What’s wrong with #MeToo’s woman?

Tina Johnson never had much. She grew up in the sixties outside the hilly city of Gadsden, Alabama. Johnson’s mother, Katherine, couldn’t read or write, but she knew how to make money. She would leave the house with ten dollars and come back with a hundred dollars because she bought a gallon of paint and painted it. She worked as an electrician – how she got her license was a mystery and drove a diesel truck. Sometimes, she would go to the local warehouse to collect a truckload of potatoes that were scratched and would not be sold. She stored them in the basement with lime on it and the family would eat potatoes for months. “Baby, I don’t want to say that, but I want to say that – we’re like black people.” “We don’t have a chance for white people.”

Johnson is a beautiful girl with blond hair and radiant blue-green eyes that seem to be without God’s conferment. She was terrible. She helped her mother take care of their pigs, cows and goats. The family planted crops on the land they rented: they planted green peppers for one year, and sugar cane for another year. They didn’t have agricultural equipment, so they cut down the cane themselves, stripped the cane, took it to the mill to turn into syrup, and used the money to vacation to Disney World and Yellowstone. Johnson and her siblings did not participate in sports or do extracurricular activities like other children, so they created their own fun. They went to the lake, made mud pies, climbed up trees to collect fruits, opened up the watermelons that neighbors grew up, and ate meat. “We think if you ate it on the spot, you won’t steal it,” Johnson said. (Up to this day, she’s having a lot of it because she ate it at that time.)

She was used to all kinds of people entering and leaving the house. Katherine ran away with DJ when she was only twelve years old, the first of five people she married. Before the couple split, she and him had three children – most of Johnson’s siblings. Johnson is the result of a relationship with a married man who owns a local tractor company. He paid for Catherine’s prenatal care, and when Johnson first came home from the hospital, she was wearing brand new clothes. But she didn’t know his existence until she was twelve. She thought that the man she had named Griffin. His family lost everything during the Great Depression, hiding money with a milk jug, sofa cushion and spare tire. “A lot of people call the crazy people with money “weirdness,” Johnson said. “But if you don’t have money, you’re crazy. Daddy goes crazy.”

Johnson once found a bunch of hundreds of dollars bills and began giving them up at school until the teacher stopped her. Her mother yelled at her recklessness, but Katherine herself kept it when she found Griffin’s money. Katherine teaches Johnson how to make money from him through flattery and passive aggressiveness. “I don’t like playing those games,” Johnson said. “But mom knows how to use those men.” She is with her mother when she feels that a man is no longer meeting her needs. That’s how Johnson learned to be a woman: she was a beautiful girl with a gold mine between her legs and everyone told her. She should never give up on it, but she can use its promise to get what she wants.

When Johnson was about four years old, her uncle William Catherine’s brother began sexually abuse her. He would take her to his dark room, put her on his legs, and rub her between her legs. Johnson believes this must be the way photos are developed. It made her feel like dirt and ran away whenever she saw him. This lasted for several years. Around the same time, another uncle, Catherine’s brother-in-law, also began to abuse her. He touched her at a family gathering while the other kids were playing in the same room. He threatened that if she told anyone about abuse, he would beat her and hurt her mother. Later she would find out that William also abused his sister Robin, and Claude harassed her niece Michelle.

At that time, sexual abuse was not something you discussed. “It’s in from birth – you don’t talk about sex at all,” Johnson said. “Women shouldn’t be powerless anymore. Katherine owns a rifle and shows her children how to use a shotgun. But you should still obey what men want. There is nothing that a person with means violates: that is a form of flattery. Johnson can get education and work, but pleasing the man in her life will always be the ultimate way to prove his worth.

Claude’s abuse was simply because Johnson got angry. One day, when she was twelve, she was washing dishes in the kitchen and the whole family gathered at home. Everyone else is outside. As Johnson stood on the sink, her uncle went inside and placed his hands on his vagina. She happened to be cleaning the cast iron skillet and she used it to hit him in the head before she knew what she was doing. Seeing him bleeding, she became terrified: she thought her mother was going to beat her to death. “I’m more afraid of being hit than realizing what I’m doing,” she said.

Johnson walked outside with his head down, almost trembling. Then her uncle told the group that he accidentally bumped his head. He looked scared. This was the first time she really understood that what he did to her was wrong. He never touched her again. But anger is with her – abuse and her powerlessness. She just knew she would never endure this behavior again.

The family cycle is hard to escape, and Johnson repeats his mother’s pattern. She got her first boyfriend James when she was 13 years old, about seventeen. At 16, she agreed to sleep with him and became pregnant for the first time. The couple got married, but she quickly filed for divorce. This relationship left her with a son, Daniel.

Johnson briefly married a medical student, but later married when she had an affair with a carpenter named Earl. He is cute, although he would drink in the truck and pass out after he got home from get off work. That marriage lasted for ten years. At that time, the couple had two daughters, Ashley and Candelyn. In the past, Johnson made some money for department stores. Now, she has found a job in a convenience store.

In the following years, Johnson lost interest in dating. She was worried that a man she brought home might run into her daughter. If she does have a man, she makes sure the girls are not in the house. It was only after she had her own young daughter that Johnson realized that the abuse she had experienced was not her fault. One day, when they were four and five, she watched them watch TV, and it was hers: she didn’t invite people to pay attention because she had ever worried. “I was thinking, oh my god, how could you think so?” She said she heard that some people said at least they did not kill children, thus minimizing child abuse. Johnson believes, but they may also have it because it prevents them from becoming their own identity. She used to be in school and struggled with depression. She always felt that she might be the prey of men looking for victims. “They can find me a mile,” she said. “All of this has been built over the years. It’s a dam ready to go bankrupt.”

And then did it. Johnson’s mother helped raise Daniel. He lived in her home, opened it, and she was so excited that she gave him new shoes and toys. In 1991, when Daniel was twelve, Katherine applied for custody. He wanted to go, so Johnson decided not to fight.

Johnson and Katherine attended the office of a prominent lawyer to transfer detention. His name is Roy Moore. Johnson could tell him immediately what kind of man he was. It’s not just how he looks at her. It’s his question about the age and color of her two young daughters – if they were as beautiful as her eyes. He asked her to have a drink with him afterwards, and she refused. Katherine likes Moore notes Johnson: He has money and influence. Johnson just wanted to leave.

But as she walked towards the door, she recalled that Moore grabbed the back of his thighs while walking behind her mother, so much so that she felt his fingers on her vagina. For one minute, she was just moving in space, and for the second minute, a stranger’s hand was on her body. “I didn’t even turn around, I kept moving forward,” Johnson recalls. Another attack “brought all the weight, and the torture you’re backing right is alive.” She didn’t remember much at the meeting. The only thing that stands out is his hand on her body. “You will never forget it,” she said.

Sexual violence has long been seen as part of life – women are told to avoid it and blame them for not being able to do it. There are usually few people in the police department to investigate and claim. The accuser was humiliated in court. But what changed in twenty cars when the #MeToo movement began. Powerful men like Harvey Weinstein are accused of continuously attacking women and then actually facing punishment. The woman brought up stories of harassment by famous journalists and founders of Silicon Valley, and the Internet took on its own business. Men lose their jobs; some go to jail. “The consciousness shifted,” Jennifer Mondino, then senior director of the UP Legal Defense Fund, told me. “It’s very exciting for advocates who have been engaged in issues of gender-based violence and gender justice.”

At this moment, in 2017, Johnson was surprised to see Roy Moore’s face on TV. Moore has become chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court and was then dismissed after refusing to shoot down the five thousand-pound monument of the Ten Commandments he built in the judicial building. He is now the Republican nominee for the open seat of the U.S. Senate. He appeared in public wearing a cowboy hat and rode a horse named Sassy. He easily leads polls. But Leigh Corfman, a fifty-three-year-old woman, worked at a payday center and just accused him of sexual misconduct.

Coffman said Moore had sexual contact with her when she was 14 in 1979, and he was 32. He approached her outside the court where she sat with her mother and then took her phone number after her mother walked into the house. He later took her home twice, where they were physically intimate. For Coffman, the situation was both exciting and terrifying. It was not until later that she realized that this was inappropriate. “As an adult woman, I’m angry at it again,” Coffman told me. “I really realized what was going on and put it in the right framework for it.”