University of Edinburgh

Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts

Title He Said/She Said: Truth-Telling and #MeToo

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He Said/She Said: Truth-Telling and #MeToo

"He Said/She Said: Truth-Telling and #MeToo" analyses how the conversation about sexual
violence changed when millions of women worldwide raised their voices to say “Me Too.” It
historicizes the #MeToo movement within feminist activism in communities of colour around sexual
assault advocacy and in relation to Anita Hill's testimony in 1991 that Clarence Thomas sexually
harassed her. The #MeToo moment offers a clear representation of the scale of sexual violence and
presents a vivid example of the power of testimony to conjure a scene of witness through the power
of truth-telling. Leigh Gilmore argues that truth-telling is dynamic and that survivor speech in the
form of #MeToo has disrupted the routine minimization of women's accounts of harm into the "He
said/She said" pattern.

In the middle of October 2017, the conversation about sexual violence changed when millions
of women worldwide raised their voices to say “Me Too.” In response to allegations of sexual abuse in
Hollywood, including serial predatory behaviour by producer Harvey Weinstein, actor Alyssa Milano
reawakened the power of a simple phrase: “Me Too.” The #MeToo movement did not come out of
nowhere. In 2007 African American activist Tarana Burke started the #MeToo movement as part of a
grassroots organization supporting women and girls of colour who are victims of sexual assault.1 This
simple phrase has previously been shared privately between survivors of sexual assault and their
advocates.2 #MeToo acknowledges the power of shared experience and the identification it fosters as
the basis for empathy. #MeToo, with and without the hashtag, was shared by 12 million Facebook users
in the first 24 hours after Alyssa Milano’s October 15th tweet.3 For many, this was the first time they had
ever spoken out about sexual violence in a public forum. It represented the first time others realized the
sheer number of those whose life histories included sexual violence. The #MeToo moment represents a
vivid example of the power of testimony to conjure a scene of witness. Those who speak and those who
hear are transformed into a new relation through the power of truth telling. Those who were silenced
spoke, witnessing their voices amplified by the collective force of millions. Those who had not previously
been aware became witnesses not only to sexual violence, but also to the ways in which they contribute
to systems that enable sexual violence to persist.

I have been writing about self-representation and vulnerable subjects for long enough to
suspect that the new openness to survivor testimony represented in the #MeToo moment might be brief.
Previous episodes of tolerance to survivor testimony, as with incest survivors in the 1980s, established
a pattern of initial curiosity mixed with the possibility of empathy that quickly led to skepticism. Too
soon, scandal arises along with cries of false accusation and worries about due process, hastening the
collapse of further widespread conversation. Testimonial moments are always vulnerable to being
derailed when new subjects encounter old judgments in the arena of truth-telling. Longstanding
patterns of doubt and discrediting are easily revived, so I gave it a week, maybe two, before the window

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would slam shut. I hoped that would be long enough to raise new awareness about the pervasiveness of
sexual violence in women’s lives, to move the conversation beyond Hollywood, to catalyse a widespread
discussion about power, gender, work, and race that started and then stalled in 1991 in the U.S. when
Clarence Thomas was seated on the Supreme Court and Anita Hill’s powerful testimony of how he had
sexually harassed her when she worked at the EEOC was silenced.4 Instead, the conversation is
continuing. From Hollywood to Washington to Silicon Valley, from academia to athletics and the media,
powerful men are losing prestige, jobs, and the air of impunity that previously encircled them. Women
and men in the U.S. are learning to speak in new ways about sexual violence and abuses of power.

In any testimonial moment, it is essential to ask: How are the dynamics of truth-telling and
gender shifting? Men have long been able to invoke the ‘He said/She said’ tactic when accused of sexual
abuse or harassment. Doing so places the thumb of doubt on every woman’s side of the scale of justice.
It worked for Clarence Thomas against Anita Hill. He said/She said gives any man an outsized ability
to smear any particular woman’s credibility, because women are routinely doubted in a way that is not
true of plaintiffs in other kinds of criminal cases. In part that’s because people believe that they simply
want to give both sides of an argument equal weight and that such even-handedness is a hallmark of
justice. But as salutary as such a belief is, it does not square with the application of justice to victims of
sexual harassment in virtually every kind of work place and to victims of sexual assault, especially the
most vulnerable: Indigenous women, women of colour, young people, and trans people. Scales of justice
tip toward the empowered, not only in the outcomes produced, but also in the attribution of doubt to
victims of sexual violence. Woven into the application of justice is a cultural bias that says women are
not as reliable as men, that they lie about sexual violence, “cry rape” when they regret sex, or just don’t
understand that boys have to be boys sometimes. He said/She said thrives in the presence of unequal
power, unequal credibility, and unequal doubt. Importantly — and this accounts for some of the staying
power of this public conversation — by amplifying the collective power of survivor speech, the “Me Too”
movement dilutes the threat of retaliation against any individual woman.

#MeToo disrupts He said/She said. The pattern of centring the discussion on a single act of
sexual assault or harassment has been replaced by a flow of allegations against numerous perpetrators.
The scale has altered. Even when one man is the focus, there are many, many other men who have been
accused in reliable and verifiably sourced stories in credible journalism. We do not see the pattern of an
array of attorneys and other enablers of an accused man facing off against a single woman, as we did
with Anita Hill, where a lone woman is isolated in her accusation and suffers additional abuse in the
form of reputational destruction. Instead, as more women come forward to offer highly credible
accounts against specific men, women’s voices are amplified. The massive number of women sharing
#MeToo certainly exposed the scale of women’s experiences of sexual abuse, but the generic quality of
the hashtag also enabled participation by offering safety in numbers. Given the ubiquity of how women
are trolled and shamed online, the ability to participate without naming any particular victimizer meant
that specific women were not silenced. The powerful act of affiliating as a survivor opened a door for
longer, specific accounts to emerge. A few days after Alyssa Milano’s October 15 #MeToo tweet, I was
invited onto a call-in radio program to discuss sexual harassment. As women called in with their stories,
I was struck by how many of them began, “The first time I was sexually abused …” There was so much

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pain, carried over a lifetime, exacerbated by silencing, that poured into the public square. From youth
to maturity, from school to work and home, from entry level to high level management jobs, on swim
teams, at church, and just walking home, it is clear that women’s lives are marked by the persistent
threat and experience of sexual abuse, as well as retaliation or disbelief if they come forward. The
personal stories bear witness to the chronic trauma women carry from the actions of abusers and from
the doubt expressed by the people they tell, including the people charged with pursuing justice.

The #MeToo movement has also made its way into popular culture. For example, the chronic
exposure to the pervasive presence of sexual violence in women’s everyday lives was recently
highlighted in a Saturday Night Live skit entitled “Welcome to Hell,” that depicted the façade of
femininity as a candy-coloured fantasy scape in which women look permanently girlish with their lip
gloss, ponytails, and blank stares, but sing about the ubiquity of sexual violence in the “hell” that men
are now shocked to learn about in the #MeToo moment. In a sing-song voice, host Saoirse Ronan
ventriloquizes the male complaint about having the truth of sexual violence unmasked — “Now House
of Cards is ruined/And that really sucks” — and introduces in the collective voice of “us” what is ruined
for women: “Well, here's a list of stuff that's ruined for us” — as the female cast sings this list:
“Parking/And walking/And Uber/And ponytails/Bathrobes/And night-time/And drinking/And
hotels/And vans.” The litany of what is ruined for women is a list of triggers so interwoven into daily
life that literally no place is free from reference to the pervasiveness of risk and inclusive of women’s
required and habitual adjustment to it. As this skit suggests, the #MeToo movement paved the way for
exposing and articulating everyday sexual violence in the lives of women.

It is hardly an accident that the persistence of “me too” is rooted within the current political
climate in the U.S. We can’t underestimate the impact of the election of President Trump, a man who
had bragged about sexual assault, and whose stalking of Hillary Clinton in the “Nasty Woman” debate
shook many. The Women’s March and the scale of global, voluntary assembly the day after his
inauguration were signs of how angry women are about a culture that allows sexual abuse to continue
without holding perpetrators accountable. Along with providing a forum to voice women’s anger, the
#MeToo moment has initiated a new moment of accountability. One wonders if it will reach the White
House.

Abuse interrupts women’s careers, harms our health, and shatters our faith in institutions. As
I argue in Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives, having survivor
speech ruled permanently under suspicion, permanently at odds with the truth creates a pervasive and
persistent culture of doubt. The blunting of He said/She said is a powerful step forward for women. But
it is a movement with more to do. Many of the people in the spotlight, both abusers and victims, have
been white celebrities or public figures. He said/She said must be disrupted for women of colour, too,
with histories of feminist advocacy and organising centred in discussions of sexual violence. Further,
the environments in which male abuse of power flourishes must be exposed as the same environments
in which racism and homophobia persist.

As the #MeToo movement makes clear, truth-telling is dynamic. It often arises within some
enabling constraint related to rules of evidence or judgment, or comes into view as a social relation tied

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to an institution, like the law or a work culture with its own norms of behaviour. Rather than standing
alone and apart, confirmable in its accuracy, observable by all, truth also often takes the form of ethical
promise. Truth is what we pledge to another and, in this way, creates a bond through its performance.
Truth-telling entails doing, but it creates the possibilities of undoing, including undoing those who
speak truth to power and the grounds of credibility on which they stand. To tell the truth is to profess a
fidelity on which one can rely. But as a matter of law, truth-telling requires interpretation of the person
giving testimony. When evidence is presented — a weapon, for example, a photograph of a scene, or of
bodily injury — it cannot speak in its own voice. But when testimony is evidence, when the witness
speaks in their own voice, interpretation is informed by bias about who can tell the truth, who is prone
to lie, and about what. The millions of survivors are showing how those denied access to the self-
possession of the first person can enter the social field of representation to bear witness to sexual
violence.

New witnesses emerge as credible in new configurations of power and within shifting forums
of judgment. Social media has democratized survivor speech and because news and entertainment
media are so fully enmeshed, celebrity reporters are now covering sexual violence and raising
consciousness about power and coercion. Currently, we are all tasked with understanding MeToo as a
form of witness. I wonder how much truth we will allow ourselves to hear.

Notes

1
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/us/me-too-movement-tarana-burke.html
2 https://thewalrus.ca/after-metoo-the-fear-of-failure/
3 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/metoo-more-than-12-million-facebook-posts-comments-reactions-24-hours/
4 In Tainted Witness (2017), I argue that Anita Hill’s testimony in 1991 inaugurated a new era of doubting women

in public.

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Author Biography
Leigh Gilmore is the author of Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives
(Columbia UP 2017); The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Cornell UP 2001);
Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation (Cornell UP 1994); and a co-
editor of Autobiography and Postmodernism (U Mass P 1994). Her articles on life writing, feminist
theory, law, trauma, testimony, and graphic narrative appear in SIGNS, Feminist Studies, Women’s
Studies Quarterly, Biography, a/b: Auto/biography Studies, Profession, Prose Studies, Law &
Literature, and American Imago, among others, and in numerous collections. Along with Elizabeth
Marshall, she is co-author of Girls in Crisis: Girlhoods and Social Justice in Life Narrative and
Contemporary Comics (Fordham UP forthcoming). She has been Professor of English at The Ohio State
University and Dorothy Cruikshank Backstrand Chair of Women’s and Gender Studies at Scripps
College, and has held visiting appointments at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, Northeastern University,
Harvard Divinity School, and Brown University. She is currently Distinguished Visiting Professor of
Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. She writes for the online journalism platform The
Conversation and has appeared as a guest analyst on sexual harassment and the #MeToo campaign on
the PBS News Hour, National Public Radio, and Boston Globe, among other outlets.