A year into #MeToo, what’s next?
NEW YORK — By the end of her impassioned speech last week in front of a crowded hotel ballroom, Alyssa Milano was choking back tears.
The words “Me Too,” the actress and activist told her audience, would continue to ring out as long as society needed them, “reverberating off every closed door, bouncing off every glass ceiling.”
“This movement is not going anywhere,” she declared, “until our work is done.”
Offstage stood activist Tarana Burke, who had just presented Milano with her award from the New York Women’s Foundation. It had been exactly a year since Milano had sent her famous “Me Too” tweet, echoing an expression Burke had coined more than a decade earlier, and awakened the next morning “to a different world,” in Burke’s words.
Now, the two women, and others associated with the movement, are assessing progress, looking ahead, and trying to decide what’s next, a year after the scandalous Harvey Weinstein allegations exploded into public consciousness.
It’s also a moment when some are speaking of so-called “setbacks” to the movement. Earlier this month, a New York judge dropped one of the
sexual assault charges against Weinstein, amid accusations of misconduct by a detective in the case. And there was the confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court despite an allegation of sexual assault from accuser Christine Blasey Ford, which he denied, and the explosive hearings and protests that accompanied the ordeal.
“I’m just glad we’re no longer fighting that battle,” Milano, who attended the hearing in solidarity with Ford, said in an interview, “because I think we all need to take a moment to breathe, assess the situation, heal a little bit, and think about what comes next.”
What does come next? For Milano, the key battleground
is the cultural one. “We obviously lost the political battle with Kavanaugh, we might be losing the legal battle with Harvey, but I think that we’re constantly striving to win the cultural battle, and sometimes that has to happen first,” she said. “So I still have a lot of hope. I don’t think that there’s any real movement that’s linear. I always say, ‘[Expletive] is gonna get broken.’”
Also preferring to see the glass half full is Debra Katz, who was already one of the nation’s most prominent attorneys in the arena of sexual assault and harassment litigation when she gained instant recognition as Ford’s attorney.
Though the outcome of that case was obviously not what she’d hoped, “I think anytime the world listens to four hours of someone’s testimony and gives rapt attention to the experiences of a sexual assault survivor, the world is transformed,” Katz said in an interview.
“And that was a direct result of the power of this movement. I do believe significant progress has been made, and will continue to be made.”
But Katz, who declined to comment specifically on her representation of Ford, said it’s obvious that certain institutions “have not kept pace with the cultural shift that we’re experiencing. Congress continues to be deeply flawed, and the majority at these hearings had a foregone conclusion. But I don’t think that’s a failing of the movement.”
What’s in the future? First of all, more legal cases. Attorneys like Katz are busier than they’ve ever been, because of increased willingness of women to come forward. And they’re finding, she says, that employers are much more receptive to resolving cases.
“What I’ve seen that feels very different, as a lawyer who’s handled this type of case for more than 30 years, is that companies are acting more promptly and taking claims more seriously, and actually terminating wrongdoers even if they’re at the highest levels of corporations.”