I was curled up on the couch, the beer nearly empty, when I heard a strange sound. It was so faint I couldn’t have said what it was exactly. The sound of someone somewhere doing something quietly. But it wasn’t muffled by the walls or ceiling. I could hear it echoing along the hall that led from my bedroom to the kitchen.

I stood up with the intention of walking to investigate, and had an epiphany: I needed to leave—now—which I did, in my flannel pj’s with neither shoes nor contact lenses. When I opened the door of my building, I assumed there would be people walking by, a rescuer, but the streets were empty, not so much as a car passing by. Then, a man appeared at the end of my block. I should say “person.” My vision is bad enough that, unaided, I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a man and a woman, let alone the height or race or weight of the person I was seeing. Once he’d moved fully into the circle of light cast by a street lamp, he stopped. I couldn’t have said whether he was looking at me or away from me. Either way, he lingered there a minute, then walked on. I didn’t call out or ask for help. I just watched him walk away, certain for reasons I couldn’t explain that he was the one who had just been inside my apartment.

I rode my bike, shoeless, to a landscape architecture party to find my roommate. I berated her: “You said you’d be home by midnight!” She, drunkenly: “What are you, my mom?” A fair point, I realized, chastened. She came home with me anyway.

While on line for coffee before class the next morning, I asked a mutual friend if I’d been out of line. Was I acting like my roommate’s mom? Yes, she said. She told me to apologize, so later that day, my roommate and I got deli sandwiches for dinner, and I said I was sorry. Then she left for work in the children’s section of Barnes & Noble, and I settled onto our ratty couch to study, only I couldn’t focus, and before long, I heard our next door neighbor yelling at our landlord. She was demanding he put bars on her windows.

“He’s been here,” she screamed.

The hair on my arms puckered up. I knew that whomever she was talking about had been in my apartment the night before, so when she was done with the landlord, I rang her bell.

She let me in and explained that a string of now infamous rapes, and one murder, had occurred in the area. Had I not heard of the Center City rapist? He had broken into her apartment in the middle of the night earlier that summer, but a neighbor’s dog began to bark, waking her up and chasing him away. The FBI had set up a stakeout of her apartment, but he never came back.

Another important element of the model is reforming police culture. Before the model, police did not assume the victim’s credibility. They worked from a place of skepticism that required victims to convince police that the attack against them was real. This was a common starting point for rape investigations nationwide, part of a general law enforcement mentality about rape. The framers of the model called attention to this bias, inspiring a sea change in the way police approach victims across the country—and a host of trainings and workshops designed to help police do better.

Once it became clear that the Philadelphia Special Victims Unit had failed to see the link between rape cases—and that a woman had been murdered as a result—the department’s culture and commitment changed overnight. A task force, led by two homicide detectives known for being dogged when it came to difficult cases, was created. Sex crimes detectives worked with crime labs to disseminate the DNA evidence they’d collected to police departments across the country and 1,200 tips were followed up on. Plainclothes officers sat in Center City bars on a nightly basis to survey the clientele in the hopes that a face in the crowd matched the one in the composite sketch. Plainclothes female officers walked the streets of Center City at night, in an attempt to lure their quarry. Detectives cast a wide net, even looking at clowns from a circus that had passed through town. All to no avail. The statute of limitations was in danger of running out on the earliest assaults, so prosecutors took the unusual step of charging the rapist’s DNA. No one in Philly wanted to let this go, but they would have to, for a little while anyway.

Then, in August 2001, a civilian dispatcher spotted an all points bulletin about a string of rapes in Fort Collins, Colorado. The MOs were the same. By September, the DNA had been matched.

Though the series had been discovered, the rapist himself remained elusive—even as he became more daring. In one year alone, he attacked seven women. Then, a detective in the major crimes unit in Philadelphia built a database of men who had lived in both cities. He was able to whittle the list down to 40 names. Detectives in both cities worked to eliminate men from the list—until they got to 34, and discovered a suspect whose movements and former addresses lined up with the string of attacks: Troy Graves. Fort Collins detectives got a court order for his DNA, but before the results had even come in, Graves confessed to everything. It took five years and untold man hours, but in the end, Graves was outmaneuvered.

Eighteen years later, when #MeToo launched, it dawned on me for the first time in my life that, technically, I meet the definition of a victim. It was a moment of total cognitive dissonance for me: I’d never even thought of myself as a survivor, let alone a victim. I was simply someone who had stayed ahead of the currents of sexual violence running through the cities in which I lived. I’ve never felt cowed by danger or wounded by its manifold existence in my life. As a result, I had no interest in joining the chorus of #MeToo because I knew that if I did I would turn events that were, for me, anecdotes into episodes that defined me. And I knew that whatever social currency I scored by doing so would come at the expense of my power to tell my story on my own terms.

Back then, I actually thought Alyssa Milano invented it. What better way to burnish a fading star than to become an activist, acquire a few million followers and let the puff pieces rain.

But the truth was so much more cynical. Activist and educator Tarana Burke coined the phrase “me too” in 2006, before there were hashtags, to raise awareness of how common sexual assault is, and to give survivors a sense of community around experiences that can be shameful and isolating. It was meant to shine a light on women whose stories are invisible to the culture at large. Sexual violence affects all women. Around 20% of all American women have been sexually assaulted—but not all victims are created equal. The case of Girl X, a Black child who was brutally assaulted in a Chicago housing project just a few weeks after JonBenét Ramsey was killed, received almost no media attention. Meanwhile, Ramsey’s murder set the pre-internet world on fire. All that attention didn’t make Ramsey any less dead, but it did make her more visible. Burke developed “me too” through her work with girls whose stories will never be splashed across the pages of People magazine. How fitting, then, that the Rose McGowans of the world should co-opt it.

The problem with #MeToo wasn’t just that it served one demographic: powerful, rich, mostly white women. Movie stars recounted the lurid details of their encounters with Weinstein. Women in media cataloged the transgressions against them in a spreadsheet, and therein lay the real issue: 55% of sexual assaults occur at or near the victim’s home. Only 12% of assault victims report that they were working at the time of the assault. #MeToo went viral as a workplace harassment movement—among the most well-heeled workers in America no less—when it was created to bring attention to the problem of sexual assault in our society as a whole. On the basis of age alone, #MeToo was out of step with the problem it purported to point up: 70% of sexual assault victims are under the age of 18, too young to find themselves stuck in an office cubicle.

#MeToo inspired a wave of sexual harassment legislation, culminating in the Biden administration’s Ending Forced Arbitration Act, which prohibits employers from forcing female employees to arbitrate disputes related to sexual harassment. The impact of #MeToo on the workplace is clear and unequivocal, which is something, but the gains all went to the top. Its effects didn’t trickle down to help the victims of sexual assault.

Today, only a fraction of all rapists will do time for their crimes, around 0.25%. There’s still a 99.75% chance their attackers will go free, and sexual assault is one of the most underreported crimes there is—only around 30% of rapes are reported—so the chance that a rapist will be incarcerated is actually much lower, along the lines of 0.0075%.

Women were on their own before #MeToo, and they’re on their own now. If anything, the system is even more stacked against them than it was before.