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Rape Denialism as Public Sport
The #MeToo movement is dead
There are certain moments in life when you realize how ignorant or wrong you’ve been about something, and suddenly it feels like the floodgates of shameful revelation open into your entire being. I’ve had that feeling several times in my life, one of them in early February of 2016 while listening to a This American Life episode, called “Anatomy of Doubt.”
I was organizing a closet in the women’s domestic violence shelter where I volunteered every week, listening to the podcast as I worked. I usually enjoyed learning random tidbits from the show, exploring new perspectives, and hearing Ira Glass’s voice. But this week was different.
The shelter was in a secret location in North Seattle, and the episode also discussed something strangely relevant that had happened in North Seattle: the story of a horrific, brutal rape, of an 18-year-old woman who had spent most of her youth in foster care.
Despite significant evidence of the atrocious crime she was victim to, no one in her life believed her — not the police, and not even her two longest-standing foster mothers
