I want to say that again, because it was the thing I was proudest of in the entire case: my father, who had been made to feel that his word was worthless, that no one would ever believe a confused old man, never had to sit in a courtroom and be doubted, because I had built a case so complete that his abusers’ own forged paper convicted them without him.

This is the thing most people do not understand about how you actually protect someone who has been through what my father went through, and it is the thing I have spent my career trying to teach.

The instinct, the dramatic instinct, is to want the victim to face their abuser, to speak their truth, to have their day.

And sometimes that is healing and right.

But very often it is another wound — to make a frightened, diminished person sit in a hostile room and be cross-examined, have their memory attacked, their competence questioned, the exact vulnerabilities their abuser exploited now weaponized a second time by a defense attorney doing their job.