Nagata resigned following the lawsuit.[378]

As a result of the severe culture of victim blaming, the slogan #WeToo was developed in conjunction with #MeToo. The slogan was launched in order to spur more women to openly support the feminist agenda of revealing the prevalence of sexual harassment and showing solidarity with victims. By replacing "Me" with "We", the slogan allowed women to contribute to the movement without having to speak of their own experience with sexual harassment, which is associated with the risk of receiving stigma, shame, and ostracization. The slogan was developed by Monica Fukuhara, who had first hand experience in the difficulty women in Japan face in regards to the fear of speaking of their experience with sexual assault.[379]

Another manifestation of the MeToo movement in Japan was the following development of the KuToo campaign. Based on the Japanese word "kutsu" for shoes and the word for pain "kutsuu", the campaign was launched in response to the corporate norm that expects women at the workplace to always wear high heels. Similarly, women are pressured to wear high heels when job hunting, so as to raise the prospects of finding a competitive position in a corporation. Founded and supported by writer Yumi Ishikawa, the campaign gained enough support to result in a petition being sent to labour ministry officials. Specifically, KuToo aims to prompt officials to create anti-sexual harassment and discrimination laws that will prohibit companies from restricting women from wearing anything other than high heels at the workplace.[380]

Kenya

When #MeToo first went viral in October 2017, coverage was overshadowed in Kenya by a presidential election that was occurring the next week.[381] However, the #MeToo movement started slowly spreading in Kenya after the election was over.[381] In January 2018, it became especially popular after several new mothers alleged sexual misconduct at Kenyatta National Hospital, claiming that after giving birth they have been sexually assaulted when they went alone to breastfeed.[382] There were also allegations that children in the hospital have been sexually assaulted.[382] The hospital announced that the women were all lying, but in the future, women should stay together in groups in the hospital to prevent sexual assault. In response, hundreds of people began protesting in the streets of in Nairobi, Kenya, and an investigation was initiated by the health minister.[383]

Nepal

Former Mayor of Kathmandu, Keshav Sthapit has been accused of sexual harassment by two female office clerks of the Kathmandu Metropolitan Office, Rashmila Prajapati and Ujjwala Maharjan, as a part of the Me Too movement in Nepal.[384][385][386]

Nigeria

Culture

Nigerian women and children get sexually assaulted every day and do not speak up about it due to fear of stigmatisation and prejudice.[387] Official silence seems to surround sexual abuse of women in Nigeria, with the police frequently not taking sexual abuse reports seriously.[388] As a result, men, who are often the perpetrators of sexual abuse go unchallenged, and unpunished owing to factors such as culture and popular beliefs.[388] The custom of victim blaming is evident in testimonies rape and sexual abuse survivors.[387] Nigerian cultures look down on the open discussions of sexual matters and desires.[388] A great deal of the pressure to remain silent stems from socio-cultural values, customs and expectations about what constitutes socially accepted behaviours.[389] Cultural socialisation recognises men as having a naturally stronger sexual drive, and speaks of women in terms of shame, lack of interest in sexual matters and as one to be conquered by a domineering man.[388] Nigerians are socially nurtured and fed by oppressive patriarchal subjectivities that try to instil a sense of what is normal: sexually-speaking.[389]

Role of power and privilege

There is a factor of power influencing the slow growth of the movement in Nigeria. The country is a highly patriarchal society.[390] Women have complained of how unimaginable it is in the country to report cases of harassment.[391] Yet, sexual harassment is so prominent within the country that it is perceived as almost a right to men.[391]

Brenda Uphopho case

She had been assaulted three times by three different men. The first incident took place at age five. At that time, she was too young to understand what happened until a similar incident occurred at age 18. She was at a party when a stranger forced her to have sex with him. Upon her refusal, he beat her up and raped her. Due to the stigma attached to being raped, she resorted to silence. The final experience took place at her workplace when her boss forcibly put his hand under her skirt. She still remained silent with the notion of not being believed and being judged by others. Realizing she could not remain silent and needing to make an impact, Uphopho currently works with her husband to break the "culture of silence" around abuse in Nigeria. They produced a play called Shattered which seeks to encourage victims of sexual abuse to speak up.[392]

Norway

In Norway, under the hashtag #stilleforopptak (en. SilentforRecording), almost 600 actresses signed a petition and shared their stories through Aftenposten on November 16, 2017.[393] This also inspired dancers and musicians to create their own petitions, #nårdansenstopper (en. WhentheDanceStops) signed by 792 dancers,[394] and #nårmusikkenstilner (en. WhentheMusicQuiets) signed by over 1110 musicians.[395]

Trond Giske, the deputy leader of the Norwegian Labour Party and a former cabinet minister in Norway, resigned from his political positions on January 7, 2018, after being accused of an extensive pattern of sexual assault and sexual harassment of young women, and of taking advantage of his political positions to make unwanted sexual advances.[396] The accusations came in the context of the Me Too debate and dominated Norwegian media for several weeks from December 2017.[397] Accusations towards the now former leader of the Norwegian Young Conservatives, Kristian Tonning Riise, also saw the light of day. In a Facebook post, Tonning Riise wrote: "I have been confronted with the fact that members of the Norwegian Young Conservatives on several occasions have reacted to my behaviour."[398] It would later be revealed that the Conservative Party had received 15 alerts, whereas 10 of them regarded Tonning Riise.[399] Ulf Leirstein, Norwegian politician for the Progress Party and member of the Storting, had to take a break from office after it was discovered that he had shared pornographic images with a 14-year-old member of the Progress Party's Youth in addition to suggesting a threesome between him, a 30-year-old woman and a 15-year-old member of the Progress Party's Youth.[400]

Pakistan

Main article: Me Too movement (Pakistan)

Zainab rape-murder case

After the death of 7-year-old Zainab Ansari in January 2018, who was raped and killed, there began a wave of declarations on Pakistan social media in #MeToo style.[383] Sexual assault against a minor in Pakistan will result in 14 to 20 years in prison and a fine of 1 millions rupees.[401][402][403][404] Sheema Kermani, a classical dancer, has been called the leader of the Pakistan #MeToo movement.[405] Former model Frieha Altaf and designer Maheem Khan shared stories of sexual abuse, and challenged Pakistan to be more proactive at stopping children from getting raped.[383]

Film industry

Protests[406] marked the premieres of Teefa in Trouble in Karachi and Lahore by activists who boycotted the film over the sexual harassment allegations leveled against Ali Zafar by Meesha Shafi, as well as at least half a dozen other women, earlier in the year.[407] Zafar categorically denied the allegations and sued Shafi for defamation in the court where the case is ongoing.[408][409] On the other hand, Shafi had also filed a harassment case against Zafar, which, itself, is an ongoing investigation.[410]

With hashtags such as #BoycottAliZafar, #BoycottTeefainTrouble, and #TeefaisTrouble, a huge wave of activists built a momentum on social media ahead of the movie's premiere and subsequent screenings. A few major Pakistani media outlets outright ignored the demonstrations but other had to give in when protestors turned up at cinemas and police and other law enforcement agencies got involved.[411]

Zafar reportedly also had to avoid his grand arrival at the film's Karachi premiere and take a detour through the basement at Nueplex Cinemas in DHA, Karachi, in order to avoid the hoard of demonstrators who had gathered at the venue's main entrance.[412][413] During the protest, Feroze Khan, an actor and Zafar's friend, returned from inside the cinema in an attempt to sway the protestors by telling them to support "Pakistani cinema"; however, he was turned away owing to his stance, to which he responded by making obscene gestures.[414][415]

Reports had also emerged that the Nueplex Cinemas’ security manhandled some of the demonstrators and verbally abused multiple people at the protest.[416]

Protestors again showed up at Lahore's CineStar for voice their anger and disappointment at both the promotion of the film of an alleged harasser and the celebrities pouring in to support him. The controversy deepened when, in one instance, the demonstrators asked Waleed Zaman, the creative director of women's clothing brand Kayseria, the reason why he was backing the film, to which Zaman responded by saying: "We support sexual harassment of women."[417][418]

Zaman later posted and deleted multiple apologies on his social media accounts.

At yet another screening of the film at Nueplex Cinemas at Rashid Minhas Road, Karachi, protestors were allegedly held in the basement and beaten by the cinema's private security, with various media reports confirming the incident.[419][420] The demonstrators’ phones were also confiscated and the cinema's security allegedly tried to plant incriminating evidence in one of the protestors' bags in order to make their case appear stronger to police.[409] However, they were let go later after the arrival of Rangers personnel.

Stand-up comedy

At least four women leveled allegations of sexual misconduct against Junaid Akram, a prominent stand-up comedian and vlogger.[421] Most of the accusers were girls in their teens and early twenties. Akram, too, denied "all allegations of sexual harassment and sexual misconduct", labeled them "false", and announced that he intended to pursue legal actions as he had "already met my legal team".[422]

Akram also clarified that his "marital status is public information".[423]

Charity sector

The son of world-renowned late philanthropist Abdul Sattar Edhi, Faisal Edhi, who now heads the Edhi Foundation, was also accused of sexual misconduct by a former journalist,[422][424] who said the man "grabbed my hand tightly and tried to kind of pull me back into the van". Faisal Edhi has denied the claims.[425]

Philippines

The Me Too movement has slowly picked up in the Philippines. In the culture of the Philippines, shaming and victim blaming are still present and is often encouraged.[426] They are afraid to say #MeToo because people do not believe them. Stories finally began to come about after actress Saab Magalona retweeted Alyssa Milano's infamous quote.[427] The accusations revolved around the entertainment industry as one of the bands, Jensen and The Flips was being brought up and they acknowledged their mistakes and apologized for their misconduct.[427] Statistics from the Philippine Commission on Women from 2004 to 2013 revealed that only 629 cases had been recorded with the Philippine national police's Women and Children Protection Center.[427] This figure is believed to only be a fraction of the actual number of harassment offenses committed against women. While the movement has not been as big as in the U.S., other movements such as #BabaeAko have started as a result of #MeToo. #BabaeAko translates to "I am a Woman" and began in May after President Rodrigo Duterte declared that the next Chief Justice of Philippines could not be a woman.[428]

South Korea

In South Korea, the Me Too movement started to gain momentum as public prosecutor Seo Ji-hyeon shared her experience of assault by a high-level prosecutor and oppression of government authorities on national television on January 29, 2018.[429] As part of her interview, Seo claimed that she was sexually assaulted by then Korean Ministry of Justice Policy Planning Director and former prosecutor Ahn Tae-geun at a funeral in 2010. She reported the activity to her superiors, however, her superiors covered up the incident and demoted her to Changwon Public Prosecutor's Office from her post in Seoul, in spite of the fact that she was highly praised and awarded for her work performance by her superiors prior to the incident.[430]

After Seo's public admittance of sexual assault, the Me Too movement spread quickly to other areas of society. On February 13, 2018, several women, including former actress Kim Soo-hee and actress Hong Seon-joo, accused Lee Yountaek, a prominent and critically acclaimed stage director, of sexual harassment.[431] Lee allegedly forced many women in his theater troupe, for 18 years, to massage his genital area prior to raping them.[432] In addition, Kim Soo-hee stated that in 2005, Lee raped her and got her pregnant, for which she had an abortion.[433] Moreover, actress Hong Seon-joo alleged that Lee forcibly penetrated her private part with sticks and wooden chopsticks, saying it will help her vocalization.[434] As a result, Lee resigned from all his positions in the theater world and formally apologized to the victims.[435][436] Lee admitted to all his crimes except the abortion.[437]

However, discussion on sexual assault and harassment preceded the MeToo with a series of hashtags under the scope of #000_nae_seongpongnyeok (#sexual_violence_in_000) with particular attention in the arts and culture #yeonghwagye_nae_seongpongnyeok (#sexual_violence_in_the_film_industry).[438] These hashtags were used on Twitter in October 2016, a year before the MeToo movement in the West.[438] They document a work culture that encourages men to act aggressively, and women to "defeminize" in order to avoid objectification. Anonymous accounts set up to document sexual assault and harassment received legal action, and or had personal information leaked (doxing). In addition to the trauma of sexual assault, they must also face the financial, psychological and social burden of litigation.[438]

On February 22, 2018, actor Oh Dal-su was accused of sexual harassment,[439][440][441] for which he denied the accusation.[442] However, February 26, further accusations against Oh were broadcast on JTBC Newsroom, during which an interview was conducted with the woman who had accused Oh of sexual harassment and sexual assault.[443][444] Moreover, on February 27's episode of JTBC's Newsroom, actress Uhm Ji-young came forward to say that she was also sexually harassed by Oh in 2003.[445][446] As a result, Oh pulled out of his upcoming TV series My Mister.[447][448] However, all charges against Oh were dismissed following a police investigation.[449]

Jo Min-ki, accused by several students of sexual assault, committed suicide following the allegations.

Also on February 22, 2018, students in Cheongju University in Korea divulged the long-time crimes of professor and actor, Jo Min-ki. At first, he denied his crimes and dismissed them as rumors.[450][451] However, as many other students, including fellow male students accusing him of such exploitation, he admitted to the allegations and apologized publicly.[452] It was confirmed that Jo would be investigated by the police.[453] On March 9, 2018, Jo committed suicide following his scandal,[454][455] which in turn triggered backlash against the Me Too movement in South Korea.[456]

On February 23, 2018, actress Choi Yul accused actor Cho Jae-hyun of assaulting her sexually.[457] On February 24, Cho acknowledged the accusations.[458]

On February 28, 2018, Ko Un, one of South Korea's most iconic and prominent poets and frequently mentioned Nobel laureate shortlist candidate, was also accused of sexual assault. First reported by the Dong-A Ilbo, poet Choi Young-mi's poem 'The Beast' suggests sexual assault by Ko approximately 20 years ago. The poem did not explicitly mention Ko, but the details of the frequently mentioned "En", which bears similarities to Ko's name – Ko Un – highly matches the accused poet's past.[459] It also confirms the constant rumors and allegations that has been circulating in the past years that Ko has been using his privilege as a prominent poet to gain sexual advances and favors. As a result, Ko was pulled from textbooks and critically denounced by fellow literaries alike. Ko also resigned from various posts that he held, including his professorship at KAIST. On March 2, 2018 Ko offered his statement to The Guardian through UK publishers Bloodaxe Books, writing that "he had ‘done nothing which might bring shame on my wife or myself."[460] Despite the denial, more allegations are emerging against Ko.

As more public figures are being denounced across society, there has been an increased number of celebrities accused of unwanted sexual advances and activities in the Korean television and cinematic industries, including Choi Il-hwa and Kim Heung-gook.[461][462][463][464]

On March 5, 2018, prominent Democratic Party of Korea presidential contender and former Chungcheongnam-do province Governor Ahn Hee-jung resigned from the governorship and announced his retirement from public service, as his former secretary Kim Ji-eun accused him of multiple cases of sexual assault.[465] She claims that Ahn assaulted her multiple times and said that there is more than one victim inside the Governor's office. Ahn admitted about his sexual activity to his former secretary and apologized, however claimed that it was consensual. He was expelled from his party on the same day.[466][467][468]

A female executive of Hyundai resigned due to the movement.[469]

In response to the support of the MeToo movement, Citizen’s Action to Support the MeToo Movement was created in early 2018. It is a network of groups that work together to organize events and mass protests both in support of victims of sexual assault and to enact legal and societal reform in regards to the issue. Citizen’s Action is responsible for various large scale protests and public speaking events.[368]

Spain

The Spanish-language counterpart is #YoTambién. In Spain, on October 25 several Spanish actresses recognized in a report the existence of sexual harassment in Spanish cinema, among them Maru Valdivieso, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Carla Hidalgo, and Ana Gracía.[470] Also explaining cases of harassment suffered by them were the actress, scriptwriter and film director Leticia Dolera[471] and Bárbara Rey.[472] The Me Too movement found an echo in the ongoing uproar raised by La Manada case, crystallizing in numerous protests across the country.[473]

Serbia

Inspired by the women of the global MeToo movement, Marija Lukić has stood up against Milutin Jeličić, her boss and the Mayor of Brus, a small town in central Serbia and taken her accusations to court.[474] She and several other women from Brus have accused Mayor of sexual harassment and disturbing messages.[475] Lukić faced threats and pressure, but she also received scores of support messages flooding in on social media with the hashtag #PravdaZaMarijuLukić (#JusticeForMarijaLukić).[474][475] This events were one of the triggers for the anti-government protests, which forced Jeličić to resign from office and his duties in the governing Serbian Progressive Party were suspended.[475][476] Lukić states that she no longer believes in Serbian justice, but she is determined to fight for her rights at the European Court of Human Rights.[475]

Sweden

In Sweden, several women used the hashtag to confront television presenter Martin Timell's,[477] whose shows on TV4 were cancelled on October 20, 2017,[478][479] and journalist Fredrik Virtanen's[480], who later got fired in his role as lead columnist at Aftonbladet,[481] alleged abuse towards them. Carl XVI Gustaf, king of Sweden, said #MeToo is a positive movement that is good for society, and urged victims to come forward and share their stories.[248][482]

A major part of the Me Too debate in Sweden focused on the affair surrounding Jean-Claude Arnault that led to several members of the Swedish Academy leaving their positions.[483][484]

Gender studies scholar Eva Lundgren and legal scholar Jenny Westerstrand wrote that the Swedish journalistic profession bore a large part of the blame in Sweden for the problems the Me Too debate had highlighted because Swedish journalists had systematically attacked critical discussion of and research on men's violence against women for over 20 years.[485] Ellinor Skagegård in the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet wrote that during the Me Too campaign, it looks as if Lundgren was right in her research on men's violence against women.[486]

Tunisia

Tunisia's #EnaZeda movement (en: #MeToo) began when politician Zouheir Makhlouf was seen allegedly masturbating in a vehicle, whilst following a schoolgirl home.[487] A Facebook group was set up in response to the purported incident, which has over 21,000 members. Najma Kousri, one of the co-founders of the movement, praised the energy from social media as it has gathered huge amounts of testimony and provided support for survivors of sexual violence.[488]

United Kingdom

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In the wake of #MeToo, a Labour activist shared her 2011 story of being raped by a senior person in the Labour Party, but being warned that her career could be damaged if she reported the incident.[489] In the UK, the Cabinet Office has launched an investigation in allegations that Parliament member Mark Garnier ordered a secretary to buy sex toys for his wife and mistress.[490]

A series of allegations concerning the involvement of British politicians in cases of sexual harassment and assault arose in October and November 2017, the 2017 Westminster sexual scandals. Allegations were prompted by discussions among junior staff employed in the UK Parliament at Westminster following the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse allegations in Hollywood earlier in October, and the subsequent rise of Me Too. The journalists Jane Merrick and Kate Maltby made allegations against the Defence Minister Michael Fallon and de facto Deputy Prime Minister Damian Green, respectively. These led to the departures of both from Theresa May's cabinet, the latter after a two-month inquiry that also considered allegations that Green had lied about copious amounts of pornography found on his parliamentary computer. Both Merrick and Maltby cited the #MeToo movement as inspiring their allegations.[491]

Rape statistics (2016–2017) from Rape Crisis Centers across England and Wales unfolds that every year, about 85,000 women and 12,000 men become victims of rape.[492]

In January 2018, Channel 4 News's Cathy Newman conducted an interview on Canadian professor of psychology Jordan Peterson.[493] Newman was criticized for the interview and Rachael Revesz of The Independent wrote that subsequent abuse targeted at Newman was a symbol of a backlash against the MeToo movement.[494]

#HimToo

Main article: Him Too movement

Accuracy dispute

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The related hashtag #HimToo emerged in popularity with the #MeToo movement. Although dating back to at least 2015, and initially associated with politics or casual communication, #HimToo took on new meanings associated with #MeToo in 2017, with some using it to emphasize male victims of sexual harassment and abuse, and others using it to emphasize male perpetrators. In September and October 2018, during the sexual assault allegations raised during Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, #HimToo became used by supporters of Kavanaugh and to highlight male victims of false accusations.[495][496]

In January 2019, a tertiary institution's lecturer from Hong Kong also came out in the spotlight to announce his establishment of a support group aimed at "gathering all men who have suffered from false allegations of sexual crimes to speak out" in an interview by a local newspaper. He claimed that he was a victim of this movement, which he considered as "encouraging unethical females to frame males they hate, who, under conventional stereotypes, are usually assumed to hold indecent urge for women".

He did add that he "was not opposed to this movement", but was concerned about its "abuses that could ruin the life of many innocent men".[497]

Criticism

False accusations

There has been discussion about the extent to which accusers should be believed before fact-checking. Some have questioned whether the accused are being punished without due process confirming their guilt.[498][499][500]

Many commentators have responded that the number of false reports is expected to be low, citing figures obtained by the U.S. Department of Justice and other organizations have generally found that around 2-10% rape and sexual assault allegations reported to police are determined to be false after a thorough investigation. However, the 2–10% figure does not include cases in which it cannot be established if the accused is innocent or guilty, nor does it include allegations that are never reported to law enforcement.[36][37]

A February 2005 study by the UK Home Office that compiled data on 2,284 reported rape cases found that from a set of 216 rape cases later found to be false, only six led to arrests and only two involved charges being filed.[501][502][503] Elle writer Sady Doyle commented that another hashtag, #BelieveWomen, was not a threat to due process but a commitment to "recognize that false allegations are less common than real ones".[503] Jennifer Wright of Harper's Bazaar proposed a similar definition of #BelieveWomen and pointed out The Washington Post's ability to quickly identify a false accusation set up by Project Veritas. She also stated that only 52 rape convictions being overturned in the United States since 1989, as opposed to 790 for murder, was strong evidence that at least 90% of rape allegations are true.[502][504] Michelle Malkin expressed a suspicion that many stories in the #MeToo movement would be exaggerated and accused news outlets of focusing on "hashtag trends spread by celebrities, anonymous claimants and bots".[505]

On November 30, 2017, Ijeoma Oluo revealed the contents of a request she received from USA Today, asking her to write a piece arguing that due process is unnecessary for sexual harassment allegations. She refused, saying "of course I believe in due process" and wrote that it was disingenuous for the paper to ask her "to be their strawman".[506]

On September 21, 2018, President Donald Trump accused Dr. Christine Blasey Ford of making up her accusations against now Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, saying that if her story was true she would have filed a report against him when it had happened. This is a common argument against the MeToo movement and alleged sexual assault victims alike.[507]

On October 11, 2018, Melania Trump, wife of US President Donald Trump, said that women who make accusations of sexual abuse against men should back their claims with solid evidence.[508]

According to the New York Post, the #MeToo movement, "has emboldened ... women to falsely accuse well-appointed men for financial gain, fame or vengeance."[509]

Undefined purpose

There has been discussion about whether the movement is meant to inspire change in all men or just a percentage of them, and what specific actions are the end goal of the movement.[510] Other women have stated #MeToo should examine only the worst types of abuse in order to prevent casting all men as perpetrators, or causing people to become numb to the problem.[498][510]

Creator Tarana Burke has laid out specific goals for the #MeToo movement, including: processing all untested rape kits in the United States, investigating the vetting of teachers, better protecting children at school, updating sexual harassment policies, and improving training in workplaces, places of worship, and schools. She has stated that everyone in a community, including men and women, must take action in order to make the #MeToo movement a success. She also supports the #MeToo Congress bill and hopes it will inspire similar legal changes in other parts of the country.[22]

Overcorrection

Richard Ackland, a lawyer and award-winning journalist, described the response to defamation cases "an asphyxiating vortex of litigation".[511]

There has been discussion on whether harsh consequences are warranted for particular examples of alleged misconduct.[498][499][500] An especially divisive story broke on Babe.net on January 13, 2018, when an anonymous accuser detailed the events of her date with Aziz Ansari and referred to what transpired as "sexual assault". Jill Filipovic wrote for The Guardian that "it was only a matter of time before a publication did us the disservice of publishing a sensational story of a badly behaved man who was nonetheless not a sexual assailant".[512][513][514] James Hamblin wrote for The Atlantic that, on the contrary, these "stories of gray areas are exactly what [...] need to be told and discussed."[515]

Some actors have admonished proponents of the movement for not distinguishing between different degrees of sexual misconduct. Matt Damon commented on the phenomenon in an interview, and later apologized, saying "the clearer signal to men and to younger people is, deny it. Because if you take responsibility for what you did, your life's going to get ruined."[516] Subsequently, Liam Neeson opined that some accused men, including Garrison Keillor and Dustin Hoffman, were being treated unfairly.[20]

Tarana Burke said in January 2018, "Those of us who do this work know that backlash is inevitable." While describing the backlash as carrying an underlying sentiment of fairness, she defended her movement as "not a witch hunt as people try to paint it". She stated that engaging with the cultural critique in #MeToo was more productive than calling for it to end or focusing on accused men who "haven't actually touched anybody".[19] Ronan Farrow, who published the Weinstein exposé in the New Yorker that helped start the #MeToo resurgence (alongside New York Times reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor), was asked in late December 2017 whether he thought the movement had "gone too far". Farrow called for a careful examination of each story to guard against false accusations but also recalled the alleged sexual abuse his sister Dylan Farrow claims she went through at the hands of his father Woody Allen. He stated that after decades of silence, "My feeling is that this is a net benefit to society and that all of the people, men, and women, pouring forward and saying 'me too' deserve this moment. I think you're right to say that we all have to be conscious of the risk of the pendulum swinging too far, but in general this is a very positive step."[21]

Ijeoma Oluo spoke about how some Democrats have expressed regret over the resignation of Senator Al Franken due to allegations of sexual misconduct. She sympathized with them but stressed the importance of punishing misconduct regardless of whether the perpetrator is viewed as "a bad guy" overall. She wrote that "most abusers are more like Al Franken than Harvey Weinstein".[517] The New York Times has called this discussion the "Louis C.K. Conundrum", referring to the admission by comedian Louis C.K. that he committed sexual misconduct with five women, and the subsequent debate over whether any guilt should be associated with enjoyment of his work.[518][519][520] Jennifer Wright of Harper's Bazaar has said that public fears of an overcorrection reflect the difficulty of accepting that "likeable men can abuse women too".[504]

A 2019 LeanIn.Org/SurveyMonkey survey showed that 60 percent of male managers reported being "too nervous" of being accused of harassment when mentoring, socializing, or having one-on-one meetings with women in the workplace.[521][522][523]

A 2019 study in the journal Organizational Dynamics, published by Elsevier, found that men are significantly more reluctant to interact with their female colleagues. Examples include 27 percent of men avoid one-on-one meetings with female co-workers, 21 percent of men said they would be reluctant to hire women for a job that would require close interaction (such as business travel), and 19 percent of men being reluctant to hire an attractive woman.[524][525]

Possible trauma to victims

The hashtag has been criticized for putting the responsibility of publicizing sexual harassment and abuse on those who experienced it, which could be re-traumatizing.[526][527][528] The hashtag has been criticized as inspiring fatigue and outrage, rather than emotionally dense communication.[529][530]

Tony Robbins said he was "knocking victimhood" from the movement.[531] The motivational speaker was also scrutinized for comments he made criticizing the movement, implying that women are victimizing themselves to gain significance. He later apologized adding, "I need to get connected to the brave women of #MeToo."[532]

Exclusion of sex workers

There have been many calls for the #MeToo movement to include sex workers and sex trafficking victims.[533][534][535][536][537] Although these women experience a higher rate of sexual harassment and assault than any other group of people, they are often seen in society as legitimate targets that deserve such acts against them.[538] Autumn Burris stated that prostitution is like "#MeToo on steroids" because the sexual harassment and assault described in #MeToo stories are frequent for women in prostitution.[533] Melissa Farley argues that prostitution, even when consensual, can be a form of sexual assault, as it can be for money for food or similar items, thus, at least according to Farley, making prostitution a forced lifestyle relying on coercions for food.[538] Many sex workers disagree with her stance, saying that she stigmatizes prostitution.[539]

American journalist Steven Thrasher noted that, "There has been worry that the #MeToo movement could lead to a sex panic. But the real sex panic is not due to feminism run amok, but due to the patriarchal, homophobic, transantagonistic, theocratic desire of the US Congress to control sex workers." He points to 2018 Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), which many experts say will only put sex workers at further risk by causing them to go underground, does not offer sex workers any help or protections, and as a side effect prevents most people from using online personal ads regardless of their intentions.[540]

British filmmaker Bizhan Tong, a figure involved in various gender equality initiatives, wrote, directed, and self-funded feature film The Escort [541] after conducting a series of interviews with current and former sex workers in a direct attempt to lend a platform for their voices to be heard.[542] The film was shot in 2017 and completed in 2018, premiering in New York in August that year, and receiving several awards across the globe.[543] It is currently being adapted for the stage.

Not addressing police misconduct

Despite the prevalence[where?] of sexual misconduct, some have pointed out the lack of discussion in the #MeToo movement regarding law-enforcement misconduct.[544][545][546][547] Police sexual misconduct disproportionately affects women of color, though women from all walks of life are affected.[547] The Cato Institute reported that in 2010, more than 9% of police misconduct reports in 2010 involved sexual abuse, and there are multiple indications that "sexual assault rates are significantly higher for police when compared to the general population."[545] Fear of retribution is considered[by whom?] one reason some law-enforcement officers are not subjected to significant consequences for known misconduct.[544] Police-reform activist Roger Goldman stated that an officer who is fired for sexual misconduct from one police department often gets rehired by a different department, where they can continue the misconduct in a new environment.[544] Some states (such as Florida and Georgia) have licensing laws that can decertify a law-enforcement officer who has committed major misconduct, which prevents decertified officers from being hired again in that state.[544] Some have called for sexual misconduct allegations against police to be investigated by third parties to reduce bias (as opposed to the common practice of investigations being led by fellow law-enforcement officers or colleagues in the same department).[547]

Lack of representation of minority women

Many have pointed to a lack of representation of minority women in the #MeToo movement or its leadership.[548][549][550][551][552][553] Most historical feminist movements have contained active elements of racism, and have typically ignored the needs of non-white women despite the fact that minority women are more likely to be targets of sexual harassment.[548][549][550][551][552]

Minority women are overrepresented in industries with the greatest number of sexual harassment claims, for example hotels, health, food services, and retail.[550] It has been pointed out that undocumented minority women often have no recourse if they're experiencing sexual violence.[554] Activist Charlene Carruthers said, "If wealthy, highly visible women in news and entertainment are sexually harassed, assaulted and raped—what do we think is happening to women in retail, food service and domestic work?"[550]

Former victim Farah Tanis stated there are also additional barriers for black women who want to participate in the #MeToo movement. She pointed out that there is often social pressure not to report allegations against black men, especially from church and family, because many would view that as a betrayal against their "brothers."[554] Additionally, black women are less likely to be believed if they do speak out.[554][555]

Some have argued that the American judicial system acknowledges the term "sexual harassment" only because of successful sexual harassment lawsuits by three black women: Diane Williams and Paulette Barnes against the US government, and Mechelle Vinson against a bank.[556] Vinson's case of Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson eventually leading to the unanimous 1986 Supreme Court decision that sexual harassment violates the Civil Rights Act.[549][550] Black law professor Anita Hill again brought sexual harassment to public discourse in 1991 with her testimony against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.[549][550][557]

Tarana Burke initially criticized the movement for ignoring the work of black women in creating dialogue addressing sexual assault. However, she did salute those who partook in the movement and credited Milano for acknowledging Burke's own similar movement.[558] As well as this, she pleaded to black women not to drop out of the movement just because the media isn't listening saying "This is your movement, too."[559]

American feminist and journalist Gloria Steinem said there is a blind spot surrounding intersectionality between race and gender, and a major problem with today's feminists is they are not acknowledging "that women of color in general—and especially black women—have always been more likely to be feminist than white women."[548] Steinem argues that #MeToo could never have happened without the work of these women, and women in the #MeToo movement have a responsibility: "If you have more power, remember to listen as much as you talk. And if you have less power, remember to talk as much as you listen."[549]

Overemphasis on specific cases

The #MeToo movement has been criticized for putting too much public focus on the consequences of specific individuals who have been accused of sexual misconduct, as opposed to discussing policies and changes to institutional norms that would help people who are currently experiencing sexual abuse.[560] It's been noted that although allegations surrounding high-profile public figures tends to attract the most attention, the stories of regular workers often go unacknowledged.[1] Yet to ensure meaningful change, these workers’ experiences must be at the center of any policy solutions that lawmakers pursue. Tarana Burke has voiced similar misgivings, pointing out one problematic aspect of #MeToo is "All of this media attention is on the perpetrator. All of the conversation about fairness and due process is focused on the perpetrator." She states the movement should focus on specific steps to help current and future sufferers.[561] Activist and writer Jaclyn Friedman said, "We’ve got to stop treating each case that comes to light like a self-contained soap opera that ends when the villain is defeated, and start addressing the systems that have enabled workplace sexual abuse for so long."[562] Writer Jia Tolentino has stated that it is natural to focus on the individual stories because they are "gripping and horrible", but determining the best workplace changes "doesn't have a ton to do with the specific investigation and adjudication of men that have already done this".[563]

Disregard for incarcerated women

Prisoners' rights are significantly limited and the power imbalance between female inmates and male officers allows and promotes prison rape and other forms of abuse.[564][565][566] In addition, most women who are incarcerated for the murder of their intimate partners acted in protection of themselves.[565][566] Many people have criticized the prison system for punishing women who act in self defense.[567] Others criticize the main outreach of the Me Too movement for failing to address the systemic imprisonment of abused women and men.[567][568][569]

Me Too movement

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The Me Too movement (or #MeToo movement), with a large variety of local and international related names, is a movement against sexual harassment and sexual assault.[1][2][3] The phrase "Me Too" was initially used in this context on social media in 2006, on Myspace, by sexual harassment survivor and activist Tarana Burke.[4]

Similar to other social justice and empowerment movements based upon breaking silence, the purpose of "Me Too", as initially voiced by Burke as well as those who later adopted the tactic, is to empower women through empathy and strength in numbers, especially young and vulnerable women, by visibly demonstrating how many women have survived sexual assault and harassment, especially in the workplace.[4][5][6]

Following the exposure of the widespread sexual-abuse allegations against Harvey Weinstein in early October 2017,[7][8] the movement began to spread virally as a hashtag on social media.[6][9][10] On October 15, 2017, American actress Alyssa Milano posted on Twitter, "If all the women who have ever been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘Me too.’ as a status, then we give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem," saying that she got the idea from a friend.[11][12][13][14] A number of high-profile posts and responses from American celebrities Gwyneth Paltrow,[15] Ashley Judd,[16] Jennifer Lawrence,[17] and Uma Thurman, among others, soon followed.[18]

Widespread media coverage and discussion of sexual harassment, particularly in Hollywood, led to high-profile firings, as well as criticism and backlash.[19][20][21]

After millions of people started using the phrase and hashtag in this manner, it spread to dozens of other languages. The scope has become somewhat broader with this expansion, however, and Burke has more recently referred to it as an international movement for justice for marginalized people in marginalized communities.[22]

Contents

- 1Purpose

- 1.1Awareness and empathy

- 1.2Policies and laws

- 1.3Media coverage

- 1.4Issues with social norms

- 1.5Reform and implementation

- 1.6Role of men

- 2Timeline

- 2.12006 (Tarana Burke)

- 2.22015 (Ambra Gutierrez)

- 2.32016: Russia and Ukraine (Anastasia Melnichenko)

- 2.42017 (Alyssa Milano)

- 3Impact

- 3.1US media and fashion industries

- 3.2Churches

- 3.3Education

- 3.4Finance

- 3.5Politics and government

- 3.5.1ME TOO bill in the US Congress

- 3.6Silicon Valley

- 3.7Sports

- 3.8Medicine

- 3.9Music

- 3.10Social Justice and Journalism

- 3.11Military

- 3.12Pornography

- 3.13Animal Advocacy

- 3.14Astronomy

- 4Financial support

- 5International response

- 5.1List of local alternative hashtags

- 5.2Afghanistan

- 5.3Australia

- 5.4Belgium

- 5.5Canada

- 5.6Chile

- 5.7China

- 5.8Ethiopia

- 5.9France

- 5.10Germany

- 5.11Iran

- 5.12India

- 5.13Israel

- 5.14Palestine

- 5.15Italy

- 5.16Japan

- 5.17Kenya

- 5.18Nepal

- 5.19Nigeria

- 5.19.1Culture

- 5.19.2Role of power and privilege

- 5.19.3Brenda Uphopho case

- 5.20Norway

- 5.21Pakistan

- 5.21.1Zainab rape-murder case

- 5.21.2Film industry

- 5.21.3Stand-up comedy

- 5.21.4Charity sector

- 5.22Philippines

- 5.23South Korea

- 5.24Spain

- 5.25Serbia

- 5.26Sweden

- 5.27Tunisia

- 5.28United Kingdom

- 6#HimToo

- 7Criticism

- 7.1False accusations

- 7.2Undefined purpose

- 7.3Overcorrection

- 7.4Possible trauma to victims

- 7.5Exclusion of sex workers

- 7.6Not addressing police misconduct

- 7.7Lack of representation of minority women

- 7.8Overemphasis on specific cases

- 7.9Disregard for incarcerated women

- 8See also

- 9References

- 10External links

Purpose

The original purpose of "Me Too" as used by Tarana Burke in 2006 was to empower women through empathy, especially young and vulnerable women. In October 2017, Alyssa Milano encouraged using the phrase as a hashtag to help reveal the extent of problems with sexual harassment and assault by showing how many people have experienced these events themselves.[4][5]

After millions of people started using the phrase, and it spread to dozens of other languages, the purpose changed and expanded, and as a result, it has come to mean different things to different people. Tarana Burke accepts the title of "leader" of the movement, but has stated that she considers herself more of a "worker." Burke has stated that this movement has grown to include both men and women of all colors and ages, as it continues to support marginalized people in marginalized communities.[19][22] There have also been movements by men aimed at changing the culture through personal reflection and future action, including #IDidThat, #IHave, and #IWill.[23]

Awareness and empathy

Analyses of the movement often point to the prevalence of sexual violence, which has been estimated by the World Health Organization to affect one-third of all women worldwide. A 2017 poll by ABC News and The Washington Post also found that 54% of American women report receiving "unwanted and inappropriate" sexual advances with 95% saying that such behavior usually goes unpunished. Others state that #MeToo underscores the need for men to intervene when they witness demeaning behavior.[24][25][26]

Burke said that #MeToo declares sexual violence sufferers are not alone and should not be ashamed.[27] Burke says sexual violence is usually caused by someone the woman knows, so people should be educated from a young age that they have the right to say no to sexual contact from any person, even after repeat solicitations from an authority or spouse, and to report predatory behavior.[28] Burke advises men to talk to each other about consent, call out demeaning behavior when they see it and try to listen to victims when they tell their stories.[28]

Alyssa Milano described the reach of #MeToo as helping society understand the "magnitude of the problem" and said, "it's a standing in solidarity to all those who have been hurt."[29][30] She stated that the success of #MeToo will require men to take a stand against behavior that objectifies women.[31]

Policies and laws

Burke has stated the current purpose of the movement is to give people the resources to have access to healing, and to advocate for changes to laws and policies. Burke has highlighted goals such as processing all untested rape kits, re-examining local school policies, improving the vetting of teachers, and updating sexual harassment policies.[32] She has called for all professionals who work with children to be fingerprinted and subjected to a background check before being cleared to start work. She advocates for sex education that teaches kids to report predatory behavior immediately.[28] Burke supports the #MeToo bill in the US Congress, which would remove the requirement that staffers of the federal government go through months of "cooling off" before being allowed to file a complaint against a Congressperson.[32]

Milano states that a priority for #MeToo is changing the laws surrounding sexual harassment and assault, for example instituting protocols that give sufferers in all industries the ability to file complaints without retaliation. She supports legislation making it difficult for publicly traded companies to hide cover-up payments from their stockholders and would like to make it illegal for employers to require new workers to sign non-disclosure agreements as a condition of employment.[31] Gender analysts such as Anna North have stated that #MeToo should be addressed as a labor issue due to the economic disadvantages to reporting harassment. North suggested combating underlying power imbalances in some workplaces, for example by raising the tipped minimum wage, and embraces innovations like the "portable panic buttons" that are mandated for hotel employees in Seattle.[33]

Others have suggested that barriers to employment must be removed, such as the job requirement by some employers to sign non-disclosure agreements or other agreements that prevent an employee from talking about their employment publicly, or taking disputes (including sexual harassment claims) to arbitration rather than to legal proceedings. It's been suggested that legislation should be passed that bans these types of mandatory pre-employment agreements.[1]

Some policy-based changes that have been suggested include increasing managerial oversight; creating clear internal reporting mechanisms; more effective and proactive disciplinary measures; creating a culture that encourages employees to be open about serious problems;[1] imposing financial penalties for companies that allow workers to remain in their position when they have repeatedly sexually harassed others; and forcing companies to pay huge fines or lose tax breaks if they decide to retain workers who are sexual harassers.[34]

Media coverage

In the coverage of #MeToo, there has been widespread discussion about the best ways to stop sexual harassment and abuse - for those who are currently being victimized at work, as well as those who are seeking justice for past abuse and trying to find ways to end what they see as a culture of abuse. There is general agreement that a lack of effective reporting options is a major factor that drives unchecked sexual misconduct in the workplace.[35]

False reports of sexual assault are very rare, but when they happen, they are put in the spotlight for the public to see. This can give the false impression that the majority of the reported sexual assaults are false. However, false reports of sexual assault only make up 2%–10% of the total number that are reported.[36][37] These figures do not take into account the factor that the majority of victims do not report when they are assaulted or harassed. Misconceptions about false reports are one of the reasons why women are scared to report their experiences with sexual assault - because they are afraid that no one will believe them, that in the process they will have embarrassed and humiliated themselves, in addition to opening themselves up to retribution from the assailants.[38][39]

In France, a person who makes a sexual harassment complaint at work is reprimanded or fired 40% of the time, while the accused person is typically not investigated or punished.[40] In the United States, a 2016 report from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission states that although 25–85% of women say they experience sexual harassment at work, few ever report the incidents, most commonly due to fear of reprisal.[35] There is evidence that in Japan, as few as 4% of rape victims report the crime, and the charges are dropped about half the time.[41][42]

There is a discussion on the best ways to handle whisper networks, or private lists of "people to avoid" that are shared unofficially in nearly every major institution or industry where sexual harassment is common due to power imbalances, including government, media, news, and academia. These lists have the stated purpose of warning other workers in the industry and are shared from person-to-person, on forums, in private social media groups, and via spreadsheets. However, it has been argued that these lists can become "weaponized" and be used to spread unsubstantiated gossip - an opinion which has been discussed widely in the media.[43]

Defenders say the lists provide a way to warn other vulnerable people in the industry if worried about serious retribution from the abusers, especially if complaints have already been ignored. They say the lists help victims identify each other so they can speak out together and find safety in numbers.[43][44] Sometimes these lists are kept for other reasons. For example, a spreadsheet from the United Kingdom called "High Libido MPs" and dubbed "the spreadsheet of shame" was created by a group of male and female Parliamentary researchers, and contained a list of allegations against nearly 40 Conservative MPs in the British Parliament. It is also rumored that party whips (who are in charge of getting members of Parliament to commit to votes) maintain a "black book" that contains allegations against several lawmakers that can be used for blackmail.[45][46][47] When it is claimed a well-known person's sexual misconduct was an "open secret", these lists are often the source.[43] In the wake of #MeToo, several private whisper network lists have been leaked to the public.[43][44]

In India, a student gave her friends a list containing names of professors and academics in the Indian university system to be avoided. The list went viral after it was posted on social media.[48] In response to criticism in the media, the authors defended themselves by saying they were only trying to warn their friends, had confirmed every case, and several victims from the list were poor students who had already been punished or ignored when trying to come forward.[49][50] Moira Donegan, a New York City-based journalist, privately shared a crowd-sourced list of "Shitty Media Men" to avoid in publishing and journalism. When it was shared outside her private network, Donegan lost her job. Donegan stated it was unfair so few people had access to the list before it went public; for example, very few women of color received access (and therefore protection) from it. She pointed to her "whiteness, health, education, and class" that allowed her to take the risk of sharing the list and getting fired.[44]

The main problem with trying to protect more potential victims by publishing whisper networks is determining the best mechanism to verify allegations in a way that is fair to all parties.[51][52] Some suggestions have included strengthening labor unions in vulnerable industries so workers can report harassment directly to the union instead of to an employer. Another suggestion is to maintain industry hotlines which have the power to trigger third-party investigations.[51] Several apps have been developed which offer various ways to report sexual misconduct, and some of these apps also have the ability to connect victims who have reported the same person.[53]

Issues with social norms

In the wake of #MeToo, many countries such as the U.S.,[54] India,[55] France,[56] China,[57] Japan,[41] and Italy,[58] have seen discussion in the media on whether cultural norms need to be changed for sexual harassment to be eradicated in the workplace.

Dr. John Launer of Health Education England stated leaders must be made aware of common "mismatches of perceptions" at work to reduce incidents where one person thinks they are flirting while the other person feels like they're being demeaned or harassed.[59] Reporter Anna North from Vox states one way to address #MeToo is teach children the basics of sex. North states the cultural notion that women do not enjoy sex leads men "to believe that a lukewarm yes is all they're ever going to get", referring to a 2017 study which found that men who believe women enjoy being forced into sex are "more likely to perceive women as consenting".[60] Alyssa Rosenberg of The Washington Post called for society to be careful of overreaching by "being clear about what behavior is criminal, what behavior is legal but intolerable in a workplace, and what private intimate behavior is worthy of condemnation" but not part of the workplace discussion. She says "preserving the nuances" is more inclusive and realistic.[61]

Professor Daniel Drezner stated that #MeToo laid the groundwork for two major cultural shifts. One is the acceptance that sexual harassment (not just sexual assault) is unacceptable in the workplace. The other is that when a powerful person is accused of sexual harassment, the reaction should be a presumption that the less powerful accuser is "likely telling the truth, because the risks of going public are great." However, he states society is struggling with the speed at which change is being demanded.[62]

Reform and implementation

Although #MeToo initially focused on adults, the message spread to students in K–12 schools where sexual abuse is common both in person and online.[63] MeTooK12 is a spin-off of #MeToo created in January 2018 by the group Stop Sexual Assault in Schools, founded by Joel Levin and Esther Warkov, aimed at stopping sexual abuse in education from kindergarten to high school.[64][65] #MeTooK12 was inspired in part by the removal of certain federal Title IX sexual misconduct guidelines.[66] There is evidence that sexual misconduct in K–12 education is dramatically underreported by both schools and students, because nearly 80% of public schools never report any incidents of harassment. A 2011 survey found 40% of boys and 56% of girls in grades 7–12 reported had experienced some type of negative sexual comment or sexual harassment in their lives.[64][66] Approximately 5% of K–12 sexual misconduct reports involved 5 or 6-year-old students. #MeTooK12 is meant to demonstrate the widespread prevalence of sexual misconduct towards children in school, and the need for increased training on Title IX policies, as only 18 states require people in education to receive training about what to do when a student or teacher is sexually abused.[65]

Role of men

There has been discussion about what possible roles men may have in the #MeToo movement.[67][68][69] It has been noted that 1 in 6 men have experienced sexual abuse of some sort during their lives and often feel unable to talk about it.[70] Creator Tarana Burke and others have asked men to call out bad behavior when they see it,[68][69] or just spend time quietly listening.[19][71] Some men have expressed the desire to keep a greater distance from women since #MeToo went viral because they do not fully understand what actions might be considered inappropriate.[72][73] For the first few months after #MeToo started trending, many men expressed difficulty in participating in the conversation due to fear of negative consequences, citing examples of men who have been treated negatively after sharing their thoughts about #MeToo.[74]

Author and former pick-up artist Michael Ellsberg encourages men to reflect on past behavior and examples of questionable sexual behavior, such as the viral story Cat Person, which is written from the perspective of a twenty-year-old woman who goes on a date with a much older man and ends up having an unpleasant sexual experience that was consensual but unwanted. Ellsberg has asked men to pledge to ensure women are mutually interested in initiating a sexual encounter and to slow down if there is ever doubt a woman wants to continue.[75][76]

Relationship instructor Kasia Urbaniak said the movement is creating its own crisis around masculinity. "There's a reflective questioning about whether they’re going to be next and if they’ve ever hurt a woman. There's a level of anger and frustration. If you’ve been doing something wrong but haven't been told, there's an incredible sense of betrayal and it’ll provoke a backlash. I think silence on both sides is incredibly dangerous." Urbaniak says she would like women to be allies of men and to be curious about their experience. "In that alliance there's a lot more power and possibility than there is in men stepping aside and starting to stew."[77]

In August 2018, The New York Times detailed allegations that leading #MeToo figure Asia Argento sexually assaulted actor Jimmy Bennett.[78] The sexual assault allegedly took place in a California hotel room in 2013 when he was only two months past his 17th birthday and she was 37; the age of consent in that state is 18.[78] Bennett said when Argento came out against Harvey Weinstein, it stirred memories of his own experience. He imparted he had sought to resolve the matter privately, and had not spoken out sooner, "because I was ashamed and afraid to be part of the public narrative."[79] In a statement provided to The Times, he said: "I was underage when the event took place, and I tried to seek justice in a way that made sense to me at the time because I was not ready to deal with the ramifications of my story becoming public. At the time I believed there was still a stigma to being in the situation as a male in our society. I didn't think that people would understand the event that took place from the eyes of a teenage boy." Bennett said he would like to "move past this event in my life," adding, "today I choose to move forward, no longer in silence."[79] Argento, who quietly arranged a $380,000 nondisclosure settlement with Bennett in the months following her revelations regarding Weinstein, has denied the allegations.[80] Rose McGowan initially expressed support for Argento on and implored others to show restraint, tweeting, "None of us know the truth of the situation and I'm sure more will be revealed. Be gentle." As one of the most vocal advocates of the Me Too movement, McGowan faced criticism on social media for her comments, which conflicted with the movement's message of believing survivors.[81] MeToo founder Tarana Burke responded the Asia Argento report, stating "I’ve said repeatedly that the #metooMVMT is for all of us, including these brave young men who are now coming forward. Sexual violence is about power and privilege. That doesn't change if the perpetrator is your favorite actress, activist or professor of any gender."[3]

Timeline

2006 (Tarana Burke)

Tarana Burke, a social activist and community organizer, began using the phrase "Me Too" in 2006, on the Myspace social network[4] in order to promote "empowerment through empathy" among women of color who have been sexually abused.[14][82][83] Burke, who is creating a documentary titled Me Too, has said she was inspired to use the phrase after being unable to respond to a 13-year-old girl who confided to her that she had been sexually assaulted. Burke said she later wished she had simply told the girl: "Me too".[4][27]

2015 (Ambra Gutierrez)

In 2015 The New York Times reported that Weinstein was questioned by police "after a 22-year-old woman accused him of touching her inappropriately."[84] The woman, Italian model Ambra Gutierrez, cooperated with the New York City Police Department (NYPD) to obtain an audio recording where Weinstein admitted to having inappropriately touched her.[85] As the police investigation progressed and became public, tabloids published negative stories about Gutierrez that portrayed her as an opportunist.[86] American Media, publisher of the National Enquirer, allegedly agreed to help suppress the allegations by Gutierrez and Rose McGowan. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. decided not to file charges against Weinstein, citing insufficient evidence of criminal intent, against the advice of local police who considered the evidence sufficient.[87] The New York district attorney's office and the NYPD blamed each other for failing to bring charges.[87]

2016: Russia and Ukraine (Anastasia Melnichenko)

In July 2016, a social media post by Ukrainian journalist Anastasia Melnichenko went viral. Thousands of women, and some men, in Russia and Ukraine began posting their personal stories of sexual harassment and assault on social media using the hashtag #IAmNotAfraidToSpeak (#яНеБоюсьСказати‬ in Ukrainian; #яНеБоюсьСказать in Russian).[88][89][90][91] Her original post in Ukrainian[92] was about a sexual harassment in family, on the streets, with ex-boyfriend, but not in the workspace. Also she updated her post with the words: "Цей допис писала, лютуючи на коменти чоловіків під цим дописом: <...>. Тому і дозволила собі досить агресивний випад у бік чоловіків вкінці посту. Звісно ж, не хотіла образити хороших і адекватних. Як з*ясувалося, їх більше, ніж я думала." ("I wrote this post, raging at the comments of men under this post: <...> That is why I let myself aggressive enough attack towards men at the end of the post. Of course, I did not want to offend good and adequate ones. As it turned out, there are more of them than I thought.").

2017 (Alyssa Milano)

Following widespread exposure of accusations of predatory behavior by Harvey Weinstein, and her own blog post on the subject, on October 15, 2017, actress Alyssa Milano wrote: "If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.", and reposted the following phrase suggested by a friend: "If all the women who have ever been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote 'Me too.' as a status, then we give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.",[12][11] encouraging spreading the phrase "Me Too." to attempt to draw attention to sexual assault and harassment.[14][5] The next day, October 16, 2017, Milano wrote: "I was just made aware of an earlier #MeToo movement, and the origin story is equal parts heartbreaking and inspiring", providing the link to site of Ms. Burke.[4][27][93] Milano credits her identification with the Me Too movement to being personally affected by sexual harassment during a concert when she was 19.[94]

Alyssa Milano encouraged use of the hashtag after accusations against Harvey Weinstein surfaced in 2017.

Several hashtags related to sharing stories of workplace sexual harassment were in use before #MeToo, including #MyHarveyWeinstein, #WhatWereYouWearing (on March 12, 2014 there was a question on Twitter "What Were You Wearing When You Were Assaulted?" and there were answers what they wore;[95] there were posts with the #whatwereyouwearing as late as of 2010, not related to any kind of sexual harassment or workplace[96][97][98]), #SurvivorPrivilege (in June 2014 the #SurvivorPrivilege was about alleged lies of rape survivors to get privileges and denial of that by females, especially by students[99]) and #YouOkSis (on August 2, 2014 there was #YouOkSis about street harassment[100]).[101][102][103]

Impact

US media and fashion industries

See also: Weinstein effect and Sexual abuse in Hollywood

The phrase "Me too" was tweeted by Milano around noon on October 15, 2017, and had been used more than 200,000 times by the end of the day,[104] and tweeted more than 500,000 times by October 16.[105] On Facebook, the hashtag was used by more than 4.7 million people in 12 million posts during the first 24 hours.[27] The platform reported that 45% of users in the United States had a friend who had posted using the term.[106]

Tens of thousands of people, including hundreds of celebrities, replied with #MeToo stories.[107] Some men, such as actors Terry Crews[108] and James Van Der Beek,[109] have responded to the hashtag with their own experiences of harassment and abuse. Others have responded by acknowledging past behaviors against women, spawning the hashtag #HowIWillChange.[110]

In addition to Hollywood, "Me Too" declarations elicited discussion of sexual harassment and abuse in the music industry,[111] sciences,[112] academia,[113] and politics.[114]

Feminist author Gloria Feldt stated in Time that many employers are being forced to make changes in response to #MeToo, for example examining gender-based pay differences and improving sexual harassment policies.[115] Others have noted there has been pressure on companies, specifically in the financial industry, to disclose diversity statistics[clarification needed].[116]

In January 2019, actress Emma Thompson pulled out of the production "Luck" based on the production company's decision to hire former Disney Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter. Lasseter had been accused of harassing women while at Disney.[117] Thompson wrote a letter in February 2019 to the American production company Skydance, to explain her reasons for leaving "Luck". Among others, Thompson stated: "If a man has been touching women inappropriately for decades, why would a woman want to work for him if the only reason he’s not touching them inappropriately now is that it says in his contract that he must behave "professionally"?[118]

The 2019 rerelease of Toy Story 2 had a blooper scene during the credits removed due to sexual misconduct concerns.[119]

Churches

In November 2017, the hashtag #ChurchToo was started by Emily Joy and Hannah Paasch on Twitter and began trending in response to #MeToo as a way to try to highlight and stop sexual abuse that happens in a church.[120][121] In early January 2018, about a hundred evangelical women also launched #SilenceIsNotSpiritual to call for changes to how sexual misconduct is dealt within the church.[122][123] #ChurchToo started spreading again virally later in January 2018 in response to a live-streamed video admission by Pastor Andy Savage to his church that he sexually assaulted a 17-year-old girl twenty years before as a youth pastor while driving her home, but then received applause by his church for admitting to the incident and asking for forgiveness. Pastor Andy Savage then resigned from his staff position at Highpoint Church and stepped away from ministry.[124][125][126] Many have argued that one of the biggest crises in the history of the Catholic Church is the current child sexual abuse that is being reported, according to Tom Inglis in his book Are the Irish Different?.[127]

Education

See also: Francisco J. Ayala § Sexual harassment investigation and resignation; and University of California, Irvine § Internal and political controversies

The University of California has been no stranger to sexual harassment, with substantial accusations reported yearly in the hundreds at all nine UC campuses, notably UC Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, and San Diego.[128] However, a landmark event at the University of California, Irvine spearheaded the removal and reprimand of several campus officials and professors accused of sexual harassment and discrimination. In early July 2018, UC Irvine removed millionaire benefactor Francisco J. Ayala's name from its biology school, central science library, graduate fellowships, scholar programs, and endowed chairs after an internal investigation substantiated a number of sexual harassment claims. The results from the investigation were compiled in a 97-page report, which included testimony from victims enduring Ayala's harassment for 15 years.[129][130][131][132][133][134][135] His removal promptly sparked the removal of Professor Ron Carlson in August 2018, who had led the creative writing program at UC Irvine. He resigned after substantiated reports of sexual misconduct with an underage student were unearthed.[136] UC Irvine upon learning about the report accepted Professor Carlson's immediate resignation.[137] Additionally, four additional professors in the School of Biological Sciences at UC Irvine between June and August 2018 were put under sanctions or terminated for violating the UC Policy on Sexual Harassment including Thomas A. Parham, former vice chancellor at UC Irvine and former president of the Association of Black Psychologists.[138]

To address harassment within scientific settings, BethAnn McLaughlin started the #MeTooSTEM movement and hashtag.[139] She called for the National Institutes of Health to cut funding to anyone who has been found guilty of harassment charges.[139][140] McLaughlin shared the MIT Media Lab Disobedience Award with Tarana Burke and Sherry Marts for her work on Me Too in STEM.[141][142]

There are still many places of education such as high schools, however, where legal intervention is not readily enforced for situations where sexual assault takes place. Pamela Y. Price in her book Directions in Sexual Harassment Law describes how "a major argument for why [laws against] sexual harassment won't work in education is that issues of sexuality can't be regulated (similar to the debate in employment) or that adolescent behavior is too unpredictable to be legally controlled" (Price 62).[143]

Finance

It has been noted that, although the financial industry is known to have a wide prevalence of sexual harassment,[144] as of January 2018, there were no high-profile financial executives stepping down as the result of #MeToo allegations.[145] The first widely covered example of concrete consequences in finance was when two reporters, including Madison Marriage of the Financial Times, went undercover at a men-only Presidents Club event meant to raise money for children. Because women were not allowed to attend except as "hostesses" in tight, short black dresses with black underwear, Financial Times reporter Madison Marriage and another reporter got jobs as hostesses and documented widespread sexual misconduct. As a result, The Presidents Club was shut down.[145]

In March 2018, Morgan Stanley broker Douglas E. Greenberg was put on administrative leave after a New York Times story outlined harassment allegations by four women, including multiple arrests for the violation of restraining orders, and a threat to burn down an ex-girlfriend's house. It has been called the #MeToo moment of Portland's financial service industry.[146]

Only about a quarter of top positions are held by women at several major banks, and there is evidence there may be wide disparities in some financial institutions between how much men and women are paid on average.[116][relevant? – discuss]

The authors of a December 2018 Bloomberg News article on this topic interviewed more than thirty senior Wall Street executives and found that many are now more cautious about mentoring up and coming female executives because of the perceived risks involved. One said, "If men avoid working or traveling with women alone, or stop mentoring women for fear of being accused of sexual harassment, those men are going to back out of a sexual harassment complaint and right into a sex discrimination complaint."[147]

Politics and government

Statehouses in California, Illinois, Oregon, and Rhode Island responded to allegations of sexual harassment surfaced by the campaign,[148] and several women in politics spoke out about their experiences of sexual harassment, including United States Senators Heidi Heitkamp, Mazie Hirono, Claire McCaskill and Elizabeth Warren.[114] Congresswoman Jackie Speier has introduced a bill aimed at making sexual harassment complaints easier to report on Capitol Hill.[149] The accusations in the world of Spanish politics have also been published in the media,[150] and a series of allegations and research on MPs and political figures of (all major British political parties) regarding sexual impropriety became a nationwide scandal in 2017; this research was undertaken in the aftermath of the Weinstein scandal and the Me Too movement.[151][152][153]

Detective Leslie Branch-Wise of the Denver Police Department spoke publicly for the first time in 2018 about experiencing sexual harassment by Denver Mayor Michael B. Hancock. The detective provided sexually suggestive text messages from Hancock sent to her while working for Hancock's security detail in 2012. After six years of keeping the secret, Detective Branch-Wise credited the Me Too movement as an inspiration to share her experience.[154]

Congressman John Conyers was the first sitting United States politician to resign in the wake of #MeToo.[155][156][157] Later in 2019, Katie Hill resigned from Congress[158] due to an affair with a staffer after the House Ethics Committee opened an investigation into her conduct, stemming from these new rules.[159]

ME TOO bill in the US Congress

Jackie Speier proposed the Member and Employee Training and Oversight on Congress Act (ME TOO Congress Act) on November 15, 2017.[160] The full language of the bipartisan bill was revealed by the House on January 18, 2018 as an amendment to the Congressional Accountability Act of 1995.[161] The purpose of the bill is to change how the legislative branch of the U.S. federal government treats sexual harassment complaints. Under the old system, complaints regarding the legislative branch were channeled through the Office of Compliance, which required complete confidentially through the process and took months of counseling and mediation before a complaint could actually be filed. Any settlement payments were paid using federal taxes, and it was reported that within a decade, $15 million of tax money had been spent settling harassment and discrimination complaints. The bill would ensure future complaints could only take up to 180 days to be filed. The bill would also allow the staffers to transfer to a different department or otherwise work away from the presence of the alleged harasser without losing their jobs if they requested it. The bill would require Representatives and Senators to pay for their own harassment settlements. The Office of Compliance would no longer be allowed to keep settlements secret, and would be required to publicly publish the settlement amounts and the associated employing offices. For the first time, the same protections would also apply to unpaid workers, including pages, fellows and interns.[162][163][164]

Silicon Valley

In the months preceding the NY Times story on Harvey Weinstein, Travis Kalanick (CEO of Uber at the time) came under fire for enabling a misogynist culture at the company, and having extensive knowledge of sexual harassment complaints at the company, while failing to do anything about them.[165] After an initial blog post by a former Uber Engineer detailed her experiences at the company, more employees came out with their own stories, as documented in a follow-up article by the NY Times in late February, 2017. In it, they detail how they had notified senior management including Kalanick about incidents of sexual harassment, and that their complaints had gone ignored.[166] A few months later, in June of 2017, Kalanick himself came under allegations of sexual harassment, as it was reported that he visited an escort bar in Seoul, bringing fellow female employees of the company along with him. [167] One of the female employees filed a complaint to Human Resources about how she felt forced to be there, and was very uncomfortable in that environment, where women were made to wear tags with numbers on them, as if in an auction. [168] Fresh allegations of sexual harassment at the company surfaced one year later, implicating Uber's Corporate Development Executive Cameron Poetzscher. The allegations made it clear that Uber was not taking this issue seriously enough. [169]

On October 25, 2018, the New York Times released a detailed report on the prior behavior of Andy Rubin at Google. The allegations cite that Google knew of a sexual misconduct claim against Rubin, and yet still decided to pay him a $90 million separation package at his departure from the company.[170]

Sports

Soon after #MeToo started spreading in late 2017, several allegations from a 2016 Indianapolis Star article resurfaced in the gymnastic industry against former U.S. Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar of Michigan State University. Nassar was called out via #MeToo for sexually assaulting gymnasts as young as 6 years old during "treatments".[171] Rachael Denhollander was the first to call him out.[172] Though nothing was done after the initial allegations came out in 2016, after more than 150 women came forward, Nassar was effectively sentenced to life in prison. The president of Michigan State University, Lou Anna Simon, resigned in the wake of the scandal.[171]

At around the same time, WNBA star Breanna Stewart publicly revealed that she had been a victim of child sexual abuse from age 9 to 11.[173]

In late November 2017, Lui Lai Yiu, a hurdler from Hong Kong, recounted in a Facebook post instances of having been sexually assaulted by her male coach when she was 14, sparking off mass controversy in Hong Kong.[174] Her coach was arrested in late January 2018,[175] but acquitted in mid-November 2018.[176]

In 1996, while attending the University of Tennessee, former American football player Peyton Manning was accused of sexual assault by trainer Jamie Ann Naughright after he pressed his genitals against Naughright's face during a foot examination. Manning claims that he was just pulling a prank by "mooning" another athlete in the room as Naughright bent over to examine him. Both Naughright and the other athlete deny Manning's story. Naughright settled with the university for $300,000 for its alleged failure in four incidents, and resigned from the school. She had initially made a list of 33 complaints about the school.[177] Naughright filed a defamation lawsuit against Peyton Manning and three other parties in 2002. Manning defamed her in a book he wrote with his father and author John Underwood. The lawsuit was settled after the court ruled there was sufficient evidence for it to be heard by a jury. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed due to confidentiality terms.[178][179]

Medicine

MeToo has encouraged discussion about sexual harassment in the medical field.[59][180][181] Research had indicated that among U.S. academic medical faculty members, about 30% of women and 4% of men have reported experiencing sexual harassment, and it has been noted that medical staff who complain often receive negative consequences to their careers.[69][181] Other evidence has indicated 60% of medical trainees and students experienced harassment or discrimination during training, though most do not report the incidents.[59]

Music

Several prominent musicians have expressed support for the Me Too movement and have shared their own experiences of sexual assault and harassment.

Before the Me Too Movement, in 2017, Jessie Reyez released the song "Gatekeeper" about her experience of harassment by a famous producer, describing the conversations men in power have with young women working in the music industry.[182] This song inspired female artists in the music industry to speak up against sexual harassment, contributing to the start of the Me Too movement.[183]

Actress Alyssa Milano's activism for the Me Too movement began because she was harassed at the age of 19 during a concert.[184] On October 15, 2017, she started a viral twitter thread by tweeting "If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet." Musicians such as Sheryl Crow, Christina Perri and Lady Gaga responded and contributed their own personal experiences.[185]

Amanda Palmer and songwriter Jasmine Power composed "Mr. Weinstein Will See You Now", a song that takes listeners through a story of a woman being invited to the office of a man in power.[186] A music video with an all-woman crew, cast and production team was released on the anniversary of the New York Times's reporting on sexual abuse allegations against Harvey Weinstein, with profits donated to #TimesUp, a movement against sexual harassment.[187]

The band Veruca Salt used the #MeToo hashtag to air allegations of sexual harassment against James Toback,[188] and singer-songwriter Alice Glass used the hashtag to share a history of alleged sexual assault and other abuses by former Crystal Castles bandmate Ethan Kath.[189][190]

Singer Halsey wrote a poem, "A Story Like Mine", which she delivered at a 2018 Women's march in New York City. The poem describes incidents of sexual assault and violence throughout her life, including accompanying her best friend to Planned Parenthood after she had been raped and her personal experiences of sexual assault by neighbors and boyfriends.[191]

Allegations against figures in the music industry

In January 2019, the Lifetime documentary Surviving R. Kelly aired, describing several women's accusations of sexual, emotional, mental, and physical abuse by singer R. Kelly. The documentary questioned the "ecosystem" that "supports and enables" powerful individuals in the music industry.[192] In February 2019, Kelly was arrested for 10 alleged counts of sexual abuse against four women, three of whom were minors at the time of the incidents.[193] His former wife Andrea Kelly has also accused him of domestic violence and filed a restraining order against him in 2005.[194]

Singer Kesha has accused her former producer Dr. Luke of sexually, physically, and emotionally abusing her since the beginning of her music career.[195] Dr. Luke denied the allegations and a judge refused her request to be released from a contract with Sony Music due to the alleged abuse.[196] Kesha described her response to this experience in the song "Praying", which she performed at the 2018 Grammys. The song was seen as offering encouragement to sexual assault survivors that the world can improve.[197]

A documentary was also instrumental in publicizing accusations in the case of late singer Michael Jackson. Child sexual abuse allegations against Jackson were renewed after the airing of the documentary Leaving Neverland in 2019. The documentary focuses on Wade Robson and James Safechuck and their interactions with Jackson, especially the sexual interactions they say they endured for years during their childhood.[198] Both had previously testified in Jackson's defense — Safechuck as a child during the 1993 investigation, Robson both as a child in 1993 and as a young adult in 2005.[199][200] In 2015, Robson's case against Jackson's estate was dismissed on the grounds that it was filed too late.[201][202][203] The documentary resulted in a backlash against Jackson and a reassessment of his legacy in some quarters, while other viewers dismissed it as one-sided, questioned its veracity and viewed it as unconvincing due to factual conflicts between the film and the 1993 and 2005 allegations against Jackson, and his acquittal at trial.[204]

Removal of music

In November 2018, Cleveland, Ohio radio station WDOK Star 102 announced that it had removed the song "Baby, It's Cold Outside" from its playlist because listeners felt that the lyrics were inappropriate. The station's host commented that "in a world where #MeToo has finally given women the voice they deserve, the song has no place".[205] The streaming service Spotify removed music by XXXTentacion and R. Kelly from Spotify-owned playlists after allegations of "hateful conduct",[183][206] but later reversed course due to the fact that the allegations against the artists were unproven.[207]

Social Justice and Journalism

Eventually, the Me Too Movement became analyzed under a journalistic viewpoint, as writers and editors began to push the movement into larger news networks and labor sectors. Particularly, Sarah Lyons, who wrote "Hands Off Pants On," illustrated the importance of allowing an open space for victims of sexual assault in the work place to heal.[208] Further, the article also revealed the creation of the campaign, "UNITE HERE," which has a driving goal to protect women who felt threatened by sharing their stories and creating devices to stop assault before it happens.

Another scope that is critical to understand in order to lift up survivors of sexual violence is that of the legal system. In Sarah Jaffe's article, she analyzed victims thought the extent to which they are forced to follow through with police departments, and they (possibly) the court systems.[209] This path is currently struggling, and was constructed to fail those who need assistance the most.

Military

See also: Sexual assault in the United States military

Poster created by the U.S. Army's Sexual Harassment/Assault Response & Prevention

In the wake of #MeToo, #MeTooMilitary came to be used by service men and women who were sexually assaulted or harassed while in the military,[210] appearing on social media in January 2018 the day after remarks by Oprah Winfrey at the Golden Globe Awards honoring female soldiers in the military "whose names we'll never know" who have suffered sexual assault and abuse in order to make things better for women today.[211]

A report from the Pentagon indicated that 15,000 members of the military reported being sexually assaulted in the year 2016 and only 1 out of 3 people assaulted actually made a report.[212] Veteran Nichole Bowen-Crawford has said the rates have improved over the last decade, but the military still has a long way to go, and recommends that women veterans connect privately on social media to discuss sexual abuse in a safe environment.[211][213]

There was a "#MeTooMilitary Stand Down" protest, organized by Service Women's Action Network, which gathered at the Pentagon on January 8, 2018. The protest was endorsed by the U.S. Department of Defense, who stated that current service members were welcome to attend as long as they did not wear their uniform.[214][215][216] The protest supported the Military Justice Improvement Act, sponsored by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, which would move "the decision over whether to prosecute serious [sex] crimes to independent, trained, professional military prosecutors, while leaving uniquely military crimes within the chain of command".[215]

Pornography

There have been discussions about how pornography is related to the emergence of the #MeToo movement, and what changes, if any, should be made to the porn industry in response.[217][218] The deaths of five female porn actresses during the first three months of 2018 inspired demands that workers in the industry be included as part of the #MeToo movement.[219] It has been pointed out that many women and men have been sexually assaulted on set.[220] Some high-profile pornographic performers have been accused of assault since the emergence of #MeToo, including James Deen and Ron Jeremy.[219][221][222] The porn industry has overall been supportive of #MeToo, with the topics of harassment and bodily autonomy being addressed at the 2018 AVN Awards.[223] There have been calls for the industry to police itself better in the wake of #MeToo.[220] However, when gay actor Tegan Zayne accused fellow actor Topher DiMaggio of rape in a #MeToo post, and four other men came forward with their own allegations of sexual misconduct against DiMaggio, very little happened and there was no official investigation.[224]

Several groups of Christians, conservative women, and radical feminists have argued that #MeToo demonstrates pornography causes women to be viewed as sexual objects and contributes to the prevalence of sexual harassment. As a result, these groups believe the production and consumption of pornography should be greatly restricted or made illegal.[217]

Other social advocates and feminists have responded by pointing out that attempts to suppress pornography in the U.S. have historically never been effective at reducing consumption. They note that porn consumption in the U.S. is currently at what is likely the highest levels in history, but overall levels of sexual violence and rape are far lower today than when the anti-pornography movement in the U.S. first emerged during the 1960s. Additionally, many feminists argue that laws which make pornography illegal only further restrict women as far what they are and are not allowed to do with their bodies.[217]

Many feminists have stated that pornography can be empowering or enjoyable for women and depicting female sexuality is not always objectification.[217][225] Others point out that a lot of porn is made by women and for women.[226] Award-winning porn actress and director Angela White says there is a "large positive shift within the industry" to more women directing and producing their own content and "to represent women as powerful sexual beings."[219] Anti-porn activist Melissa Farley has said this ignores the "choicelessness" faced by many actresses in porn.[217] Liberal advocates argue that anti-pornography movements in the U.S. have historically never tried to increase choices for vulnerable adult performers, and taking away a person's right to act in porn may hurt them economically by reducing their choices. Many adult performers have stated that the social stigma surrounding their type of work is already a major barrier when they're seeking help, and making porn illegal would leave them few options if they are suffering from sexual abuse.[219]

As a result of #MeToo, many adult performers, sex worker advocates and feminists have called for greater protections for pornographic actresses, for example reducing social stigmas, mandating training courses that teach performers their rights, and providing access to independent hotlines where performers can report abuse. They argue that making porn illegal would only cause the production of porn to go underground where there are even fewer options for help. Some liberal activists have argued to compromise by raising the legal age of entry into adult entertainment from 18 to 21, which would prevent some of the most vulnerable women from being taken advantage of, while allowing adult women to still do what they want with their own bodies.[219]

Some have pointed out that many young people who do not receive a sex education adopt ideas about sex and sexual roles from pornography, whose fantasy depictions of those behaviors are not accurate to life, as they are designed for purposes of adult entertainment, and not educating the public on the reality of sexual behavior.[227] Some areas of the United States teach birth-control methods only by abstinence from sex. In a 2015 article for the American Journal of Nursing David Carter noted that a study found that abstinence-based education was "correlated with increases in teenage pregnancies and births". Multiple people have voiced support for comprehensive sex education programs that encompass a wide range topics, which they state leave children more informed.[228] Several feminists have argued it is crucial to provide children with basic sex education before they are inevitably exposed to porn. Sex education can also effectively prepare children to identify and say no to unwanted sexual contact before it occurs, and gives parents an opportunity to teach children about consent.[229]

Animal Advocacy

The #MeToo movement has had an impact on the field of animal advocacy. For instance, on January 30, 2018, Politico published an article titled, "Female Employees Allege Culture of Sexual Harassment at Humane Society: Two senior officials, including the CEO, have been investigated for incidents dating back over a decade."[230] The article concerned allegations against then- Humane Society of the United States CEO, Wayne Pacelle; and a well-known animal protection activist named Paul Shapiro.[231] Mr. Pacelle soon resigned.[232] Mr. Shapiro also soon left the Humane Society of the United States.[233] Both men have nonetheless continued to hold leadership positions either in, or adjacent to, the animal protection movement.[234][235]

Astronomy

The #astroSH twitter tag was used to discuss sexual harassment in the field of Astronomy, and several scientists and professors resigned or were fired.[236][237][238][239]

Financial support

In May 2018, The New York Women's Foundation announced their Fund to Support the Me Too Movement and Allies, a $25M commitment over the next five years to provide funding and support survivors of sexual violence.[240]

In September 2018, CBS announced that it would be donating $20 million of former Chairman Les Moonves' severance to #MeToo. Moonves was forced to step down after numerous sexual misconduct accusations.[241][242]

International response

The hashtag has trended in at least 85 countries,[243] including India, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom. Direct translations of #MeToo have been shared by Spanish speakers in South America and Europe and by Arabic speakers in Africa and the Middle East, while activists in France and Italy have developed hashtags to express the attitudes of the movement.[244] Communicating similar experiences and "sharing feelings in some form of togetherness" connects people and can lead to "formation of a process of collective action" (Castells).[245][246] The campaign has prompted survivors from around the world to share their stories, and name their perpetrators. The European Parliament convened a session directly in response to the Me Too campaign, after it gave rise to allegations of abuse in Parliament and in the European Union's offices in Brussels. Cecilia Malmström, the European Commissioner for Trade, specifically cited the hashtag as the reason the meeting had been convened.[247]

List of local alternative hashtags

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- Arab League Arabic: #أنا_كمان (en: MeToo)[248]

- Canada, French-speaking areas: #MoiAussi (en: MeToo)[249]

- China, Mainland: #我也是 and #WoYeShi (en: MeToo)[250]

- Finland: #memyös (en: WeToo)

- France: #balanceTonPorc (en: DenounceYourPig,[251] ExposeYourPig[252]) #noustoutes (en: All (of) us (women))

- India: #मैंभी (en: MeToo)[253]

- Iran: #من_هم_همینطور (en: MeToo)

- Italy: #QuellaVoltaChe (en: ThatTimeThat)[248]

- Israel: #גםאנחנו (en: UsToo) גםאני#, גמאני# (en: MeToo)

- Japan: #私も and #WatashiMo (en: MeToo)

- Kazakhstan: #МенДе or #MenDe (en: MeToo)[254]

- North Macedonia: #СегаКажувам (en: NowTelling)

- Norway: #stilleføropptak (en: SilentUntilRecorded), #nårdansenstopper (en: WhentheDanceStops), #nårmusikkenstilner (en: WhentheMusicQuiets)

- Pakistan: #میں_بھی (en: MeToo)

- Russia: #МеняТоже or #Ятоже (en: MeToo)

- South Korea: #나도당했다 (en: MeToo)

- Spain: #YoTambién (en: MeToo)[248] (

Catalonia: #JoTambé) (

Basque Country: #NiEre) (

Galicia: #EuTamén)

- Taiwan: #我也是 and #WoYeShi (en: MeToo)

- Tunisia: #EnaZeda (en: MeToo)[255]

- Vietnam: #TôiCũngVậy (en: MeToo)

Afghanistan

The #MeToo hashtag initially spread in Afghanistan where it is estimated about 90% of women experience sexual harassment in public, at school, or at work, but was quickly silenced when those who shared their stories started fearing for their life.[256][257] Less than 1% of police officers or military members are women, and sexual assault is often ignored by law enforcement and the military.[258] Rape threats and other types of harassment are common on Facebook and other social media in Afghanistan. Sharing stories of sexual abuse against higher-ranking men is especially dangerous for women in the country, and may result in the killing of the victim or her family members.[257] Some women are also punished or killed to by their own family for speaking out, to redeem their "honor" after being tarnished by rape.[257] Despite the risks, some notable people such as Sarienews journalist Maryam Mehtar, and presidential advisor Shaharzad Akbar have shared their own #MeToo stories on social media. Mehtar experienced extreme abuse and several death threats for sharing her story about being sexually harassed in public on a daily basis, and was publicly called a "whore" in an interview with The New York Times by Afghan writer Jalil Junbish. He also called the NYT reporter a whore in the same interview. He later denied making the comments.[258] Other women only share their first name or a fake name, and typically describe the story without naming the perpetrator for fear of reprisal.[258] Sexual harassment was first defined in Afghanistan in 2016, though there has been little effort made to enforce laws against it.[256] Rod Nordland and Fatima Faizi of The New York Times reported that a colonel in the Afghan Air Force was secretly and clearly videotaped sexually assaulting a subordinate in November 2017, and the video quickly went viral, but despite an alleged investigation, the colonel has not been formally accused of misconduct.[258] The Ministries of Interior and Communications set up a phone hotline to for women to call to report sexual misconduct from law enforcement officials, but a call to the line revealed the hotline will offer advice only about phone harassment, and stated if a person harasses you in person, to "slap them".[258]

Australia

In October 2017 reporter and journalist Tracey Spicer announced on Twitter that she was launching an investigation into reports of sexual harassment by powerful Australian men in the media in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse allegations and the rise in public awareness of the #MeToo movement. Earlier that same year, Spicer had released a memoir, The Good Girl Stripped Bare, where she wrote about her own experiences of sexual harassment in the work place.[259] Spicer later reported that she had received responses from 470 people about people in the industry, including Australian television presenter and producer Don Burke.[260] The extent of the claims against Burke were published by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and The Sydney Morning Herald in a joint investigative piece on November 26, 2017, where it was reported that "One name kept recurring – Don Burke."[261][262] Spicer, along with Kate McClymont, Lorna Knowles and Alison Branley, won the 2018 Walkley Awards in the print/text journalism and Television/Video Current Affairs Short (less than 20 minutes) categories for their investigation and on Australia Day in 2018, Spicer was appointed as a Member of the Order of Australia "for significant service to the broadcast media as a journalist and television presenter, and as an ambassador for social welfare and charitable groups".[263][264] Later that same year, Spicer and Melinda Schneider launched NOW Australia, a campaign aimed at helping connect people with legal support and counselling.[265]

Since then the #MeToo movement has now expanded beyond Australian media and the Australian Human Rights Commission has launched an independent search into workplace sexual harassment that is the first of its kind in the world.[266]

It has been hypothesised by The Age that Australia's strict defamation laws make it difficult for more victims to come forward.[267] Yael Stone made an accusation against Geoffrey Rush[268][269] who then successfully sued her for defamation; this may have a chilling effect on the #MeToo movement due to the lack of protection for freedom of speech.[270]

The #MeToo movement was announced the winner of the 2019 Sydney Peace Prize. The award will be presented to Tarana Burke and Tracey Spicer on November 14, 2019.[271]

Belgium

In May 2019, Julie Van Espen was the victim of a homicide in Antwerp. Her death has led to political protests against sexual violence. That month, over 15,000 people walked a 'silent march' in Antwerp for Van Espen. The hashtags '#enough', '#MeToo' and '#JulieVanEspen' were used by people on social media to command attention to the case, to raise awareness on sexual violence, and to address that the suspect of her murder had been convicted of rape twice before.[272]

Canada

Éric Salvail, accused of sexual harassment

In French-speaking parts of Canada, the campaign is done under the hashtag #MoiAussi.[273] A minister of Quebec, Hélène David, said she believed a global movement was in the works and we should salute this change.[274] It was reported that calls to rape and women's crisis centers have increased dramatically, up to 553% above normal levels,[275] since #MoiAussi started trending in October 2017, causing problems with staffing and budgeting.[276] Quebec has contributed $1 million to help support these crisis hotlines.[275] Hundreds of people marched to promote #MoiAussi at an event in Toronto in December 2017.[277] In the wake of #MoiAussi, a candidate for mayor of Plateau-Mont-Royal dropped out of the race in response to allegations of sexual misconduct from several women.[278] Montreal police set up a phone hotline for people who have been raped or harassed to call.[274] Radio and TV presenter Éric Salvail was accused by 11 people of either being sexually harassed, or witnessing harassment from Salvail.[274] He lost several endorsements and was suspended from most projects he was involved with.[279] Humorist Gilbert Rozon resigned from all his positions and tried to sell his company in the wake of several sexual misconduct allegations, including one from producer Julie Snyder, a class action lawsuit from several women, and a sexual assault report filed with the police.

A newly popular hashtag, #EtMaintenant (#AndNow or Now What?) has started spreading as the "second part" to #MoiAussi to discuss what to do now that the magnitude of the problem with sexual misconduct in the workplace has been exposed. #EtMaintenant is represented by a yellow heart. It was unveiled on the show Tout le monde en parle in January 2018, with the stated purpose of determining which attitudes related to society, politics, institutions, and media need to be changed to ensure equity between all people.[280]

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been a vocal advocate and supporter of the #MeToo movement. In a speech at the World Economic Forum in January 2018, Trudeau called for critical discussion on issues brought up by the #MeToo, Time's Up, and Women's March movements.[281] Trudeau has also advocated and acted upon a high standard set for himself and members of his government. Trudeau stated that he holds a "zero tolerance for sexual assault, harassment or other forms of misconduct by his employees or caucus colleagues".[282] As leader of the Liberal party, Trudeau initiated investigations on several members of parliament resulting in the dismissal of cabinet minister Kent Hehr, the resignation of MP Darshan Kang, and the suspension and later expulsion of MPs Scott Andrews and Massimo Pacetti.[283] In an interview, Trudeau explained that the zero tolerance standard applied to himself as well and stated, "I've been very, very careful all my life to be thoughtful, to be respectful of people's space and people's headspace as well."[284]

However, an editorial written in August 2000 resurfaced during his premiership regarding an alleged incident where an author accused Trudeau of groping a reporter and in July 2018 Trudeau publicly rejected the accusations.[285][286] The piece stated Trudeau provided a "day-late" apology to the reporter, saying, "If I had known you were reporting for a national paper, I never would have been so forward."[287] On July 6 Trudeau stated there was no need to conduct an investigation into the allegations against him.[288]

Chile

In April–June 2018, female students marched around Chile and occupied universities in protest against sexual harassment.[289] Multiple actresses levelled accusations of Weinstein-like behaviour at telenovela director Herval Abreu in April and film director Nicolás López in June; both men have denied any wrongdoing.[290]

China

On Chinese social networks, hashtags #WoYeShi or #metoo are sometimes used to denote the #Metoo hashtag. Mi tu pronounced in Mandarin, meaning "rice bunny", is also used with a hashtag of #RiceBunny.[291]

In mainland China, the Chinese internet censorship service has slowed down the Chinese MeToo posts via censorship.[292] So far, the #MeToo debate appears to be limited to universities.[293]

An article appearing on the state-run China Daily newspaper states that sexual misconduct is rare in China due to superior education and culture has caused considerable Internet outrages.[294]

A recent study from a pair of professors from City University of Hong Kong indicated that about 80% of working women in China have experienced sexual harassment at some point in their career,[250] and there were strong reactions of anger online following the report. The article has since been taken down.[295] Activist Feng Yuan points out that China does not have national laws prohibiting sexual harassment, and uses state media to encourage women to focus on family and stay home. New laws recently made it illegal for television programming to contain images of a women's cleavage, sexual acts outside of marriage, or any topics that present "Western lifestyles" in a positive light. #MeToo has received extreme governmental censorship online.[57][295]

Sophie Richardson, the Human Rights Watch director for China, stated the Chinese government regularly suppresses discussion of women's rights, for example an incident in 2015 where Li Tingting and four other activists were arrested when the government learned they planned to hand out stickers about preventing sexual harassment on public transportation.[295]

In Hong Kong, track and field athlete Vera Lui Lai-Yiu posted her case of sex abuse alongside #metoo on her Facebook fanpage on her 23rd birthday. She posted in response to a similar action by gymnast McKayla Maroney. Lui posted a picture of herself holding a piece of paper with the handwritten words "#metoo lly" (her initials).[296][297][298][299][300] In January 2018, student Zheng Xi publicly started a campaign against sexual harassment in response to #MeToo.[250]

Dr. Luo Xixi, an academic, revealed being sexually assaulted by a professor at Beihang University when she was in her 20s. Luo gathered extensive evidence from many women, including recordings, and presented it to the institution. She waited until the professor was already suspended before going public with the story. Her post was viewed over 3 million times within 24 hours. She said that #metoo gave her the courage to speak up. She is currently living in the US.[57]

Zhou Xiaoxuan, a 25-year-old screenwriter in Beijing, stated that the China Central Television host and anchor Zhu Jun assaulted her in his dressing room while she was an intern of his in 2014. When she went to the police, she was urged her to drop her report, telling her that her parents, who both work for government institutions, could lose their jobs. So for years, Ms. Zhou kept what had happened a secret, only known by herself, her parents, and some close friends. That was until one day, where she saw a "#MeToo" post, and decided to share her own story. Her intentions were to share with her friends that this happens to people close to themselves, but instead her post was shared rapidly over the Chinese internet, until the Chinese government intervened and banned state-run media from covering the story.[301]

Yue Xin, an undergraduate of Peking University in Beijing, led a campaign to uncover information regarding the alleged assault and subsequent suicide of Gao Yan, a student who was allegedly assaulted by former professor Shang Yang.[302] Peking University took measures to attempt to dissuade Yue from pursuing her investigation.[303][304] Yue Xin would eventually participate in the Jasic Incident.

Ethiopia

Alyssa Milano specifically called for supporting the victims in Ethiopia in an interview with Rolling Stone.[31] In Ethiopia, up to 40% of students may have experienced sexual violence.[305] In November 2017, nine middle-school aged girls organized together and spoke out about an abusive teacher in their school, saying they got the idea from the "Me Too" movement. The teacher was dismissed and referred to law enforcement. UNICEF's Amanda Westfall said the teacher likely would have gotten away with it just a few years ago.[305]

France

Variants of the phrase trended in France,[104] especially #BalanceTonPorc (#DenounceYourPig),[273] which encouraged users to share the names of their alleged abusers.[306][307] #BalanceTonPorc was first used by Sandra Muller. She was requested to take down her tweet by two lawyers.[308] In France, 93% of complaints against criminal sexual harassment are dropped or never followed up on by law enforcement.[309] Prosecutions are extremely rare, and only 65 of 1,048 sexual harassment lawsuits from 2014 actually led to a conviction.[308] In 40% of workplace sexual violence cases, the person who makes the complaint is reprimanded or fired, while the accused person is typically not investigated or punished.[309] There is no French equivalent to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which gives victims a place to report workplace sexual violence if the employer and/or law enforcement refuses to address the complaint.[309] Brigitte Macron, wife of French President Emmanuel Macron, expressed support for the #MeToo movement.[308][310]

Initially the hashtag went viral, but there was an almost immediate media backlash.[311] Soon after, 100 high-profile French women, including actress Catherine Deneuve, former pornographic actress and radio host Brigitte Lahaie, art critic and author Catherine Millet, signed an open letter by Abnousse Shalmani which criticized the #MeToo / #BalanceTonPorc campaign. It was noted the letter is poorly edited with several typos and unclear or clumsy passages.[56][312]

The people who signed the letter, especially Deneuve and Millet, were criticized for saying men should have the "right to pester" women.[313] The letter also told people not to be bothered by small amounts of sexual harassment, for example men who rub against women on public transportation. The letter states women should "consider it as the expression of a great sexual misery, or even as a nonevent".[312] French politician Marlène Schiappa said some aspects of the letter were "profoundly shocking" and "we have immense difficulty convincing young women that when a man rubs his genitals against a woman in the Métro without her consent, it is an act of sexual assault that can lead to three years in prison and a 75,000 euro fine."[308][312]

A week after its publication, Deneuve issued a letter of clarification, and said although she still agrees with the spirit of the original letter, she wants to clarify that she does believe sexual harassment and assault are real problems, and apologized to all victims of unpleasant sexual acts who read the letter and felt hurt by it.[314][315]

Political commentator Anastasia Colosimo said the movement to prevent sexual misconduct at work is more accepted by younger women in France because they take sexual freedom as a given, while older feminists are afraid #MeToo may hurt the sexual revolution.[56] Legal professional Marilyn Baldeck noted that when people are given "concrete examples" of sexual misconduct, they often "change their minds and acknowledge how harmful some situations can be".[312] French politician Sandrine Rousseau said that the #MeToo movement will continue because French women have been silenced for too long.[308] A petition aimed at President Emmanuel Macron demanded sexual harassment to be taken more seriously in France, and received more than 100,000 signatures in three days.[309]

Singer Tom Connan said in an interview published by L'Obs that he had been the victim of sexual harassment and claimed that men (not only women) were also affected by the problem.[316]

NousToutes

In 2018, 30,000 women marched in Paris with the #NousToutes, dressing in purple.[317][318]

Ten of thousand of men and women demonstrated the 23rd of november 2019 in more than 30 cities.[319]

Ligue du LOL

In February 2019 prominent male Parisian journalists were accused of forming a group, called the "Ligue du LOL", which – over a 10-year period – ran online harassment campaigns against feminists, female journalists, writers of colour and gay people. The group's founder, Vincent Glad [fr], was suspended by the daily newspaper Libération, whose own fact-checking unit broke the story.

The NGO SOS Racisme called for a judicial investigation.[320][321]

Germany

MeToo was not particularly popular in Germany until January 11, 2018, when it started trending after the Die Zeit weekly newspaper published reports about three German former actresses who alleged that award-winning TV director Dieter Wedel had committed sexual assault.[322][323] There have been official concerns about the alleged long-time coverup of Wedel's actions because most of his work was done through public broadcasting and received government money.[323] The report detailed a months-long investigation into the three allegations, and included 50 interviews.[322] Wedel has not responded to the allegations in Die Zeit, stating through a spokesperson he is in the hospital and having heart trouble.[323] Another high-profile German case concerned the former president of the Munich Academy of Music, Siegfried Mauser.[324] In a study of 2000 Germans conducted after the initial spread of #MeToo, it was found that 43% of women and 12% of men have experienced sexual harassment or abuse, most commonly inappropriate touching.[325]

Iran

In the Islamic Republic of Iran, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a message stating the "disaster of countless sexual assaults on Western women – including incidents leading to #Metoo campaign" can be solved with the Islamic solution of hijab.[326][327]

India

Main article: Me Too movement (India)

The use of the #MeToo hashtag on social media spread quickly in India,[328][329] where sexual harassment is commonly referred to by the word 'eve-teasing', a term described as misleading, tame, and diluting the seriousness of the crime.[330] In response to #MeToo, there have been attempts to teach Indian women about workplace rights and safe reporting, as well as educate men about the scope of the problem.[328][331] Some have likened #MeToo to a 2012 social movement which followed a violent gang rape in New Delhi that later resulted in a woman's death, which caused the Indian government to institute harsher punishments for rape.[329][332][333] Others have suggested there was underlying public anger over a Delhi rape conviction that was overturned by Judge Ashutosh Kumar a month before against filmmaker and writer Mahmood Farooqui, ruling that a "feeble" no was not enough to revoke consent because it was typical for one partner to be less willing. The case is being appealed to the Supreme Court.[332][334] Activist Jasmeen Patheja, head of Blank Noise, stated #MeToo's power is in demonstrating India can no longer ignore the scope of the problem.[329] Kaimini Jaiswal, a lawyer at the Supreme Court of India, stressed the importance of teaching women how to read, especially in rural villages, because most women in these areas are illiterate and completely financially and emotionally dependent on a male relative.[333]

Blogger Sheena Dabholkar's viral #MeToo tweet resulted in the boycott of Khodu Irani's popular Pune pub, High Spirits, by several well-known performers.[328][335][336] Several women mentioned Mahesh Murthy, which initiated a police case in January 2018.[248][337] The Trends Desk of The Indian Express wrote many Indian men are speaking up as a part of #MeToo, including discussions about consent and how some men are also abused.[338][339] Rina Chandran of Reuters said that #MeToo is ignoring the 600,000 women in India who are currently involuntary sex workers, and are typically poor, uneducated or lack a family.[340]

There were reports of mass sexual assaults during the 2018 new year's celebrations in Bangalore, which have been associated with #MeToo. The incidents were initially dismissed by the police until someone uploaded CCTV footage of the assaults to social media.[333] Home Minister G. Parameshwara, Abu Azmi, and other officials came under fire for stating "western" women's clothing and values were the cause of the rapes and that women's families should not allow them to go to parties or major celebrations.[333]

Several lists of alleged rapists and harassers started spreading on social media in India, including "The List" which initially included the names of about sixty highly respected academic men. The List of Sexual Harassers in Academia ("LoSHA") was posted on October 24, 2017, by activist Inji Pennu and an Indian student in California named Raya Sarkar, who alleged they personally confirmed every incident.[341][342] This list has resulted in criticism against #MeToo because the allegations were unverified before they started spreading on social media. Some of the victims from the list have come forward to explain they were ignored, mistreated or retaliated against when they tried to pursue action.[343] Sarkar has defended The List, saying that she posted it only to warn her friends about professors and academics to avoid (mostly upper caste men), and had no idea it could become so popular.[342] A second list came out a week later that was made by women from a lower caste background and included more names, raising the total to around 70.[341]

Twelve prominent Indian feminists dismissed The List in a formal letter, saying they understand that the justice system is typically tilted against victims, but unverified claims make things harder for the feminist movement.[341][344] Writers Rhea Dangwal and Namrata Gupta responded that most victims from the list were poor students who tried to go through official channels without success or recourse, while every single man on the list has the ability to defend himself socially and legally.[341]

On September 27, 2018, former actress Tanushree Dutta accused Nana Patekar of sexual harassment,[345] which was the catalyst of the "Me Too" movement in India. The accusation by Dutta stirred a row of accusations from many women in industries including media and politics.[346][347][348] In October 2018, the Minister of state for External Affairs, MJ Akbar was accused of sexual harassment by several female colleagues through the 'Me Too' Movement in India.[349]

On October 21, 2018, former music director Anu Malik was suspended from the jury panel of Indian Idol 2018, after facing multiple allegations of sexual harassment made through the movement.[350]

Israel

In Israel, the Hebrew hashtag גםאנחנו# (#UsToo) began trending on October 18, 2017, with a front page spread in the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth.[273] Asi Levi said at the Ophir Award ceremony that unlike America, in Israel the status of those accused do not change.[351] A hashtag for men, #HowIWillChange, has also become popular.[352]

Palestine

#AnaKaman or وأنا كمان# (#MeToo) has also been used by Palestinian women from refugee camps.[353]

Italy

In Italy, women posted stories of assault and harassment under the hashtag #QuellaVoltaChe, which translates literally as "TheTimeThat".[354][355] The phrase was launched by the journalist Giulia Blasi.[356] Italian journalist Simona Siri wrote in The Washington Post that the initially popular movement quickly died out in Italy. She stated that Italian politician and former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who is known for his role in wild parties (Bunga Bunga bacchanals) with underage women and prostitutes,[357][358] has contributed to a strong sexist culture with few female politicians in positions of power.[58] Movie directors Fausto Brizzi and Giuseppe Tornatore were accused of harassment by more than a dozen women but did not face any significant consequences or media scrutiny.[359][58]

The New York Times described the movement in Italy as "Meh" due to the lack of discussion. Laura Boldrini, the president of the lower house of Parliament, has declared that the movement cannot touch Italy because although there is much harassment, victims are often silenced and there's also a belief that "in our country, there are no harassers".[357] It has been reported that nearly 70% of female university students have been sexually harassed, and it is widely accepted that Italy is behind other countries when it comes to gender rights.[358] In response to #QuellaVoltaChe, one article from Libero was titled, "First they put out, then they whine and pretend to regret it."[358]

Italian Fabrizio Lombardo, an employee and friend of Harvey Weinstein, was widely covered by the media after he was accused of allegations that he aided Weinstein in sexually harassing Italian actress and former model Asia Argento, though he denies all wrongdoing.[360] Argento said of Italy, "Nothing has changed", and described her life after going public with the allegations as living a nightmare. She has made plans to leave Italy. Conservative TV news editor Alessandro Sallusti [it] criticized Argento for being an accomplice to Weinstein for not reporting him immediately, and several other public figures and politicians questioned her innocence.[357]

The Non Una di Meno group (Not One Woman Less), which is dedicated to stopping violence against women, wrote a letter in support of Argento and organised a protest in November 2017 where tens of thousands of people gathered in Rome.[358] Blogger Abbatto i muri (I Break Down Walls), journalist Ida Dominijanni, Cagne sciolte (literally, Loose Bitches), and author Michela Marzano also strongly supported Argento publicly.[358] Italian women's rights activist Lorella Zanardo has stated that it is taken for granted that women must give or sell their body in order to get high-profile positions in politics, film, and media.[357]

Maria Elena Boschi, a politician who has created governmental initiatives aimed at teaching women it's okay to say no to sexual advances, has been targeted in the news and on social media for her support of the #QuellaVoltaChe movement.[356] She has been impersonated in several fake interviews where the actresses portray Boschi in unflattering ways.[357] There are also photoshopped images of Boschi that have been shared widely on social media, including a doctored image with her underwear showing during her swearing-in ceremony, which never occurred.[357][361] Francesca Puglisi, the chair of the Commission of Inquiry into Femicide in Italy, said that one woman is killed every two days on average by male violence, and the problem is severely under-reported, though she credited the #QuellaVoltaChe hashtag and the work by Boschi with making a positive difference.[362]

Argento, herself, was accused of sexual misconduct in 2018 by actor Jimmy Bennett. Following this allegation, Argento was fired from her work on The X Factor Italy.[363]

Japan

In Japan approximately 4% of rapes are reported in Japan due to social stigmas against sexual assault survivors, of which half of the criminal charges are dropped by prosecutors.[41] Many rape myths in Japanese culture typically hold women accountable for sexual assaults instead of the assaulter, creating an environment where even if victims come forward "Japanese society wants them to stay silent."[41] Political Scientist Mari Miura argues that a lack of solidarity among women and the complicated, stigmatized and lengthy process of prosecuting rapists deters sexual assault survivors from speaking out.[364] In fact, the word "rape" is taboo in Japan, instead described with less threatening words like saying an underage victim was "tricked," or a woman was "violated" thus contributing to a public lacking comprehensive understanding of the pervasiveness of the problem.[41] The legal age of consent in Japan is 13.[365] Women in Japan are regularly exposed to harassment from a young age,[366] for example, on public transportation[41] it is called chikan.[367] Prior to 2017, laws regarding the treatment of sexual assault had remained unchanged since 1907. It previously failed to consider oral and anal rape as assault. Despite the definition of assault being expanded in 2017, rape is criminalized and prosecutable under law only if there is clear evidence of physical force and resistance being involved in the act.[368]

Multiple other authors and public figures have criticized what they saw as Japan's silence on the topic of sexual assault, such as Kyoko Nakajima, Mayumi Mori,[41] Kirsten King,Akiko Kobayashi,[369][370] Hakuo Au (née Haruka Ito).[371] BuzzFeed Japan writer Takumi Harimaya has stated that by sharing these stories, other victims of sexual assault and harassment can know they are not alone.[371] Another journalist, Keiko Kojima stated that the movement is necessary to let people know that it is okay to say no to sexual violence, including male victims. She further remarked that despite how it is attacked in Japanese media, that #MeToo is not an "anti-man" campaign and that it is simply about anti-violence and anti-harassment. Kojima also believes it is extremely important for men to call out behaviors in others such as sexual harassment or having sex with someone who is unconscious and that every person who is not committing sexual violence is part of the #MeToo movement, whether they are male or female.[367]

As part of the #MeToo movement, Shiori Itō went public alleging that she was raped by Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a prominent TV journalist and acquaintance of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe,[372] an admission she says was unthinkable for a woman to do in Japan. Yamaguchi rejects her accusations, and says that sex was consensual.[372] She said her experience with Japan's legal system showed her that victims of sex crimes were undermined and ignored. She called for the Japanese parliament to update Japan's laws regarding rape, which were over a century old. She explains how she could not get information on which hospital provides rape kits without going through a preliminary interview in person. When she went to the police, she was discouraged from filing a report, and informed her career would be ruined for no reason if she did this. She was told she did not act like a victim, and had to be interviewed by several officers, including one who made her reenact the rape with a dummy while he took pictures. Although they initially said they would arrest Yamaguchi, the case and charges were unexpectedly dropped. Itō then went to the media, but no one would take her story. When she spoke about the experience at a press conference, she made national news and immediately started receiving a negative backlash, hate mail, and threats.[41][373] She has been unsuccessful in her attempts to have criminal charges brought against Yamaguchi, but as of 2018 she was still pursuing a civil case against him, which he was defending.[372] After reflecting on her experience with reporting sexual assault, Itō notes that there "is little concept of sexual consent in the law or in society" which indicates a need for more education in schools especially given the prevalence of rape culture and power imbalances in Japanese society.[41] Itō further stated that the #MeToo Movement was small in Japan but that "what’s happened in the United States and elsewhere has provided an opening in our media to discuss sexual harassment and assault here, and to raise awareness".[41][374]

In 2018, Junichi Fukuda, a deputy finance minister in the Abe Administration, resigned after being accused of sexual harassment by his former subordinates and an anonymous TV Asahi reporter.[375][376] TV Asahi warned against their employee making this allegation and going public with the allegedly incriminating conversation between her and Fukuda. Fukuda was publicly defended by his boss, Finance Minister Aso Taro, who stated that Fukuda was unjustly reprimanded since sexual assault is not a punishable crime in Japan.[368] Aso Taro retained his job despite commenting that replacing female reporters with men should stop sexual harassment.[376]

A former member of the Japanese idol group Niji no Conquistador pressed charges against Pixiv representative director, Hiroaki Nagata, for sexual harassment during her time with the group, motivated by the #MeToo movement.[377] Nagata resigned following the lawsuit.[378]

As a result of the severe culture of victim blaming, the slogan #WeToo was developed in conjunction with #MeToo. The slogan was launched in order to spur more women to openly support the feminist agenda of revealing the prevalence of sexual harassment and showing solidarity with victims. By replacing "Me" with "We", the slogan allowed women to contribute to the movement without having to speak of their own experience with sexual harassment, which is associated with the risk of receiving stigma, shame, and ostracization. The slogan was developed by Monica Fukuhara, who had first hand experience in the difficulty women in Japan face in regards to the fear of speaking of their experience with sexual assault.[379]

Another manifestation of the MeToo movement in Japan was the following development of the KuToo campaign. Based on the Japanese word "kutsu" for shoes and the word for pain "kutsuu", the campaign was launched in response to the corporate norm that expects women at the workplace to always wear high heels. Similarly, women are pressured to wear high heels when job hunting, so as to raise the prospects of finding a competitive position in a corporation. Founded and supported by writer Yumi Ishikawa, the campaign gained enough support to result in a petition being sent to labour ministry officials. Specifically, KuToo aims to prompt officials to create anti-sexual harassment and discrimination laws that will prohibit companies from restricting women from wearing anything other than high heels at the workplace.[380]

Kenya

When #MeToo first went viral in October 2017, coverage was overshadowed in Kenya by a presidential election that was occurring the next week.[381] However, the #MeToo movement started slowly spreading in Kenya after the election was over.[381] In January 2018, it became especially popular after several new mothers alleged sexual misconduct at Kenyatta National Hospital, claiming that after giving birth they have been sexually assaulted when they went alone to breastfeed.[382] There were also allegations that children in the hospital have been sexually assaulted.[382] The hospital announced that the women were all lying, but in the future, women should stay together in groups in the hospital to prevent sexual assault. In response, hundreds of people began protesting in the streets of in Nairobi, Kenya, and an investigation was initiated by the health minister.[383]

Nepal

Former Mayor of Kathmandu, Keshav Sthapit has been accused of sexual harassment by two female office clerks of the Kathmandu Metropolitan Office, Rashmila Prajapati and Ujjwala Maharjan, as a part of the Me Too movement in Nepal.[384][385][386]

Nigeria

Culture

Nigerian women and children get sexually assaulted every day and do not speak up about it due to fear of stigmatisation and prejudice.[387] Official silence seems to surround sexual abuse of women in Nigeria, with the police frequently not taking sexual abuse reports seriously.[388] As a result, men, who are often the perpetrators of sexual abuse go unchallenged, and unpunished owing to factors such as culture and popular beliefs.[388] The custom of victim blaming is evident in testimonies rape and sexual abuse survivors.[387] Nigerian cultures look down on the open discussions of sexual matters and desires.[388] A great deal of the pressure to remain silent stems from socio-cultural values, customs and expectations about what constitutes socially accepted behaviours.[389] Cultural socialisation recognises men as having a naturally stronger sexual drive, and speaks of women in terms of shame, lack of interest in sexual matters and as one to be conquered by a domineering man.[388] Nigerians are socially nurtured and fed by oppressive patriarchal subjectivities that try to instil a sense of what is normal: sexually-speaking.[389]

Role of power and privilege

There is a factor of power influencing the slow growth of the movement in Nigeria. The country is a highly patriarchal society.[390] Women have complained of how unimaginable it is in the country to report cases of harassment.[391] Yet, sexual harassment is so prominent within the country that it is perceived as almost a right to men.[391]

Brenda Uphopho case

She had been assaulted three times by three different men. The first incident took place at age five. At that time, she was too young to understand what happened until a similar incident occurred at age 18. She was at a party when a stranger forced her to have sex with him. Upon her refusal, he beat her up and raped her. Due to the stigma attached to being raped, she resorted to silence. The final experience took place at her workplace when her boss forcibly put his hand under her skirt. She still remained silent with the notion of not being believed and being judged by others. Realizing she could not remain silent and needing to make an impact, Uphopho currently works with her husband to break the "culture of silence" around abuse in Nigeria. They produced a play called Shattered which seeks to encourage victims of sexual abuse to speak up.[392]

Norway

In Norway, under the hashtag #stilleforopptak (en. SilentforRecording), almost 600 actresses signed a petition and shared their stories through Aftenposten on November 16, 2017.[393] This also inspired dancers and musicians to create their own petitions, #nårdansenstopper (en. WhentheDanceStops) signed by 792 dancers,[394] and #nårmusikkenstilner (en. WhentheMusicQuiets) signed by over 1110 musicians.[395]

Trond Giske, the deputy leader of the Norwegian Labour Party and a former cabinet minister in Norway, resigned from his political positions on January 7, 2018, after being accused of an extensive pattern of sexual assault and sexual harassment of young women, and of taking advantage of his political positions to make unwanted sexual advances.[396] The accusations came in the context of the Me Too debate and dominated Norwegian media for several weeks from December 2017.[397] Accusations towards the now former leader of the Norwegian Young Conservatives, Kristian Tonning Riise, also saw the light of day. In a Facebook post, Tonning Riise wrote: "I have been confronted with the fact that members of the Norwegian Young Conservatives on several occasions have reacted to my behaviour."[398] It would later be revealed that the Conservative Party had received 15 alerts, whereas 10 of them regarded Tonning Riise.[399] Ulf Leirstein, Norwegian politician for the Progress Party and member of the Storting, had to take a break from office after it was discovered that he had shared pornographic images with a 14-year-old member of the Progress Party's Youth in addition to suggesting a threesome between him, a 30-year-old woman and a 15-year-old member of the Progress Party's Youth.[400]

Pakistan

Main article: Me Too movement (Pakistan)

Zainab rape-murder case

After the death of 7-year-old Zainab Ansari in January 2018, who was raped and killed, there began a wave of declarations on Pakistan social media in #MeToo style.[383] Sexual assault against a minor in Pakistan will result in 14 to 20 years in prison and a fine of 1 millions rupees.[401][402][403][404] Sheema Kermani, a classical dancer, has been called the leader of the Pakistan #MeToo movement.[405] Former model Frieha Altaf and designer Maheem Khan shared stories of sexual abuse, and challenged Pakistan to be more proactive at stopping children from getting raped.[383]

Film industry

Protests[406] marked the premieres of Teefa in Trouble in Karachi and Lahore by activists who boycotted the film over the sexual harassment allegations leveled against Ali Zafar by Meesha Shafi, as well as at least half a dozen other women, earlier in the year.[407] Zafar categorically denied the allegations and sued Shafi for defamation in the court where the case is ongoing.[408][409] On the other hand, Shafi had also filed a harassment case against Zafar, which, itself, is an ongoing investigation.[410]

With hashtags such as #BoycottAliZafar, #BoycottTeefainTrouble, and #TeefaisTrouble, a huge wave of activists built a momentum on social media ahead of the movie's premiere and subsequent screenings. A few major Pakistani media outlets outright ignored the demonstrations but other had to give in when protestors turned up at cinemas and police and other law enforcement agencies got involved.[411]

Zafar reportedly also had to avoid his grand arrival at the film's Karachi premiere and take a detour through the basement at Nueplex Cinemas in DHA, Karachi, in order to avoid the hoard of demonstrators who had gathered at the venue's main entrance.[412][413] During the protest, Feroze Khan, an actor and Zafar's friend, returned from inside the cinema in an attempt to sway the protestors by telling them to support "Pakistani cinema"; however, he was turned away owing to his stance, to which he responded by making obscene gestures.[414][415]

Reports had also emerged that the Nueplex Cinemas’ security manhandled some of the demonstrators and verbally abused multiple people at the protest.[416]

Protestors again showed up at Lahore's CineStar for voice their anger and disappointment at both the promotion of the film of an alleged harasser and the celebrities pouring in to support him. The controversy deepened when, in one instance, the demonstrators asked Waleed Zaman, the creative director of women's clothing brand Kayseria, the reason why he was backing the film, to which Zaman responded by saying: "We support sexual harassment of women."[417][418]

Zaman later posted and deleted multiple apologies on his social media accounts.

At yet another screening of the film at Nueplex Cinemas at Rashid Minhas Road, Karachi, protestors were allegedly held in the basement and beaten by the cinema's private security, with various media reports confirming the incident.[419][420] The demonstrators’ phones were also confiscated and the cinema's security allegedly tried to plant incriminating evidence in one of the protestors' bags in order to make their case appear stronger to police.[409] However, they were let go later after the arrival of Rangers personnel.

Stand-up comedy

At least four women leveled allegations of sexual misconduct against Junaid Akram, a prominent stand-up comedian and vlogger.[421] Most of the accusers were girls in their teens and early twenties. Akram, too, denied "all allegations of sexual harassment and sexual misconduct", labeled them "false", and announced that he intended to pursue legal actions as he had "already met my legal team".[422]

Akram also clarified that his "marital status is public information".[423]

Charity sector

The son of world-renowned late philanthropist Abdul Sattar Edhi, Faisal Edhi, who now heads the Edhi Foundation, was also accused of sexual misconduct by a former journalist,[422][424] who said the man "grabbed my hand tightly and tried to kind of pull me back into the van". Faisal Edhi has denied the claims.[425]

Philippines

The Me Too movement has slowly picked up in the Philippines. In the culture of the Philippines, shaming and victim blaming are still present and is often encouraged.[426] They are afraid to say #MeToo because people do not believe them. Stories finally began to come about after actress Saab Magalona retweeted Alyssa Milano's infamous quote.[427] The accusations revolved around the entertainment industry as one of the bands, Jensen and The Flips was being brought up and they acknowledged their mistakes and apologized for their misconduct.[427] Statistics from the Philippine Commission on Women from 2004 to 2013 revealed that only 629 cases had been recorded with the Philippine national police's Women and Children Protection Center.[427] This figure is believed to only be a fraction of the actual number of harassment offenses committed against women. While the movement has not been as big as in the U.S., other movements such as #BabaeAko have started as a result of #MeToo. #BabaeAko translates to "I am a Woman" and began in May after President Rodrigo Duterte declared that the next Chief Justice of Philippines could not be a woman.[428]

South Korea

In South Korea, the Me Too movement started to gain momentum as public prosecutor Seo Ji-hyeon shared her experience of assault by a high-level prosecutor and oppression of government authorities on national television on January 29, 2018.[429] As part of her interview, Seo claimed that she was sexually assaulted by then Korean Ministry of Justice Policy Planning Director and former prosecutor Ahn Tae-geun at a funeral in 2010. She reported the activity to her superiors, however, her superiors covered up the incident and demoted her to Changwon Public Prosecutor's Office from her post in Seoul, in spite of the fact that she was highly praised and awarded for her work performance by her superiors prior to the incident.[430]

After Seo's public admittance of sexual assault, the Me Too movement spread quickly to other areas of society. On February 13, 2018, several women, including former actress Kim Soo-hee and actress Hong Seon-joo, accused Lee Yountaek, a prominent and critically acclaimed stage director, of sexual harassment.[431] Lee allegedly forced many women in his theater troupe, for 18 years, to massage his genital area prior to raping them.[432] In addition, Kim Soo-hee stated that in 2005, Lee raped her and got her pregnant, for which she had an abortion.[433] Moreover, actress Hong Seon-joo alleged that Lee forcibly penetrated her private part with sticks and wooden chopsticks, saying it will help her vocalization.[434] As a result, Lee resigned from all his positions in the theater world and formally apologized to the victims.[435][436] Lee admitted to all his crimes except the abortion.[437]

However, discussion on sexual assault and harassment preceded the MeToo with a series of hashtags under the scope of #000_nae_seongpongnyeok (#sexual_violence_in_000) with particular attention in the arts and culture #yeonghwagye_nae_seongpongnyeok (#sexual_violence_in_the_film_industry).[438] These hashtags were used on Twitter in October 2016, a year before the MeToo movement in the West.[438] They document a work culture that encourages men to act aggressively, and women to "defeminize" in order to avoid objectification. Anonymous accounts set up to document sexual assault and harassment received legal action, and or had personal information leaked (doxing). In addition to the trauma of sexual assault, they must also face the financial, psychological and social burden of litigation.[438]

On February 22, 2018, actor Oh Dal-su was accused of sexual harassment,[439][440][441] for which he denied the accusation.[442] However, February 26, further accusations against Oh were broadcast on JTBC Newsroom, during which an interview was conducted with the woman who had accused Oh of sexual harassment and sexual assault.[443][444] Moreover, on February 27's episode of JTBC's Newsroom, actress Uhm Ji-young came forward to say that she was also sexually harassed by Oh in 2003.[445][446] As a result, Oh pulled out of his upcoming TV series My Mister.[447][448] However, all charges against Oh were dismissed following a police investigation.[449]

Jo Min-ki, accused by several students of sexual assault, committed suicide following the allegations.

Also on February 22, 2018, students in Cheongju University in Korea divulged the long-time crimes of professor and actor, Jo Min-ki. At first, he denied his crimes and dismissed them as rumors.[450][451] However, as many other students, including fellow male students accusing him of such exploitation, he admitted to the allegations and apologized publicly.[452] It was confirmed that Jo would be investigated by the police.[453] On March 9, 2018, Jo committed suicide following his scandal,[454][455] which in turn triggered backlash against the Me Too movement in South Korea.[456]

On February 23, 2018, actress Choi Yul accused actor Cho Jae-hyun of assaulting her sexually.[457] On February 24, Cho acknowledged the accusations.[458]

On February 28, 2018, Ko Un, one of South Korea's most iconic and prominent poets and frequently mentioned Nobel laureate shortlist candidate, was also accused of sexual assault. First reported by the Dong-A Ilbo, poet Choi Young-mi's poem 'The Beast' suggests sexual assault by Ko approximately 20 years ago. The poem did not explicitly mention Ko, but the details of the frequently mentioned "En", which bears similarities to Ko's name – Ko Un – highly matches the accused poet's past.[459] It also confirms the constant rumors and allegations that has been circulating in the past years that Ko has been using his privilege as a prominent poet to gain sexual advances and favors. As a result, Ko was pulled from textbooks and critically denounced by fellow literaries alike. Ko also resigned from various posts that he held, including his professorship at KAIST. On March 2, 2018 Ko offered his statement to The Guardian through UK publishers Bloodaxe Books, writing that "he had ‘done nothing which might bring shame on my wife or myself."[460] Despite the denial, more allegations are emerging against Ko.

As more public figures are being denounced across society, there has been an increased number of celebrities accused of unwanted sexual advances and activities in the Korean television and cinematic industries, including Choi Il-hwa and Kim Heung-gook.[461][462][463][464]

On March 5, 2018, prominent Democratic Party of Korea presidential contender and former Chungcheongnam-do province Governor Ahn Hee-jung resigned from the governorship and announced his retirement from public service, as his former secretary Kim Ji-eun accused him of multiple cases of sexual assault.

[465] She claims that Ahn assaulted her multiple times and said that there is more than one victim inside the Governor's office. Ahn admitted about his sexual activity to his former secretary and apologized, however claimed that it was consensual. He was expelled from his party on the same day.[466][467][468]

A female executive of Hyundai resigned due to the movement.[469]

In response to the support of the MeToo movement, Citizen’s Action to Support the MeToo Movement was created in early 2018. It is a network of groups that work together to organize events and mass protests both in support of victims of sexual assault and to enact legal and societal reform in regards to the issue. Citizen’s Action is responsible for various large scale protests and public speaking events.[368]

Spain

The Spanish-language counterpart is #YoTambién. In Spain, on October 25 several Spanish actresses recognized in a report the existence of sexual harassment in Spanish cinema, among them Maru Valdivieso, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Carla Hidalgo, and Ana Gracía.[470] Also explaining cases of harassment suffered by them were the actress, scriptwriter and film director Leticia Dolera[471] and Bárbara Rey.[472] The Me Too movement found an echo in the ongoing uproar raised by La Manada case, crystallizing in numerous protests across the country.[473]

Serbia

Inspired by the women of the global MeToo movement, Marija Lukić has stood up against Milutin Jeličić, her boss and the Mayor of Brus, a small town in central Serbia and taken her accusations to court.[474] She and several other women from Brus have accused Mayor of sexual harassment and disturbing messages.[475] Lukić faced threats and pressure, but she also received scores of support messages flooding in on social media with the hashtag #PravdaZaMarijuLukić (#JusticeForMarijaLukić).[474][475] This events were one of the triggers for the anti-government protests, which forced Jeličić to resign from office and his duties in the governing Serbian Progressive Party were suspended.[475][476] Lukić states that she no longer believes in Serbian justice, but she is determined to fight for her rights at the European Court of Human Rights.[475]

Sweden

In Sweden, several women used the hashtag to confront television presenter Martin Timell's,[477] whose shows on TV4 were cancelled on October 20, 2017,[478][479] and journalist Fredrik Virtanen's[480], who later got fired in his role as lead columnist at Aftonbladet,[481] alleged abuse towards them. Carl XVI Gustaf, king of Sweden, said #MeToo is a positive movement that is good for society, and urged victims to come forward and share their stories.[248][482]

A major part of the Me Too debate in Sweden focused on the affair surrounding Jean-Claude Arnault that led to several members of the Swedish Academy leaving their positions.[483][484]

Gender studies scholar Eva Lundgren and legal scholar Jenny Westerstrand wrote that the Swedish journalistic profession bore a large part of the blame in Sweden for the problems the Me Too debate had highlighted because Swedish journalists had systematically attacked critical discussion of and research on men's violence against women for over 20 years.[485] Ellinor Skagegård in the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet wrote that during the Me Too campaign, it looks as if Lundgren was right in her research on men's violence against women.[486]

Tunisia

Tunisia's #EnaZeda movement (en: #MeToo) began when politician Zouheir Makhlouf was seen allegedly masturbating in a vehicle, whilst following a schoolgirl home.[487] A Facebook group was set up in response to the purported incident, which has over 21,000 members. Najma Kousri, one of the co-founders of the movement, praised the energy from social media as it has gathered huge amounts of testimony and provided support for survivors of sexual violence.[488]

United Kingdom

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In the wake of #MeToo, a Labour activist shared her 2011 story of being raped by a senior person in the Labour Party, but being warned that her career could be damaged if she reported the incident.[489] In the UK, the Cabinet Office has launched an investigation in allegations that Parliament member Mark Garnier ordered a secretary to buy sex toys for his wife and mistress.[490]

A series of allegations concerning the involvement of British politicians in cases of sexual harassment and assault arose in October and November 2017, the 2017 Westminster sexual scandals. Allegations were prompted by discussions among junior staff employed in the UK Parliament at Westminster following the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse allegations in Hollywood earlier in October, and the subsequent rise of Me Too. The journalists Jane Merrick and Kate Maltby made allegations against the Defence Minister Michael Fallon and de facto Deputy Prime Minister Damian Green, respectively. These led to the departures of both from Theresa May's cabinet, the latter after a two-month inquiry that also considered allegations that Green had lied about copious amounts of pornography found on his parliamentary computer. Both Merrick and Maltby cited the #MeToo movement as inspiring their allegations.[491]

Rape statistics (2016–2017) from Rape Crisis Centers across England and Wales unfolds that every year, about 85,000 women and 12,000 men become victims of rape.[492]

In January 2018, Channel 4 News's Cathy Newman conducted an interview on Canadian professor of psychology Jordan Peterson.[493] Newman was criticized for the interview and Rachael Revesz of The Independent wrote that subsequent abuse targeted at Newman was a symbol of a backlash against the MeToo movement.[494]

#HimToo

Main article: Him Too movement

Accuracy dispute

This section appears to contradict the article Him Too movement. Please see discussion on the linked talk page. (January 2019) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

The related hashtag #HimToo emerged in popularity with the #MeToo movement. Although dating back to at least 2015, and initially associated with politics or casual communication, #HimToo took on new meanings associated with #MeToo in 2017, with some using it to emphasize male victims of sexual harassment and abuse, and others using it to emphasize male perpetrators. In September and October 2018, during the sexual assault allegations raised during Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, #HimToo became used by supporters of Kavanaugh and to highlight male victims of false accusations.[495][496]

In January 2019, a tertiary institution's lecturer from Hong Kong also came out in the spotlight to announce his establishment of a support group aimed at "gathering all men who have suffered from false allegations of sexual crimes to speak out" in an interview by a local newspaper. He claimed that he was a victim of this movement, which he considered as "encouraging unethical females to frame males they hate, who, under conventional stereotypes, are usually assumed to hold indecent urge for women".

He did add that he "was not opposed to this movement", but was concerned about its "abuses that could ruin the life of many innocent men".[497]

Criticism

False accusations

There has been discussion about the extent to which accusers should be believed before fact-checking. Some have questioned whether the accused are being punished without due process confirming their guilt.[498][499][500]

Many commentators have responded that the number of false reports is expected to be low, citing figures obtained by the U.S. Department of Justice and other organizations have generally found that around 2-10% rape and sexual assault allegations reported to police are determined to be false after a thorough investigation. However, the 2–10% figure does not include cases in which it cannot be established if the accused is innocent or guilty, nor does it include allegations that are never reported to law enforcement.[36][37]

A February 2005 study by the UK Home Office that compiled data on 2,284 reported rape cases found that from a set of 216 rape cases later found to be false, only six led to arrests and only two involved charges being filed.[501][502][503] Elle writer Sady Doyle commented that another hashtag, #BelieveWomen, was not a threat to due process but a commitment to "recognize that false allegations are less common than real ones".[503] Jennifer Wright of Harper's Bazaar proposed a similar definition of #BelieveWomen and pointed out The Washington Post's ability to quickly identify a false accusation set up by Project Veritas. She also stated that only 52 rape convictions being overturned in the United States since 1989, as opposed to 790 for murder, was strong evidence that at least 90% of rape allegations are true.[502][504] Michelle Malkin expressed a suspicion that many stories in the #MeToo movement would be exaggerated and accused news outlets of focusing on "hashtag trends spread by celebrities, anonymous claimants and bots".[505]

On November 30, 2017, Ijeoma Oluo revealed the contents of a request she received from USA Today, asking her to write a piece arguing that due process is unnecessary for sexual harassment allegations. She refused, saying "of course I believe in due process" and wrote that it was disingenuous for the paper to ask her "to be their strawman".[506]

On September 21, 2018, President Donald Trump accused Dr. Christine Blasey Ford of making up her accusations against now Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, saying that if her story was true she would have filed a report against him when it had happened. This is a common argument against the MeToo movement and alleged sexual assault victims alike.[507]

On October 11, 2018, Melania Trump, wife of US President Donald Trump, said that women who make accusations of sexual abuse against men should back their claims with solid evidence.[508]

According to the New York Post, the #MeToo movement, "has emboldened ... women to falsely accuse well-appointed men for financial gain, fame or vengeance."[509]

Undefined purpose

There has been discussion about whether the movement is meant to inspire change in all men or just a percentage of them, and what specific actions are the end goal of the movement.[510] Other women have stated #MeToo should examine only the worst types of abuse in order to prevent casting all men as perpetrators, or causing people to become numb to the problem.[498][510]

Creator Tarana Burke has laid out specific goals for the #MeToo movement, including: processing all untested rape kits in the United States, investigating the vetting of teachers, better protecting children at school, updating sexual harassment policies, and improving training in workplaces, places of worship, and schools. She has stated that everyone in a community, including men and women, must take action in order to make the #MeToo movement a success. She also supports the #MeToo Congress bill and hopes it will inspire similar legal changes in other parts of the country.[22]

Overcorrection

Richard Ackland, a lawyer and award-winning journalist, described the response to defamation cases "an asphyxiating vortex of litigation".[511]

There has been discussion on whether harsh consequences are warranted for particular examples of alleged misconduct.[498][499][500] An especially divisive story broke on Babe.net on January 13, 2018, when an anonymous accuser detailed the events of her date with Aziz Ansari and referred to what transpired as "sexual assault". Jill Filipovic wrote for The Guardian that "it was only a matter of time before a publication did us the disservice of publishing a sensational story of a badly behaved man who was nonetheless not a sexual assailant".[512][513][514] James Hamblin wrote for The Atlantic that, on the contrary, these "stories of gray areas are exactly what [...] need to be told and discussed."[515]

Some actors have admonished proponents of the movement for not distinguishing between different degrees of sexual misconduct. Matt Damon commented on the phenomenon in an interview, and later apologized, saying "the clearer signal to men and to younger people is, deny it. Because if you take responsibility for what you did, your life's going to get ruined."[516] Subsequently, Liam Neeson opined that some accused men, including Garrison Keillor and Dustin Hoffman, were being treated unfairly.[20]

Tarana Burke said in January 2018, "Those of us who do this work know that backlash is inevitable." While describing the backlash as carrying an underlying sentiment of fairness, she defended her movement as "not a witch hunt as people try to paint it". She stated that engaging with the cultural critique in #MeToo was more productive than calling for it to end or focusing on accused men who "haven't actually touched anybody".[19] Ronan Farrow, who published the Weinstein exposé in the New Yorker that helped start the #MeToo resurgence (alongside New York Times reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor), was asked in late December 2017 whether he thought the movement had "gone too far". Farrow called for a careful examination of each story to guard against false accusations but also recalled the alleged sexual abuse his sister Dylan Farrow claims she went through at the hands of his father Woody Allen. He stated that after decades of silence, "My feeling is that this is a net benefit to society and that all of the people, men, and women, pouring forward and saying 'me too' deserve this moment. I think you're right to say that we all have to be conscious of the risk of the pendulum swinging too far, but in general this is a very positive step."[21]

Ijeoma Oluo spoke about how some Democrats have expressed regret over the resignation of Senator Al Franken due to allegations of sexual misconduct. She sympathized with them but stressed the importance of punishing misconduct regardless of whether the perpetrator is viewed as "a bad guy" overall. She wrote that "most abusers are more like Al Franken than Harvey Weinstein".[517] The New York Times has called this discussion the "Louis C.K. Conundrum", referring to the admission by comedian Louis C.K. that he committed sexual misconduct with five women, and the subsequent debate over whether any guilt should be associated with enjoyment of his work.[518][519][520] Jennifer Wright of Harper's Bazaar has said that public fears of an overcorrection reflect the difficulty of accepting that "likeable men can abuse women too".[504]

A 2019 LeanIn.Org/SurveyMonkey survey showed that 60 percent of male managers reported being "too nervous" of being accused of harassment when mentoring, socializing, or having one-on-one meetings with women in the workplace.[521][522][523]

A 2019 study in the journal Organizational Dynamics, published by Elsevier, found that men are significantly more reluctant to interact with their female colleagues. Examples include 27 percent of men avoid one-on-one meetings with female co-workers, 21 percent of men said they would be reluctant to hire women for a job that would require close interaction (such as business travel), and 19 percent of men being reluctant to hire an attractive woman.[524][525]

Possible trauma to victims

The hashtag has been criticized for putting the responsibility of publicizing sexual harassment and abuse on those who experienced it, which could be re-traumatizing.[526][527][528] The hashtag has been criticized as inspiring fatigue and outrage, rather than emotionally dense communication.[529][530]

Tony Robbins said he was "knocking victimhood" from the movement.[531] The motivational speaker was also scrutinized for comments he made criticizing the movement, implying that women are victimizing themselves to gain significance. He later apologized adding, "I need to get connected to the brave women of #MeToo."[532]

Exclusion of sex workers

There have been many calls for the #MeToo movement to include sex workers and sex trafficking victims.[533][534][535][536][537] Although these women experience a higher rate of sexual harassment and assault than any other group of people, they are often seen in society as legitimate targets that deserve such acts against them.[538] Autumn Burris stated that prostitution is like "#MeToo on steroids" because the sexual harassment and assault described in #MeToo stories are frequent for women in prostitution.[533] Melissa Farley argues that prostitution, even when consensual, can be a form of sexual assault, as it can be for money for food or similar items, thus, at least according to Farley, making prostitution a forced lifestyle relying on coercions for food.[538] Many sex workers disagree with her stance, saying that she stigmatizes prostitution.[539]

American journalist Steven Thrasher noted that, "There has been worry that the #MeToo movement could lead to a sex panic. But the real sex panic is not due to feminism run amok, but due to the patriarchal, homophobic, transantagonistic, theocratic desire of the US Congress to control sex workers." He points to 2018 Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), which many experts say will only put sex workers at further risk by causing them to go underground, does not offer sex workers any help or protections, and as a side effect prevents most people from using online personal ads regardless of their intentions.[540]

British filmmaker Bizhan Tong, a figure involved in various gender equality initiatives, wrote, directed, and self-funded feature film The Escort [541] after conducting a series of interviews with current and former sex workers in a direct attempt to lend a platform for their voices to be heard.[542] The film was shot in 2017 and completed in 2018, premiering in New York in August that year, and receiving several awards across the globe.[543] It is currently being adapted for the stage.

Not addressing police misconduct

Despite the prevalence[where?] of sexual misconduct, some have pointed out the lack of discussion in the #MeToo movement regarding law-enforcement misconduct.[544][545][546][547] Police sexual misconduct disproportionately affects women of color, though women from all walks of life are affected.[547] The Cato Institute reported that in 2010, more than 9% of police misconduct reports in 2010 involved sexual abuse, and there are multiple indications that "sexual assault rates are significantly higher for police when compared to the general population."[545] Fear of retribution is considered[by whom?] one reason some law-enforcement officers are not subjected to significant consequences for known misconduct.[544] Police-reform activist Roger Goldman stated that an officer who is fired for sexual misconduct from one police department often gets rehired by a different department, where they can continue the misconduct in a new environment.[544] Some states (such as Florida and Georgia) have licensing laws that can decertify a law-enforcement officer who has committed major misconduct, which prevents decertified officers from being hired again in that state.[544] Some have called for sexual misconduct allegations against police to be investigated by third parties to reduce bias (as opposed to the common practice of investigations being led by fellow law-enforcement officers or colleagues in the same department).[547]

Lack of representation of minority women

Many have pointed to a lack of representation of minority women in the #MeToo movement or its leadership.[548][549][550][551][552][553] Most historical feminist movements have contained active elements of racism, and have typically ignored the needs of non-white women despite the fact that minority women are more likely to be targets of sexual harassment.[548][549][550][551][552]

Minority women are overrepresented in industries with the greatest number of sexual harassment claims, for example hotels, health, food services, and retail.[550] It has been pointed out that undocumented minority women often have no recourse if they're experiencing sexual violence.[554] Activist Charlene Carruthers said, "If wealthy, highly visible women in news and entertainment are sexually harassed, assaulted and raped—what do we think is happening to women in retail, food service and domestic work?"[550]

Former victim Farah Tanis stated there are also additional barriers for black women who want to participate in the #MeToo movement. She pointed out that there is often social pressure not to report allegations against black men, especially from church and family, because many would view that as a betrayal against their "brothers."[554] Additionally, black women are less likely to be believed if they do speak out.[554][555]

Some have argued that the American judicial system acknowledges the term "sexual harassment" only because of successful sexual harassment lawsuits by three black women: Diane Williams and Paulette Barnes against the US government, and Mechelle Vinson against a bank.[556] Vinson's case of Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson eventually leading to the unanimous 1986 Supreme Court decision that sexual harassment violates the Civil Rights Act.[549][550] Black law professor Anita Hill again brought sexual harassment to public discourse in 1991 with her testimony against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.[549][550][557]

Tarana Burke initially criticized the movement for ignoring the work of black women in creating dialogue addressing sexual assault. However, she did salute those who partook in the movement and credited Milano for acknowledging Burke's own similar movement.[558] As well as this, she pleaded to black women not to drop out of the movement just because the media isn't listening saying "This is your movement, too."[559]

American feminist and journalist Gloria Steinem said there is a blind spot surrounding intersectionality between race and gender, and a major problem with today's feminists is they are not acknowledging "that women of color in general—and especially black women—have always been more likely to be feminist than white women."[548] Steinem argues that #MeToo could never have happened without the work of these women, and women in the #MeToo movement have a responsibility: "If you have more power, remember to listen as much as you talk. And if you have less power, remember to talk as much as you listen."[549]

Overemphasis on specific cases

The #MeToo movement has been criticized for putting too much public focus on the consequences of specific individuals who have been accused of sexual misconduct, as opposed to discussing policies and changes to institutional norms that would help people who are currently experiencing sexual abuse.[560] It's been noted that although allegations surrounding high-profile public figures tends to attract the most attention, the stories of regular workers often go unacknowledged.[1] Yet to ensure meaningful change, these workers’ experiences must be at the center of any policy solutions that lawmakers pursue. Tarana Burke has voiced similar misgivings, pointing out one problematic aspect of #MeToo is "All of this media attention is on the perpetrator. All of the conversation about fairness and due process is focused on the perpetrator." She states the movement should focus on specific steps to help current and future sufferers.[561] Activist and writer Jaclyn Friedman said, "We’ve got to stop treating each case that comes to light like a self-contained soap opera that ends when the villain is defeated, and start addressing the systems that have enabled workplace sexual abuse for so long."[562] Writer Jia Tolentino has stated that it is natural to focus on the individual stories because they are "gripping and horrible", but determining the best workplace changes "doesn't have a ton to do with the specific investigation and adjudication of men that have already done this".[563]

Disregard for incarcerated women

Prisoners' rights are significantly limited and the power imbalance between female inmates and male officers allows and promotes prison rape and other forms of abuse.[564][565][566] In addition, most women who are incarcerated for the murder of their intimate partners acted in protection of themselves.[565][566] Many people have criticized the prison system for punishing women who act in self defense.[567] Others criticize the main outreach of the Me Too movement for failing to address the systemic imprisonment of abused women and men.[567][568][569]

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Kobe Bryant sexual assault case

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Kobe Bryant sexual assault case began in July 2003, when the news media reported that the sheriff's office in Eagle, Colorado, had arrested professional basketball player Kobe Bryant in connection with an investigation of a sexual assault complaint filed by a 19-year-old hotel employee.[1] Bryant had checked into The Lodge and Spa at Cordillera, a hotel in Edwards, Colorado, on June 30 in advance of having surgery near there on July 2 under Richard Steadman. The woman accused Bryant of raping her in his hotel room on July 1, the night before the surgery.

Bryant admitted to a sexual encounter with his accuser but denied the assault allegation. The case was dropped after Bryant's accuser refused to testify in the case. A separate civil suit was later filed against Bryant by the woman. This was settled out of court and included Bryant publicly apologizing to his accuser, though admitting no guilt.

Contents

- 1Arrest

- 2Criminal case

- 3Civil case

- 4Aftermath

- 5References

- 6External links

Arrest

Eagle County Sheriff investigators first confronted Bryant with the sexual assault accusation on July 2.[1] During the July 2003 interview with investigators, Bryant initially told investigators that he did not have sexual intercourse with his accuser, a 19-year-old woman who worked at the hotel where Bryant was staying. When the officers told Bryant that she had taken an exam that yielded physical evidence, such as semen, Bryant admitted to having sexual intercourse with her, but stated that the sex was consensual.[2] When asked about bruises on the accuser's neck, Bryant admitted to "strangling" her during the encounter, stating that he held her "from the back" "around her neck", that strangling during sex was his "thing" and that he had a pattern of strangling a different sex partner (not his wife) during their recurring sexual encounters. When asked how hard he was holding onto her neck, Bryant stated, "My hands are strong. I don't know." Bryant stated that he assumed consent for sex because of the accuser's body language such as her kissing him, putting her hand on his penis, and bending over, but that he did not explicitly ask for her consent during the encounter. Bryant later said that he believed his accuser was capable of saying no because during the encounter he asked her if he could "cum on her face", and she said no.[3][4]

Law enforcement officials collected evidence from Bryant and he agreed to submit to a rape test kit and a voluntary lie detector test.[5] On July 4, Sheriff Joe Hoy issued an arrest warrant for Bryant. Bryant flew from Los Angeles back to Eagle, Colorado, to surrender to police. He was immediately released on $25,000 bond, and news of the arrest became public two days after that. On July 18, the Eagle County District Attorney's office filed a formal charge against Bryant for sexual assault. If convicted, Bryant faced probation to life in prison. On July 18, after he was formally charged, Bryant held a news conference in which he adamantly denied having raped the woman. He admitted to having an adulterous sexual encounter with her but insisted it was consensual.[6][7][8][9][10]

Criminal case

In December 2003, pre-trial hearings were conducted to consider motions about the admissibility of evidence. During those hearings, the prosecution accused Bryant's defense team of attacking his accuser's credibility.[11] It was revealed that she wore underpants containing another man's semen and pubic hair to her rape exam the day after the alleged incident.[12] Detective Doug Winters stated that the yellow underwear she wore to her rape exam contained sperm from another man, along with Caucasian pubic hair. Bryant's defense stated that the exam results showed "compelling evidence of innocence" because the accuser must have had another sexual encounter immediately after the incident. She told investigators that she grabbed dirty underwear by mistake from her laundry basket when she left her home for the examination. On the day she was examined, she said she hadn't showered since the morning of the incident. The examination found evidence of vaginal trauma, which Bryant's defense team claimed was consistent with having sex with multiple partners in two days.

The evidence recovered by police included the T-shirt that Bryant wore the night of the incident, which had three small stains of the accuser's blood on it. The smudge was verified to be the accuser's blood by DNA testing and probably was not menstrual blood because the accuser said she had her period two weeks earlier. It was revealed that Bryant leaned the woman over a chair to have sex with her, which allegedly caused the bleeding. This was the sex act in question, as the accuser claims she told Bryant to stop, but he would not, and Bryant claims he stopped after asking if he could ejaculate on her face.[13][14]

Trina McKay, the resort's night auditor, said she saw the accuser as she was leaving to go home, and "she did not look or sound as if there had been any problem".[15] However, Bobby Pietrack, the accuser's high-school friend and a bellman at the resort, said she appeared to be very upset, and "told me that Kobe Bryant had forced sex with her".

A few weeks before the trial was scheduled to begin, the accuser wrote a letter to state investigator Gerry Sandberg clarifying some details of her first interview by Colorado police. She wrote, "I told Detective Winters that on that morning while leaving I had car troubles. That was not true. When I called in late to work that day that was the reason I gave my boss for being late. In all reality, I had simply overslept . . . I told Detective Winters that Mr. Bryant had made me stay in the room and wash my face. While I was held against my will in that room, I was not forced to wash my face. I did not wash my face. Instead, I stopped at the mirror by the elevator on that floor to clean my face up. I am extremely disappointed in myself and also very sorry to anyone misled by that mix-up of information. I said what I said because I felt that Detective Winters did not believe what had happened to me."[16]

Bryant's defense lawyer Pamela Mackey asserted that the accuser was taking an anti-psychotic drug for the treatment of schizophrenia at the time of the incident. Lindsey McKinney, who lived with the accuser, said the woman twice tried to kill herself at school by overdosing on sleeping pills. Before the alleged incident, the accuser, an aspiring singer, tried out for the television show American Idol with the song "Forgive" by Rebecca Lynn Howard, but failed to advance.[17] In addition to the woman's moral character and reputation being challenged by Bryant's defense lawyer, she received death threats and hate mail[18] and her identity was leaked multiple times.[19]

On September 1, 2004, Eagle County District Judge Terry Ruckriegle dismissed the charges against Bryant, after prosecutors spent more than $200,000 preparing for trial, because his accuser informed them that she was unwilling to testify.[20]

On the same day that the criminal case was dismissed, Bryant issued the following statement through his attorney:

First, I want to apologize directly to the young woman involved in this incident. I want to apologize to her for my behavior that night and for the consequences she has suffered in the past year. Although this year has been incredibly difficult for me personally, I can only imagine the pain she has had to endure. I also want to apologize to her parents and family members, and to my family and friends and supporters, and to the citizens of Eagle, Colorado.

I also want to make it clear that I do not question the motives of this young woman. No money has been paid to this woman. She has agreed that this statement will not be used against me in the civil case. Although I truly believe this encounter between us was consensual, I recognize now that she did not and does not view this incident the same way I did. After months of reviewing discovery, listening to her attorney, and even her testimony in person, I now understand how she feels that she did not consent to this encounter.

I issue this statement today fully aware that while one part of this case ends today, another remains. I understand that the civil case against me will go forward. That part of this case will be decided by and between the parties directly involved in the incident and will no longer be a financial or emotional drain on the citizens of the state of Colorado.[21]

Civil case

In August 2004, the accuser filed a civil lawsuit against Bryant over the incident.[22] In March 2005, the two parties settled that lawsuit. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed to the public.[23] The Los Angeles Times reported that legal experts estimated the settlement was more than $2.5 million.[24]

Aftermath

Eight months after the initial incident, the Lodge & Spa at Cordillera remodeled and as part of that sold some furniture. There was speculation that some pieces included in this sale were from "Room 35" where Kobe Bryant had allegedly stayed at the time.[25] The lodge denied this and stated they had disposed of the furniture from that room separately.[26] The spa was sold in 2019 and is now a drug treatment facility.

After the allegations, Bryant signed a seven-year contract valued at $136 million over seven years, and he regained several of his endorsements from Nike, Spalding, and Coca-Cola.[27] He was named the NBA's Most Valuable Player in 2008 and the Finals' Most Valuable Player in 2009 and 2010.[28]