why now?

why women come forward when he's running for public office

If you’ve been following national politics, you know that Graham Platner has once again been embroiled in scandal. In May, it was leaked that he had been sexting other women early in his marriage. Lots of folks wrote this off as a “private matter,” but others said it showed poor character, low conscientiousness, and high impulsivity in recent history. And now, as of four days ago, a woman named Jenny Racicot has come forward, not with a story of blurry consent or even coercion, but pretty cut-and-dried rape allegations. I was struck by Jake Tapper’s response to her story, and it reminded me of why telling this kind of story is something survivors of sexual assault try to avoid. He asked her why her response was to “let him rape you” instead of fighting back. I wish Jake had known that even in cases of stranger rape (which is not what happened, Platner and Racicot had a relationship), only about 30% of victims fight back with physical force. There is a whole book about this phenomenon, aptly titled: Girls Play Dead.

In 2011, I was decidedly not a feminist, but I was a psychology major and a sociology minor, and so I found myself in a class entitled “Sexual Deviance and Violence.” It was, to this day, the most transformative class of my college career in how I saw the world. I still remember my professor talking about the work she had done with the rape crisis hotline as we discussed why women don’t come forward when they have been sexually assaulted. She said the most common refrain she heard from women was, “I don’t want to ruin his life…But I don’t want other women to go through this.”