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sexual violence
Silence Is Not Solidarity
If we are serious about building a world where women have equal power—economic, political, and personal—then we have to be serious about accountability within our own ranks
May 06, 2026
In the span of a month, two stories have laid bare an uncomfortable truth about progressive politics: Too many people will protect powerful men at the expense of the women they harm, whether to protect a movement, a party, or because they’ve been conditioned to believe this is how power works.
Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) announced his resignation from Congress last Month after multiple women came forward with allegations of sexual harassment and assault. March’s revelation by Dolores Huerta that iconic labor leader Cesar Chavez sexually abused girls and women for decades is still reverberating through communities that revered him. In both cases, the pattern is the same: Whisper networks carried warnings for years, but survivors who came forward were silenced or discredited for the sake of the “greater good.”
Why? Because Swalwell was seen as a rising Democratic star, a useful weapon against President Donald Trump. Because Chavez was a civil rights icon whose legacy anchored an entire movement. Because people convinced themselves that exposing the truth would do more damage than burying it.
They were wrong. Silence doesn’t protect movements, it protects oppressors. It tells every woman who has been harassed, groped, or assaulted by a powerful man on “our side” that her pain is an acceptable cost of doing business.
Letting people in power abuse women is never acceptable, regardless of party, regardless of legacy, regardless of how inconvenient the timing might feel.
We have seen this calculation before—the quiet bargain where accountability is sacrificed on the altar of political convenience. It never works. The truth always surfaces. And when it does, the cover-up inflicts its own damage, compounding the harm to survivors and eroding the moral authority these movements depend on.
Consider the moment we’re in. We have a president who was found liable by a jury for sexually abusing a woman, and accused by at least 28 others, and has faced no meaningful consequences for it. A president who has made clear, through word and policy, that he believes powerful men can do whatever they want. His administration is rolling back decades of progress on combatting sexual harassment and assault in workplaces and schools; gutting protections against discrimination; and dismantling the legal infrastructure women depend on for safe, equitable workplaces. The Supreme Court, made up of one-third of Trump appointees, is the first since the 1950s to rule against women and people of color in a majority of civil rights cases.
This is the landscape women are navigating right now. And into this landscape, we are supposed to accept that the men or other abusers on “our side” get a pass? No.
If we are serious about building a world where women have equal power—economic, political, and personal—then we have to be serious about accountability within our own ranks. Not because it’s easy, but because the alternative is corrosive. Every time we look the other way, we tell the next generation that a woman’s safety matters less than a man’s career. We weaken the very movements we claim to be protecting.
The women who came forward about Swalwell, including content creators who had no institutional backing, no legal team—just their own platforms and conviction—showed extraordinary courage. So did the survivors who finally broke decades of silence about Chavez. They did what the political establishment was unwilling to do. They chose the truth.
The lesson here is not that our movements are broken. It’s that they are only as strong as our willingness to hold everyone in them accountable. Letting people in power abuse women is never acceptable, regardless of party, regardless of legacy, regardless of how inconvenient the timing might feel.
We are in a fight for women’s futures in this country. That fight requires moral clarity. It requires us to stop treating accountability as a threat and start treating it as the foundation. Good things, lasting things, come from doing what is right, even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard.
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No, #MeToo Isn’t Over
Even in Trump’s America, where lawlessness can feel like the norm, survivors are here, demanding that individuals and institutions treat sexual violence with the seriousness it deserves.
Apr 22, 2026
After serious allegations of sexual misconduct, Democratic California Rep. Eric Swalwell and Texas Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales resigned from Congress on the same day. That same week, convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein went on trial for the third time in New York; the University of California, Berkeley removed the name of accused sexual abuser Cesar Chavez from its student center; and a federal judge dismissed a defamation lawsuit brought by President Donald Trump regarding his ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
These consequences for powerful men credibly accused of sexual assault have people asking: Is the #MeToo movement back?
As a co-founder of the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund, which was launched in 2018 to provide legal funding and media assistance to support survivors of workplace sexual harassment and related retaliation, I can confirm: Even in Trump’s America, where lawlessness can feel like the norm, survivors are here, demanding that individuals and institutions treat sexual violence with the seriousness it deserves.
When #MeToo first went viral, it felt like the Earth shook. Women worldwide responded to bombshell New York Times reports by sharing their experiences of sexual harassment and abuse. Quickly, it became clear that Weinstein was the tip of a massive iceberg. Allegations soon spread from Matt Lauer to Roger Ailes and beyond. But while big household names were capturing the public’s attention, something else was happening: People across the country were ready to take their abusers to court.
We have seen consequences for powerful men over the last weeks that go to show that powerful movements don’t end, they echo.
That’s why, three months after #MeToo went viral, the National Women’s Law Center joined with other advocates to create the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund, which helps survivors, no matter where they work, find justice. Over the last eight years, we have found a great deal of justice.
Since its founding, we have helped more than 12,000 people get the legal assistance they needed to hold their perpetrators accountable. From McDonald’s workers who were survivors of rampant sexual harassment by their bosses, to a female truck driver in Arizona who was sexually assaulted by her co-worker on the side of the road, the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund has fought for justice and accountability—and won.
In the years since we launched the fund, the #MeToo hashtag may have stopped trending (in part because people are less likely to use hashtags altogether), but the movement is still here, doing the work. In fact, 27 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws aimed at strengthening protections against workplace harassment. And we are not done.
We also can’t discount the immense cultural change that #MeToo’s created. For instance, Cheyenne Hunt, a Democratic creator and activist, used social media to draw attention to her story about abuse from Swalwell. She may not have used the #MeToo hashtag in her initial posts, but her courageous work follows the same playbook thousands of other survivors used to hold their perpetrators accountable. And the public was ready to respond, after nearly a decade of being grounded in Tarana Burke’s MeToo framework.
Yet we have seen from across the political divide people questioning whether the movement was successful, as evidenced by the alleged serial abuser now sitting in the Oval Office, who once said, “Grab ‘em by the pussy.” But these are the wrong questions to consider. Better ones might be: What would it take for women to feel safe in the places they work and learn? What support do survivors need? What is the cost of refusing to provide that support—the cost to survivors and to all of us, as women’s careers and contributions and opportunities are short-circuited by sexual violence?
What has happened in comment sections and court rooms has helped assure that this movement lives on in our laws and culture. Try as some might to roll back this progress—and some, particularly the president, are trying mighty hard—this reckoning will never simply be put back in the bottle.
That said, the latest examples make clear that this country still has miles to go. And given who is in the White House, the threat to survivor justice is as stark as it’s ever been. The Trump administration has spent the last year undermining survivor protections—in just over a year, it has refused to enforce harassment protections for transgender workers, blocked funding for domestic and sexual assault organizations, and weakened protections for victims of sexual harassment in schools.
But that is not evidence that this movement has failed; rather, it goes to show what many of us in the movement already knew: that there is always more work to do.
That work is, of course, made harder by people who think women’s bodies are theirs to possess, and that power means being immune to consequences. Still, we have seen consequences for powerful men over the last weeks that go to show that powerful movements don’t end, they echo. No matter how powerful you think you are, no one is above accountability.
So for anyone who thinks the #MeToo movement is over, I challenge you to look into the faces of the brave women whose stories are demanding and shaping change: Lonna Drewes. Ally Sammarco. Annika Albrecht. Regina Ann Santos-Aviles. Jessica Mann. Ana Murguia. Debra Rojas. Dolores Huerta. Annie Farmer. Virginia Giuffre. Survivors everywhere continue to speak truth—and because they do, #MeToo is as loud as it has ever been.
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Trump Won't Make America Safe Again By Minimizing Domestic Violence
The president’s remarks come at a time when he and his enablers celebrate toxic masculinity while cutting services for the most vulnerable, including domestic violence prevention and support for Survivors.
Sep 13, 2025
For those of us who work to prevent domestic violence and support survivors, it was beyond disheartening to hear the president of the United States, one of the most powerful men in the world, say, “If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say, 'This was a crime,' see?" His off-the-cuff remark was in regard to the crime rate in DC and is hard not to interpret as downplaying domestic violence.
It was notable to me that these remarks were made at the Bible Museum, at a conference for the freedom of religious education. Sadly, organized religions have too often been places that have turned a blind eye toward domestic violence, with an attitude that things that happen in the home should stay private or are to be worked out in the home. This, of course, minimizes the power and coercion behind domestic violence. Every day I speak to victims who are in situations where they cannot get help because the violence is happening at home, whether it is because they know what will happen when their abuser posts bail or they will have no place to live, or they do not want to disrupt their children’s lives and pull them out of school. The list goes on and on.
The president’s remarks come at a time when he and his enablers celebrate toxic masculinity while cutting services for the most vulnerable, including domestic violence prevention and support for Survivors. Recently Housing Urban Development funding has been cut, even though the connection between homelessness and domestic violence is clear. The California Inter Agency Council on homelessness reported that 74,779 survivors and 24,721 children of survivors experienced homelessness in 2024, that survivors had a higher rate of return to homelessness after exiting homeless services, that 14% of survivors returned to homelessness versus 10% of the overall homeless population, and that Survivors had a lower rate of exits to permanent housing—14% among survivors versus 18% among the overall homeless population. Yet funding for homelessness prevention at organizations, like the Survivor Justice Center that I run, are being cut.
Just last week I was interviewed about a hand signal that went viral that started when people were trapped at home with their abusers during the pandemic and need a nonverbal way to get help. Many of us are also standing in solidarity with survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and their re-traumatization by the ongoing dismissal of his crimes by the powers that be.
We must stop minimizing abuse just because it happened with someone you know.
Next month is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, where advocates, survivors, and supporters across the nation come together to commemorate those lives that have been lost to intimate partner violence and to continue the work to end domestic violence. I hope we can come together this month to commemorate those lives, and to raise awareness that this is not just a little fight that happens between a husband and a wife at home.
Every day, a friend, colleague, neighbor, community supporter, a good Samaritan, whomever asks me how this could still be happening, how could these ingrained power and control and coercive and abusive behavior be happening. They ask how they can help.
This is why I wrote earlier this year about the blame game. And about the burden that is placed on the survivor. We must stop minimizing abuse just because it happened with someone you know.
You can help. You can recognize the hand signal. You can say “a little fight with the wife” is wrong for so many reasons—even the reference to “the wife” removes agency from the victim spouse and makes it sound like a reference to property. As if we are returning to a far-off time from the 1950s, when domestic violence was not discussed and women were not seen as equal partners, but people that should know their place and be barefoot in the kitchen. We won’t go back.
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