The first was simply to recount facts, which is hard enough when the facts are what hers were.

But the second, the harder one, was to do it in his presence — to speak her truth six feet from the man who had spent eight years teaching her that speaking her truth would be punished.

Every sentence she completed was a small act of defiance against everything he had conditioned into her body, and her body knew it, and fought her, and she overrode it word by word by sheer will.

That is a kind of courage the movies never show, because it does not look like anything from the outside; it looks like a thin woman talking quietly in a courtroom.