On October 15, 2017, American actress and activist Alyssa Milano sent a simple message out onto the Internet: “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.” It was this gesture, which brought forth thousands of replies, that put the #MeToo movement in the mainstream. Now, just under a year later, Milano is lending her voice to another hashtag: #WhyIDidntReport.
A lot of change has been made around conversations about sexual harassment and assault as #MeToo has gained momentum. A glance at the President Donald Trump’s Twitter page, however, will tell you that we still have a long way to go. “I have no doubt,” he wrote last Thursday morning, “that if the attack on Dr Ford was as bad as she says charges would have been immediately filed with local law enforcement by either her or loving parents.”
Here, the President is responding to Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations of sexual assault against Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. And, in direct response to this tweet, survivors of sexual assault are tweeting thoughts of their own: with #WhyIDidntReport, people are sharing the reasons why they didn’t come forward with their assault stories sooner.
Hey, @realDonaldTrump, Listen the fuck up.
I was sexually assaulted twice. Once when I was a teenager. I never filed a police report and it took me 30 years to tell me parents.
If any survivor of sexual assault would like to add to this please do so in the replies. #MeToo https://t.co/n0Aymv3vCi
— Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) September 21, 2018
“It took me years after my assault to voice the experience to my closest friends,” Milano wrote in a first-person piece for Vox, expanding on her story, “It took me three decades to tell my parents that the assault had even happened. I never filed a police report. I never told officials. I never tried to find justice for my pain because justice was never an option.”
“For me, speaking up meant reliving one of the worst moments of my life. It meant recognizing my attacker’s existence when I wanted nothing more than to forget that he was allowed to walk on this Earth at all,” she wrote.
Ashley Judd, Patricia Arquette and Mira Sorvino—along with hundreds of other survivors of sexual trauma—have also come forward to share their #WhyIDidntReport stories.
#WhyIDidntReport. The first time it happened, I was 7. I told the first adults I came upon. They said “Oh, he’s a nice old man, that’s not what he meant.” So when I was raped at 15, I only told my diary. When an adult read it, she accused me of having sex with an adult man.
— ashley judd (@AshleyJudd) September 21, 2018
I gave up “reporting” after I called the police at 12 after a man masturbated at me from his car. I gave the cops his license plate number and description. They didn’t come to take a report and never contacted me again. They did nothing #WhyIDidntReport
— Patricia Arquette (@PattyArquette) September 22, 2018
#WhyIDidntReport because the first time I did for a serious sexual assault as a teenager nothing came of it, and later I felt that I wasn’t important enough to make a big deal over. I was wrong.
— Mira Sorvino (@MiraSorvino) September 22, 2018
Because I had never seen a survivor come forward and be treated with dignity, so why would I believe my case would be different? #WhyIDidntReport
— Miss Michigan (@MissAmericaMI) September 21, 2018
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