Powerful men have been doing exactly this, to women exactly like me, for all of recorded time: harming them in private, where there are no witnesses, and then controlling the story afterward, because they controlled everything that could tell it.

The private crime against the powerless has always been nearly perfect, precisely because it happens where no one can see, and the powerful person controls what everyone is allowed to know.

And what has changed, in my lifetime, is that the witness has been democratized.

The small device on my wrist, the kind millions of ordinary people wear without a thought, meant that for the first time in history, a woman dying alone on a rug in her own living room was not, in fact, alone and unwitnessed.

She carried a witness.