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What Happened to the Women of #MeToo?

For a long time, sexual violence was seen as a part of life—something women were told to avoid, and blamed for when they couldn’t. Police departments often did little to investigate claims. Accusers were humiliated in court. But when the #MeToo movement began, in the twenty-tens, something changed. Powerful men like Harvey Weinstein were accused of serially assaulting women and then actually faced punishment. Women came forward with stories of harassment by prominent journalists and Silicon Valley founders, and the internet took up their cause. Men lost their jobs; some went to prison. “The awareness shifted,” Jennifer Mondino, the senior director of the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, told me. “For advocates who had been working on gender-based violence and gender-justice issues, that was very exciting.”