She told me plainly, from the page: he knew exactly what he was doing, and I was young, and do not be angry at me.

And she was right, on every count.

The fault was never hers.

A powerful man in his forties who selects an eighteen-year-old intern is not a man who made a mistake with a peer.

He is a man who chose the least powerful person in the building and used the enormous imbalance between them as a tool.

The responsibility for that lies entirely on the side of the scale that holds all the power, and that side was never, for one instant, my daughter’s.

I will not set down here the details of how a powerful married man in his position drew a teenage intern into his orbit, because my daughter did not dwell on them in her letter and I will not dwell on them here; they are not the point, and the fault in them was never hers.