The New Yorker: What Happened to the Women of #MeToo?

June 17. 2025

Policy Director & Deputy Legal Director Jessica Ramey Stender is featured in a New Yorker article about the evolution of the MeToo movement in recent years:

Jessica Ramey Stender, the policy director at the nonprofit Equal Rights Advocates, told me, “We were seeing this disturbing pattern emerge: as more survivors came forward, the perpetrators who harmed them were using retaliatory defamation lawsuits to threaten them.” The plaintiffs in such suits didn’t have to win for the efforts to be successful. Powerful men often have more resources to wage legal battles than their accusers. And the suits allowed them to cloud public opinion about even the most verifiable claims. “These retaliatory lawsuits were designed to drain survivors of financial resources, re-traumatize them through lengthy proceedings, and really intimidate them into silence,” Stender said. Some men had the means to hire private investigators to find incriminating information on survivors, to deploy media campaigns designed by public-relations firms, and to mobilize their online followers. In the nineties, Jennifer Freyd, an expert on the psychology of sexual violence, developed a model called DARVO to explain the ways perpetrators deflect blame: “Deny, attack, reverse victim and offender.” “It’s an aggressive denial, usually attacking a person’s credibility,” she told me. “Trump is really good at it.”

Such campaigns can have a chilling effect. Stender has worked with college students and corporate employees who have filed complaints against abusers. Several faced retaliatory lawsuits, couldn’t pay for lawyers, and withdrew their claims. Stender put me in touch with Jess Miers, who, while attending law school at Santa Clara University, filed a sexual-assault complaint against another student. (He denied the allegation.) He sued her, even though she had dropped the complaint by then, and she had to hire lawyers. (The suit was eventually dismissed.) “Once litigation has been brought, for folks who are supporting you, are advocating for you, it becomes a lot more real for them,” Miers, now a law professor at the University of Akron, said. “They take a step back.”

Read the article.