A Fair Hearing

Turn on the television, scroll through social media feeds, or pick up a newspaper and you’ll find stories connected to the #MeToo movement. It started in October 2017, when revelations of survived sexual assault and harassment exploded all over the media, using the now-popular hashtag. The rest is not history but, rather, the creation of it.

This is where Robyn Doolittle’s book Had It Coming begins. She reflects on cases of sexual assault or harassment from the pre-hashtag days, including those involving the NBA star Kobe Bryant and the comedian Bill Cosby, to show how a necessary societal reframing has changed our perception of rape culture. “I felt safe in my sense of superiority, confident that I’d never be so foolish. Or weak,” Doolittle recalls of her attitude toward the complainant in the Bryant case — a nineteen-year-old hotel employee — back in 2003. “I wasn’t one of those girls: slutty girls, dying-for-attention-from-men girls, girls who made the...