After holding in an asteroid-sized shit for over a week, Donald Trump finally expelled his bowels onto Twitter Friday morning with the odious tweet you know he’s been wanting to write ever since Christine Blasey Ford came forward about Brett Kavanaugh. Here it is:
It is not at all shocking that a guy who bragged about grabbing women by the pussy and has been accused of sexual assault by nearly two dozen women would embrace this line of thinking. And so, minutes later, #WhyIDidntReport was born. As of Friday afternoon, it’s the top trending hashtag on Twitter.
#WhyIDidntReport is not the first collective outpouring of sexual trauma on social media, nor will it be the last. A slew of people, including celebrities, opened up about their own experiences with abuse and the forces that kept them silent:
The past two weeks have been particularly hellish for survivors, as we yet again witness how little the people running this country care about survivors of sexual assault. The burden should not be on us to explain our humanity or why our pain matters, but from the popularity of the unending hashtag confessional, it’s clear that in some way it leads to at least a little bit of catharsis and generates support in a society that rarely gives us any.