What The Hell America!

Amid backlash from high-profile voices, women are using groundbreaking legal reforms to reclaim their power and expose workplace abuse.

Sorry, Joe Rogan. The #MeToo movement is not going away. We know because we helped launch this iteration of the #MeToo movement when we sued Fox News and its former CEO Roger Ailes for sexual harassment and retaliation even before the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke in the fall of 2017. We know because the laws we helped pass in Washington and across the country over the last several years have helped countless women receive justice. And those laws—and this movement—aren’t going away.  

Right-wing provocateurs like Rogan, Candace Owens and others have been working hard to erase all the gains that we have made over the last nine years. Speaking about Weinstein in March, Rogan said, “I thought he was guilty of, like, heinous crimes, and then you listen, and you’re like, ‘Wait, what? What is going on?”

Owens has defended Weinstein by blaming his prosecution on the #MeToo movement. “Movements get really big, and they find someone to hang,” she said. “Weinstein was an easy person to hang because he was immoral.”

Podcaster Brendan Schaub added, “If this happened in the ’80s, it probably would have been thrown out. But in the #MeToo movement, it was a hot witch hunt. It’s 2025—that shit’s over.”

We are here to state unapologetically that “this shit” is not over—no matter how much apologists for predators want it to be.

In 2022, we were instrumental in passing the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act, which allowed survivors of sexual misconduct to hold their abusers publicly accountable.

Later that same year, we helped pass the Speak Out Act, which eradicates pre-dispute non-disclosure agreements for sexual misconduct.

In the past six years, states from New Jersey to California to Washington have enacted laws that ban NDAs for all toxic workplace issues, allowing millions of workers to finally speak truth to power about abusive behavior. More states are moving to adopt similar legislation. 

That is the point of the #MeToo movement—to give survivors a level playing field, which they never had before. What could be more American?

It is hard to overstate how effective these laws have been in giving survivors of sexual misconduct the power to hold predators accountable.

In 2018, Katie Anderson was an independent contractor who was raped by her supervisor. When she reported the assault to her company, she claims it did everything possible to protect her assailant. She had earlier signed a forced arbitration agreement and an NDA, which prevented her from sharing her story with anyone.

“They told me getting my case before a jury was impossible. The best I could hope for was to adjudicate it in arbitration, where there would be no public record. No one would ever know about what happened to me and why I suddenly left the company where I had loved working. If my rapist was brought back to the company, as he had been promised, he could theoretically prey on other women again, with no one being the wiser.”

But when our laws passed in 2022, Anderson was able to sue the company in open court and tell her story publicly. She no longer had to ruminate in silence about what her perpetrator had done to her and how her company did everything in its power to cover it up.

That is the point of the #MeToo movement—to give survivors a level playing field, which they never had before. What could be more American?

Also in 2018, Katie Brennan, a young volunteer, came forward to allege that she had been sexually assaulted by a high-ranking official for New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy’s campaign. Murphy’s lawyers quickly went into overdrive, attempting to prevent other women who had been forced to sign campaign NDAs from speaking with Brennan about their own experiences. Women who had horrific stories to tell about the toxicity of Murphy’s campaign were forced to choose between helping a survivor and being sued into oblivion for violating a gag order.

Brennan’s story helped to make New Jersey the first state to ban NDAs for all toxic workplace issues and to passage of the federal Speak Out Act. Now, Brennan is running for public office to give survivors a voice in the New Jersey State Assembly. 

There are millions of Katie Andersons and Katie Brennans out there—and none of them will stand for rolling back the clock to the days when predators were able to harass and assault with impunity, under cover of silence. These laws are here to stay and many more will be passed over the next several years, giving even more survivors their voices back. No matter how loud the voices of darkness are, no matter how much apologists for toxic predators like Weinstein may wish it, the progress towards holding them accountable is inexorable.