My mother refused to look at him even once, not out of fear, but because she had decided that she did not owe that man a single glance for the rest of her life.

Outside the courthouse, a local news reporter approached us and asked if we wanted to say anything.

I began to decline — and my mother squeezed my hand, and stepped forward, and looked straight into the camera, and said the thing that went around the world by nightfall:

“When an elderly woman tells you something hurts,” she said, “listen to her.

Sometimes it isn’t just old age.

Sometimes it is the truth, crying out to be heard.”