Ashley Judd Instagram – This morning, I was excitedly preparing to reserve our Yellowstone National Park backcountry campsites. Jodi Kantor from the NYT called, and texted simultaneously, “pick up rn,” and I did. She shared the news that the New York Court of Appeals had overturned Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 conviction on felony sex crime charges. Yet again, male sexual violence had intruded upon and disturbed a beautiful day, as it does every day in the lives of American women. We live on a daily basis with male entitlement to our female bodies. The most dangerous place in the US for us is in our homes. The men who most commonly assault, rape, and kill us are men who know. Each of us who survived Harvey Weinstein’s serial sexual predation knew him. He exploited, gleefully, the asymmetry of power in our relationship to him. He defamed me after I barely evaded his sexual assault in that hotel room in 1996. I did not evade his grotesque sexual harassment, wrath, and punishment. My art and my pocketbook are still different to this day because of him. The misguided opinion of 4 judges today does not change what we survivors know, and we acknowledge the fierceness of the minority opinion. The truth is consistent. There are multiple forces at work here. One is the power of those of us with lived experience as survivors of male sexual violence and our voices. When we share our stories, we exercise leadership by sparking others to join us in shared actions toward safety and freedom from sexual harm. We let other folks know we see them, we hear them, we believe them, we love them. We have community. The other force is institutional betrayal. We must work within and from outside institutions to encourage them to adopt the research-based, concrete actions of Institutional Courage. So many survivors share that the “second rape” and moral injury of institutional betrayal is harder to live with than the original crime against their bodies.