When US President Donald Trump demanded to know why his Supreme Court nominee's sexual assault accuser did not come forward sooner, he sought to cast doubt over her claims.
His argument? If her story were true, Christine Blasey Ford would have spoken out back in the 1980s, when she says Brett Kavanaugh pinned her down and muffled her cries as he tried to pull off her clothes at a high school party.
Nonsense, replied his detractors, from women in his own party to thousands of ordinary women who flooded the internet to tell the stories of trauma, under a viral hashtag: #WhyIDidntReport.
“Because I was 18 and I was scared and I didn't want to be defined by someone else's violent criminal act,” Gretchen Whitmer, who is running for governor of the US state of Michigan, tweeted using the hashtag.
According to Department of Justice figures from 2016, 77.1 per cent of people claiming to be victims of sexual assault did not report the matter to the police.