We have seen it again and again. Sexual assault victims struggle for years and even decades before mustering the courage to come forward, only to be met with the same skeptical questions: Where's the police report? Why didn't you tell anyone?
Martha McSally has delivered the answer.
The freshman Republican senator from Arizona, appointed in December to fill the seat of the late John McCain, is a retired Air Force colonel who distinguished herself as the first woman to fly a fighter jet in combat. She made the stunning revelation Wednesday that even as she was serving her country with distinction, she carried a secret: that she had been raped by a superior officer.
"Unlike so many brave survivors, I didn't report being sexually assaulted. Like so many women and men, I didn't trust the system at the time. I blamed myself. I was ashamed and confused. I thought I was strong but felt powerless," McSally said during a hearing of the Senate Armed Services subcommittee on personnel.
McSally thought she was strong, and she was. She was a warrior. But not even the credibility and trust McSally gained as the first female commander of a fighter squadron, not even the courage it took to become a leader of the initial air campaign in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, was enough.
For so many sexual-abuse survivors, the presumption has been that if anything truly terrible had happened - that if an accuser did not have some ulterior motive, or had not been a willing participant - she would have spoken up and gone to the authorities immediately.
We have seen this kind of mockery even from the president of the United States.
When Christine Blasey Ford claimed that then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had attacked her in high school, President Donald Trump bullied her from his Twitter pulpit: "I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents. I ask that she bring those filings forward so that we can learn date, time, and place!"