In saying #MeToo, Alyssa Milano pushes awareness campaign about sexual assault and harassment
The #MeToo campaign on social media, which Alyssa Milano initiated on Sunday, is seeing stars including Evan Rachel Wood, Sophia Bush, Rosario Dawson, Lady Gaga and more speaking up as survivors of sexual violence, along with plenty of people who aren't famous.
"If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write 'me too' as a reply to this tweet," Milano tweeted, saying the hashtag idea was "suggested by a friend" who noted that perhaps getting multiple voices to chime in with that status "might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem."
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The "Charmed" actress isn't the first to seize on the phrase "me too."
Tarana Burke, an organizer and youth worker who's a sexual assault survivor herself, has been working on "me too" since the mid-2000s — particularly with young women of color — as a means of what she calls empowerment through empathy.
"Somebody asked me, does this [campaign] amplify your work? And it does in a certain way, but also when this hashtag dies down, and people thinking about it, I'll still be doing the work," Burke told The Times on Monday.
To keep the ball rolling, she said, celebrity survivors could disclose not only their status but also what kind of personal work they've done to recover — "their trajectory for healing."
"For me, it's about helping people find an entry point to healing," explained Burke, who gave the keynote address at the 2014 March to End Rape Culture in Philadelphia. "They cannot just let it be a hashtag."
Of course, even if the current campaign has morphed a bit from Burke's work so far, having celebrities' social media reach behind it doesn't hurt. Here are a few of the folks who've weighed in so far.
Lady Gaga, who went public at the 2016 Oscars as a victim of sexual assault, tweeted only the hashtag on Sunday, as did Ali Fedotowsky-Manno of "The Bachelor" and "The Bachelorette," Tatiana Maslany of "Orphan Black" and Kristin Bauer of "True Blood," to name a few.
"Westworld" star Wood went into more detail in appearing to offer an explanation about why she hadn't told her story sooner than 2016.
"Because I was shamed and considered a 'party girl' I felt I deserved it," Wood tweeted Sunday. "I shouldnt have been there, I shouldn't have been 'bad.'"
More than a quarter-million people were discussing #MeToo on Facebook around midday Monday, and Instagram had almost 350,000 posts tagged with that label.
"#MeToo And I want you too know, THEY will always be WRONG, but YOU can end up STRONG!," "NCIS" actress Pauley Perrette tweeted Sunday. A day later, she retweeted a story about losing her virginity to rape when she was 15.