Although there’s an argument to be made that going to the press before the cops can reduce a person’s credibility in front of a jury, Jane Anderson, an attorney advisor at AEquitas…said stories with large numbers of sources help shift public opinion about how victims behave. The idea is that if regular people learn through exposure in the press and pop culture that victims are frequently too intimidated to speak with police right after an incident, they might ultimately serve as jurors who are sympathetic to the idea that victims came forward years or decades later.

 

Anderson added that by speaking out in significant numbers, victims can also make others who have blocked out their abuse realize that they aren’t crazy—and come forward with their own secrets. “Trauma tricks your brain into thinking the trauma wasn’t as serious as it was or that an assault didn’t happen,” Anderson told me. “If someone else says it happened to them, it validates what they experienced. The [efficacy] of crowdsourcing makes sense to me.”

Lost among the broader discussion of horrific misbehavior by powerful individuals is the long-term impact on their victims: diminished mental health, destroyed careers and problems trusting other people in their interpersonal relationships.

 

“Every individual is different,” says Jennifer G. Long, CEO of AEquitas. “Victims have varied responses. Some individuals withdraw from their personal and professional lives. … On the other hand, other individuals you may find throw themselves fiercely into their professional work. They may overachieve and show no outward signs that they’ve suffered.”

Since the 1991 Supreme Court case Payne v. Tennessee, the right of victims to deliver impact statements in front of the court has been widely recognized. But rarely does the public get to see those statements delivered.

 

“Victims testify every day in every courtroom about the harms they have suffered at the hands of perpetrators,” said Jennifer Gentile Long, CEO of AEquitas: The Prosecutors’ Resource on Violence Against Women. “In many ways the proceedings [over the past week] gave a voice to all of those victims.”

Jennifer Long serves as the Chief Executive Officer of AEquitas, a Washington-based firm that assists prosecutors with cases involving allegations of sex crimes, gender-based violence, and human trafficking. Ms. Long, who did not comment specifically on the Rose case, says she tends to favor robust privacy protections to shield victims from the public eye, as long as defendants retain their Sixth Amendment right to confront their accusers. “I can’t think of a compelling public interest to have a victim’s identity known, but that doesn’t mean that one couldn’t arise, given the right circumstances and set of facts,” Long tells the Monitor. “It’s so fact-specific.”