* * *

  —

  This regression has consequences on a global scale—for elections, for laws, for human rights. We saw this play out dramatically in 2018, when psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had assaulted her at a house party more than three decades previously (he denies the allegations). The stakes were enormously high; it was feared that Donald Trump’s nominee would tip the court to the right, ultimately overturning Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that enshrined abortion rights for American women. Protesters were dragged out of the committee confirmation hearings. “Save Roe!” they screamed. “Save democracy!”

  It seemed that every woman I knew tuned in to hear Ford testify, in a voice that began with a quaver but gathered strength, that Kavanaugh had lain over her, tried to take off her clothes, and covered her mouth to stifle her screams. “Brett’s assault on me drastically altered my life,” she said.

  Ford’s decision to tell her story was all for nothing in the end. Kavanaugh was confirmed by a vote of 50–48. In her memoir One Way Back, Ford recounts the horrors that awaited her family afterwards: They had to move, and pay for security, and endure threats of violence. “Perhaps if I had known just how terrible and long-lasting the consequences would be, I would have chickened out and moved to Costa Rica,” she writes. “Do I regret it? In many ways, yes. Would I do it again? Absolutely.”

  Ford’s testimony came twenty-seven years after Anita Hill had bravely—and also fruitlessly—testified before the judiciary committee that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her when they worked together. Hill and Ford sat down together for the first time in 2021 to discuss their cases on an episode of the podcast Because of Anita. It was a life-affirming conversation; they lifted each other up, praised each other’s fortitude, acknowledged the privilege and resources that had made reporting possible in the first place.

  They agreed that they had made the right decision to come forward, while acknowledging the gruelling and life-changing consequences of those decisions. Hill made an important point—one that the other women in this chapter have also made. Some 60 per cent of people who report harassment also record some kind of retaliation. “The consequences of standing up are real. Would I do it again? Yes. But I’m not in a position to tell anyone that they should do it. And I understand people who have gone through systems and say that they would never again do what they did when they complained, because the consequences were so awful.”

  In June 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe in a decision called Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Samuel Alito wrote the ruling, and siding with him were Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh. In a flash, fifty years of progress in American women’s reproductive health was sent sliding into the past.

  How’s that for a backlash?

  * * *

  —

  I’m determined to find hope in all these chapters. So let me start this redemptive episode by reeling back to 1977, in North Bay, Ontario, an unlikely setting for revolution if ever there was one. And yet this is where we find our heroine, Bonnie Robichaud, a young mother of five who landed a job as a cleaner at a Canadian Forces base. For the next two years, as she proved exemplary at her job, Robichaud was also being subjected to gruesome sexual violence at the hands of her boss. Robichaud reported the abuse; nothing happened. In fact, as she pursued her claims against him, for years he remained her supervisor.

  Robichaud is nothing if not feisty—“You don’t want to make me mad,” she told me in an interview from the Ottawa seniors’ residence where she lives with her husband of fifty-five years, Larry. Although she was left devastated and depressed by the abuse, she doggedly pursued justice for herself and other workers, first through the Department of National Defence and later through the court system. In 1987, Bonnie’s case was the subject of a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of Canada, which ruled that an employer could be held liable for the “discriminatory acts” of an employee.

  The battle that Bonnie began in the 1970s, which paved the way for so many other survivors of workplace violence, is told in her searing memoir, It Should Be Easy to Fix. It would have been so easy to quit, to drop her pursuit for justice. No one was in her corner—not the defence department, not even her union (one union rep told her, “a guy had the right to chase a woman if he wanted to”). Only her husband and kids stuck by her. When I asked her why she kept going, Bonnie sounded almost surprised at the question. “I had a right to that job,” she said. “I had a right to that job without the behaviour of the sexual harasser. And I had a right to be protected from it by the employer, who did not want to know about it.”

  Almost fifty years later, you could tell that Bonnie had made peace with the past. She’d fought a long fight, and while it had taken a toll, she’d still won in the end. All the pain—the depression, the lack of money, not being available for her kids—had faded with her victory. It had been worthwhile. One thing, though, caused her voice to rise in distress. The non-disclosure agreement she’d been made to sign by the Department of National Defence, which had been used to buy her silence.

  “I didn’t realize how difficult that would be, for me to have a non-disclosure clause. The employer will beat you up for years or whatever length of time you can survive. And then they tell you, you can’t tell anybody this has happened. That is so wrong. They should be illegal. They’re evil.” I told Bonnie about the work being done to ban NDAs around the world, and she took a deep breath. “I’m so happy to see that. If I were younger, and had more energy, I’d be there with them.”

  Most of the world learned about NDAs during MeToo—particularly the way Harvey Weinstein’s legal team used them to smother the truth. Zelda Perkins, one of Weinstein’s assistants at Miramax, was silenced under one of those NDAs. In the 1990s, she tried to report Weinstein’s attempted assault on her assistant, Rowena Chiu, to her superiors. The complaints went nowhere, and Perkins and Chiu were persuaded to sign a settlement that included an NDA. It meant that Perkins couldn’t speak to anyone about her time at Miramax, let alone about Weinstein’s behaviour.

  Now we cut forward to November 2022, and that cinema in Toronto where I was watching She Said, the adaptation of Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s book. I sat in the dark theatre and watched Samantha Morton play Zelda Perkins. “I had to have their permission if I wanted to contact a therapist, or to speak to an accountant,” Morton-as-Perkins said. She leaned forward, taut with emotion. “This is bigger than Weinstein. This is about the system protecting abusers.”

  After the film ended and the applause died down, Julie Macfarlane stood up in front of the audience. If you’d read her book Going Public: A Survivor’s Journey from Grief to Action, you knew that she was a survivor of sexual violence and a survivor of the collateral damage cast by an NDA. She was also, like Bonnie Robichaud, an advocate for other survivors. Her professional life couldn’t have been more different from Bonnie’s—she was a former law professor, where Bonnie had been a cleaner at an army base—but they were both smart, fierce women devoted to ensuring that others didn’t have to suffer abuse in silence.

  In September 2021, Julie had connected with Zelda Perkins over Twitter, where they bonded over their advocacy and their love of horses. Together they founded Can’t Buy My Silence, a worldwide organization devoted to banning the use of NDAs in settlements involving sexual assault and harassment.

  Macfarlane explained to the audience why she had left her former employer, the University of Windsor, “in disgust.” Macfarlane had been an advocate for students on campus who’d also been victims of sexual violence and abuse. One particular fellow professor was identified as a harasser, and eventually let go by the university—but his departure was covered by an NDA. When Macfarlane was asked by other universities about this professor’s reputation, she told them what she thought about her former colleague. The other professor then sued her for defamation, and instead of providing documents that would have supported her, the university “threw me under the bus,” she said. So she quit.

  “The other thing that connected Zelda and I in our own experiences of NDAs was that we were relatively privileged,” Macfarlane continued. “She was very young, but she was a white woman, she had some means of taking care of herself. I was a university professor. Yet we still got completely screwed. If we were completely screwed, how much worse is that for all the other people with none of the advantages we might have?”

  How much worse was it for all the scared young women who’d signed NDAs from rich sexual predators who chose them precisely because they were vulnerable and unlikely to speak up? The ordinary, powerless girls preyed upon by Jeffrey Epstein, R. Kelly, and a thousand less notorious monsters. Perhaps, as Macfarlane said, they signed the papers because they needed money for rent or a lawyer—never realizing that they were signing away their voices for ever and ever.

  A few months later, I caught up with Julie Macfarlane while she was on a trip to Australia. She was in her sixties, and a cancer survivor, but somehow her injustice motor just kept running. In less than eighteen months, the Can’t Buy My Silence campaign had won a series of astonishing victories. One of those victories meant that NDAs covering sexual misconduct at universities, like the one Macfarlane had unintentionally breached, were banned in several jurisdictions, including the U.K. and Ontario.

  “It’s been a bit dizzying at the moment, but it’s great,” she said. Just a week before, the Canadian Bar Association had adopted a motion to rein in the misuse of NDAs, and “discourage their use to silence victims and whistleblowers who report experiences of abuse, discrimination and harassment.” It was largely a symbolic move, but an important one, and it came soon after legislation to ban NDAs in sexual misconduct cases had passed in Prince Edward Island. California has also banned their use for settlements involving harassment or whistleblowers. When we spoke, Macfarlane was working with legislators in Ireland on a similar bill, and was in early talks with lawmakers in Australia.

  She told me that the recent Hockey Canada scandal had been crucial in moving the dial. (Never underestimate the power of hockey to grab the attention of even sports-loathing Canadians.) In the spring of 2022, a shocking story hit the headlines: a young woman said that she had been sexually assaulted by several hockey players, including members of the men’s national junior team, in a hotel room in London, Ontario, in 2018. A police investigation into the incident was dropped, but, after a public outcry, later reopened. In February 2024, five former members of the junior team—four of whom were playing for the National Hockey League—would be charged with sexual assault. The chief of the London police force apologized to the woman for the length of time the investigation had taken.

  The young woman reached a settlement for $3.55 million with Hockey Canada, but was subject to a non-disclosure agreement that prohibited her from sharing any details. The outrage that followed was seismic, perhaps because the details were so gross as they emerged in press reports and during Hockey Canada officials’ testimony before a government committee. For one thing, Hockey Canada had settled twenty-one sexual assault claims since 1989, some of which were attached to NDAs. For another, the money came from a pot of money with the Orwellian name “National Equity Fund.”

  Bowing to public pressure, Hockey Canada released the complainant from her NDA. The shift came not because the organization was ashamed of its players’ alleged assaults or of how it had handled those allegations but because doing so had become bad for the brand. “Corporate Canada is not going to agree to stop using NDAs for moral reasons,” Macfarlane told me. “They’re going to stop because using them looks even worse.”

  The process of reporting sexual violence is still incredibly fraught, as Macfarlane pointed out. After writing her book, she was swamped with calls from people asking if they should report. Echoing Anita Hill, she emphasized that reporting is not a panacea. “It’s still incredibly difficult for people to report. Not only is it personally traumatizing for them, but they are also entering into a system, whether that is in a workplace, civil courts, or the criminal system, which still treats allegations around sexual violence completely differently than anything else. You still have these issues of so-called credibility and how much you have to be able to show in evidence about something which, of course, is virtually always not witnessed by anybody else.”

  Was it worth it? It was for her. But, knowing what it took out of her, she could not make that decision for anyone else.

  * * *

  —

  “Like many women who are attacked, when I had the most to say, I said the least.” This is how E. Jean Carroll—journalist, advice columnist, and personal hero of mine—describes the aftermath of a rape attempt that happened when she was seventeen. The account is described in her odd, heartbreaking, and very funny 2019 book What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal.

  The would-be rapist was number 2 on Carroll’s “Most Hideous Men of My Life” list. Number 20 was Donald Trump. Carroll wrote that, in the mid-1990s, Trump—then a real estate tycoon in New York City—raped her in a change room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store. She did not report the crime; she stayed silent for decades. But while she was silent, she was not unharmed. Her account of the day Trump assaulted her ends with these words: “I’ve never had sex with anybody ever again.”

  In 2019, New York magazine ran an excerpt from Carroll’s book, exposing Hideous Man number 20. Trump, president at the time thanks to voters who weren’t fussed about their Chief Executive saying it was okay to grab women by the pussy, went ballistic. He called Carroll a liar and a wack job. He said she wasn’t good-looking enough for him to bother with. That the story was a hoax. That the book should be shelved under fiction. Trump’s troll army, egged on, hurled abuse at Carroll online. They threatened her with rape and death.

  Carroll, who is now eighty, was devastated by these attacks. She slept with a loaded gun. Her book tanked. Work dried up. She could have curled into a small, silent ball and faded from consciousness—I would have. Instead, taking advantage of a New York state law that allowed victims of assaults that had passed the statute of limitations to sue their attackers, she sued Trump in civil court for rape and defamation.

  I waved my E. Jean flag silently from the sidelines. This was one of those moments that felt like all of my own history, all the reporting I’d done, coalescing into one white-hot ball of meaning. The past and the future converging. The future not much of an improvement on the past; or perhaps it was, and I just had to squint harder to see it.

  I’d always loved Ask E. Jean, Carroll’s advice column in Elle magazine. My friends and I used to read it aloud to each other, in the days when you bought a magazine to read on the bus, or waited for it to slip silkily through your mailbox every month. Carroll had the swagger and humour of a 1940s comedienne, and she wrote with a pen like Nora Ephron’s. She was always on your side, but she also wanted you to get up and kick the world in the pants.

  It’s also fair to say I’d always loathed Donald Trump, and found his appeal unimaginable, especially to the white Republican women who voted for him. In 2016 I was in Florida, reporting on his presidential campaign. At a rally in Tampa, I asked one woman about the credible allegations of sexual misconduct lodged against him, which were numerous even before Carroll made her accusation public. This woman scoffed. How could he possibly have done such things when he had a woman as beautiful as Melania at home? Wow, I thought. If we could harness the power of internalized misogyny, we’d never need fossil fuels again.

  Several years later, I watched, with glee and horror, as the defamation and rape trials unfolded in a civil court in Manhattan. Everything I am writing about in this book coalesced into one febrile moment: silence and shaming; the actions of an individual silhouetted against the power of age-old systems; the ocean between the equality we thought we’d achieved and the far-off shore where it might actually be found.

  Trump continued to demean and insult Carroll, and his fans ate it up. But then, justice: he was found guilty of sexual abuse and defamation by a jury of nine people, and ordered to pay Carroll $5 million in damages. In a second defamation trial a few months later, where Trump, in the courtroom, loudly muttered that this was a “witch hunt,” he was found guilty of defamation again and ordered to pay Carroll $83.3 million in damages.

  I went on social media to crow about this victory. Dozens of women had accused Trump of sexual misconduct, and they’d all been shamed, disregarded, ignored. But one voice had cracked this narcissist wide open. E. Jean Carroll had kicked him in the wallet, where it hurt. And she vowed to use the money for a good cause. Like the other women in this chapter, she saw the historic value in her fight: “This win, more than any other thing, when we needed it the most—after we lost the rights over our own bodies in many states—we put out our flag in the ground on this one. Women won this one. I think it bodes well for the future.”

  Yes, I thought. Finally! An eighty-year-old woman was the roaring lioness we needed. But then doubts began to wash in: Trump was still extremely popular. If anything, this defeat might have made him more popular in the eyes of his supporters. They were still calling Carroll crazy, a liar, a fantasist. As I write this, Trump is leading polls and may well become president again.

  I wanted to believe that this boded well for the future, as E. Jean said. I wanted to believe that when women spoke up, something changed. That the sacrifices of Bonnie Robichaud and Tarana Burke and Julie Macfarlane and thousands of others had bent the moral arc of the universe toward justice. And I do believe that. But I also believe that the masters of the universe are not going to cede their structures of power so easily. We have to continue to raise our voices together. We can’t afford not to.