If you’ve paid attention to any of the major public policy debates in this country recently (universal healthcare, student loan forgiveness, wage equality, corporate welfare, climate change), you may have noticed a disturbing trend: A faction of society whose core ideology goes something like this: “As long as I’ve got mine, who cares about you?”

This increasingly vocal faction, whose defining characteristic seems to be saying the silent part out loud, is generally young, white, and male, though there are plenty of women who are more than happy to seek this group’s approval by parroting their rhetoric. Don’t have healthcare? Why should I have to pay for you? Unequal pay? It’s not my fault you’re not good enough at your job. Saving the environment? I’ll be dead by then anyway, so who cares? Generational poverty? Work harder. Thrown into cages at the border? You should have stayed in your own country to begin with. Student loan debt? Don’t go to a college you can’t afford.

Check out any major news item on social media and you’ll see dozens of comments from those whose biggest fear that that the “lesser” members of society will somehow acquire the things they themselves already have.

Of course, this group is largely ignorant of and pays no heed to socioeconomic, racial, geographic, or any other data that might demonstrate that the people they look down their noses at didn’t start on a level playing field. And while we’re used to seeing this faction of society turn their righteous indignation on immigrants, the homeless, the lower classes, people of color. women, etc., I was not entirely prepared for them to focus on (checks notes) … children at MLB ballparks.

If you missed it last night, Chicago Cubs outfielder Albert Almora Jr. was distraught after he fouled a line drive into a toddler at Minute Maid Park in Houston. According to those at the game, the child, a young girl, immediately slumped and was rushed away by security. The crowd was silent, Almora was down on one knee, unable to be consoled by his teammates, and even those of us watching at home got a pit in our stomachs. When Almora received news that the child was expected to be okay, he broke down in tears, hugging the security guard who delivered the message. After the game, it was clear Almora, a father himself, was still badly shaken, speaking quietly at his locker about the incident.

Once MLB fans learned the child was out of danger, the discussion turned, once again, to extending the protective netting down the baselines (don’t we have this debate every season?). If you’re thinking it’s going to take someone getting killed to make MLB take action, you’re wrong, Someone already has been killed. Last August, 79-year old Linda Goldbloom was hit in the head by a foul ball at Dodger Stadium and suffered a traumatic brain injury. She was kept alive on a ventilator, completely unresponsive, for a time. Four days later, she was dead.

Lost in the on-going conversations on launch angle and exit velocity is that balls are coming off the bats much harder than they used to in, say, 2017, when a two-year-old girl suffered critical injuries after being struck by a foul ball off the bat of the Yankees’ Todd Frazier:

Jordan Heck on Twitter

Child gets hit by a foul ball at Yankees game. The players' reactions say it all. https://t.co/YIyaBJq7tT

And there are plenty of fans hit and injured by foul balls each year that we never hear about. While MLB broadcasts are always happy to foul a ball that lands in someone’s beer, or when a guy dips out at the last minute and lets it hit his girlfriend, cameras rarely show the aftermath of more serious injuries. In 2014, Bloomberg estimated that more than 1,700 fans were hit and injured by foul balls. The following year, a fan at Fenway spent a week in the hospital after he was hit in the head by a flying bat.

So when it comes to extending the netting around MLB ballparks beyond the dugouts, for the sole purpose of protecting fans from serious injury and death, especially children, it would seem there’s only one side to this argument. Protect kids or don’t protect kids. Kind of a no-brainer, right?

Wrong.

As you might have guessed, plenty of fans are willing to sacrifice a toddler or two if that means it doesn’t interfere with their enjoyment of the game:

But Julie, you might say, these are just the dumb thoughts of a couple of trolls on Twitter, they don’t represent any kind of serious debate on this issue. And I would love to agree with you, but you would be wrong. These comments are on literally every major news article about extending netting today, by hundreds of different people. Once again, “I don’t want anything that helps others to affect me in any way. Not my tax money, not me having to share my piece of the pie, not my ill-conceived idea of what makes a baseball game enjoyable to me.”

Maybe the connection on this issue and American society as a whole isn’t as obvious to others as it is to me. Or maybe I’m just rambling out my frustrations with so many things in a Medium post about baseball netting. But somewhere along the way, we’ve given up on the idea of personal sacrifice for the good of our society. While we love to hold up The Greatest Generation as an avatar for Americans, the truth is that we’d be hard-pressed to see our friends and neighbors make the same kind of sacrifices today. Imagine these guys complying with food, clothing, and gas rationing when they’re not willing to accept baseball netting to keep their fellow fans (children!) from serious injury or death?

I don’t have answers on how we as a country come back from this kind of thinking, wherein empathy is mocked, need is derided as weakness, and lack of good fortune is perceived as deserved. I have no idea where this leaves us as a society. All I know is that it troubles me deeply.

But on baseball netting? I do have an answer for that. Let’s get that netting up, at every park, foul pole to foul pole.

By the way, guess which group is 100 percent on-board with protective netting? The ones who know how fast balls come off a bat and how scary it is to have one flying at your head.

Taylor Trammell on Twitter

This is one of my biggest fears. Our hearts drop when a foul ball is smoked and is on a 100+mph line to a fan. It sticks with not just players but everyone who witnesses it. I don't want to be the reason why a mother has to take her child to the hospital or worse.

Obi-Sean Kenobi Doolittle on Twitter

I know there are many fans who have the ability to protect themselves and others from 100mph objects leaving the field - we see you and we appreciate you. But even superheroes deserve a night off to enjoy the game with their family and friends. Netting makes that possible.

Keith Murphy on Twitter

Kris Bryant in post-game interview with ESPN calls for netting all the way to foul poles.

@JulieDiCaro is a radio and podcast host in for 670 The Score in Chicago and currently working on her first book.

I work late night in sports talk radio. That often means drunk callers, a serious lack of food options, and a nearly empty building where our studio is located. One night, I was craving chocolate, and our vending machine was on the fritz. “Just go up to (another floor), “ the guys I work with told me. “There’s a working vending machine there.” But there was no way I, a lone woman, was going up to an empty floor, at 12:30 am, on my own. The guys didn’t understand why not.

The way men and women move through the world is fundamentally different. Men typically go where they want without thinking twice. Women are constantly weighing the risks. How dangerous a situation am I going into? Should I be going alone? Is there a way to make this situation safer? Do I want chocolate enough to risk being murdered on an empty office floor in the middle of the night? (Spoiler: I did not).

So it’s difficult to overstate the shock wave that went through me last night when, while clicking around on some tabs left open on a work computer, I came across the site chicagofanatics.com. The site is a throw-back to the old bulletin boards of the mid-2000s, the places we talked about sports and movies and tv shows before Facebook and Twitter drew our attention away. There is a board for nearly every sports talk radio show in Chicago, and, out of curiosity, I clicked through a few. It was the first time I’d actually looked at the site, though I had seen the url on the same computer before.

And that’s when I saw a board with “Julie DiCaro!!!” as the topic. It consisted of 756 pages of comments.

Not 756 comments. Seven-hundred and fifty-six pages of comments. In case you didn’t get that, let me say it again: SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY-SIX PAGES OF COMMENTS.

This particular board goes back to 2016, and, as you can probably guess, wasn’t full of fans. It was, however, full of “fanatics” in the truest sense of the word, as these guys managed to fill, again, SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY-SIX PAGES of comments, mostly about me and all the things they don’t like about me. It was an absolute act of masochism to even read a few of them, but I did recognize the handles of some of my worst online harassers, accusing me of creating fake followers for myself (honestly, who has time for that?), calling me fat (a troll favorite!), and even commenting on me filling in on another station late last week. Though I’ve blocked many of these guys on Twitter, it’s pretty clear this site is where they screenshot and share my tweets, so as to . . I don’t know . . . keep tabs on me?

None of the other boards I saw were remotely as large. In fact, when I, in my shock, shared that there were SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY-SIX PAGES of mean-spirited comments about me, the admin of the site tweeted this at me:

“Passionate” is one word for them. I can think of several others. And while his tweet is condescending and downright intellectually dishonest at worst, he’s not wrong about the popularity of the thread. Check out the number of replies on the thread about me versus the others.

It’s often terrifying to be in the world as a woman. We always have one eye looking over our shoulders, keys sticking out between our fingers as a weapon, walking purposefully, ready to fight. We’re always told that the men who seek to hurt us might just give up if we fight back. We practice yelling, kicking, screaming at the top of our lungs, just in case. We go to classes on it. Our worst nightmares are the ones in which we try to scream but nothing comes out.

I honestly don’t know how one continues to move through the world knowing there are SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY_SIX PAGES worth of people out there who . . . what? Merely dislike me? Obsessively frequenting a site to say false and terrible things about a total stranger seems to indicate something stronger than dislike. Wish me harm? Taking my tweets and sharing them regularly with people I’ve actively blocked would seem to say so. Worse? I’m trying not to think about it too much.

By now, I’m familiar with the narrative about me that sites like chicagofanatics.com tell. I love to “play the victim” (I’ve never considered myself a victim and I’ve written about how I don’t like the word). I welcome any and all attention (I really, REALLY don’t). I harass myself to gain sympathy from others (or something?).

But despite what those guys (and well-intentioned friends) say, there is no such thing as “any attention is good attention.” Some attention is upsetting and scary. There’s no comfort in “if you’re upsetting the right people, you’re doing something right!” It’s no prize to be the subject of the most popular thread in 20 years when you know exactly why that’s the case.

There is only fear.

And, I guess, questions. Why do sites like this exist? Why do people like this exist? Why do people obsess over everything a person says and does simply because they are on the radio? My husband made a great point tonight after I came home, shaken. “I hate ghost hunters,” he said. “So I don’t watch ghost-hunting shows. I don’t seek out a website to talk about how much I hate all the ghost hunters.”

It’s a fair point. The radio is such a simple thing to turn off. Twitter, so easy to unfollow. It would be nothing for these guys to remove me from their lives entirely. Instead, they chose to make me a huge part of their lives in a way that makes me afraid to leave the house. After all, none of them use their real names. They know me and what I look like. I have no idea who they are. What motivates someone to run towards a person they despise, rather than away? It’s frightening to think about.

In the two and a half-years since Sarah Spain and I took part in the #MoreThanMean video, dozens of people have asked me if things have gotten better. I can’t speak for all women in sports media, but for most of us, I think it’s gotten far worse. I have no explanation other than that people are cruel. And also maybe in pain. In my better moments, I tell myself it’s the pain talking. That people are generally good.

I’m not naive enough to think I’m the only woman in a male-dominated industry dealing with this. I don’t even really have a point to writing this, other than writing is how I work through things. And also, to say, if you’re a guy who frequents sites like this, you’re complicit, even if you don’t take part in the harassment yourself. Your clicks and participation give the site cover to say “we’re not ALL like this. See? There are normal guys here too. We talk about lots of things! Not just you!”

Also, if I don’t like harassment I’m not supposed to post on Twitter and I’m supposed to start my own website for people to say good things about me, which I’m sure wouldn’t be infiltrated and trolled AT ALL by the people from the SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY-SIX PAGES:

As we went back-and-forth over the fact that this guys runs a really great community with SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY-SIX pages of negative comments about me, he got increasingly defensive, and this all became increasingly my fault:

As if discovering a website site with SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY-SIX pages of people dragging you is something we all encounter in our jobs and should take in stride. Amirite?

By the way, these are chicagofanatics.com’s terms of service:

I mean, not to be blunt, but these are not being adhered to. In a random 15-minute perusal, I was able to find tweets making fun of my body, (falsely) accusing me of bilking people out of money they thought was going to charity, (falsely) accusing me of sending myself harassing tweets for attention, discussing running “parody” accounts of me, and trying to track down my high school yearbook by trying to figure out where I’m from.

By now, I know how this game is played. I know writing this will open me up to more harassment. I know the trolls will continue to create new handles to get around me blocking them, I know they’ll double down on commenting on my every move and tweet. I know sites like chicagofantatics.com will continue to exist and they’ll continue to be fertile ground for coordinating the online harassment of women. Frightening women and lying about women and trying to drag women down into the muck will continue to be sport for a certain kind of man.

But please don’t be a part of it. You can choose not to be part of it.

By now, I’m sure the SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY-SIX PAGES have ballooned to more. Trolls love nothing more than knowing they “got” to you. Congrats, guys. You got to me. You win this round.

Somebody has to stand up to these people. These crazy, obsessive, malicious people who state falsehoods about people as if they were fact. Who spend their days scouring the internet for pictures of women to make fun of. Who went in search of my high school yearbooks to see if I was lying about being a gymnast (Sorry guys, my high school didn’t have a gymnastics team. We were too small. I was a club gymnast), and who discuss whether or not I lied about being sexually assaulted. It’s insane and terrifying and we CAN NOT let this be the new normal for women in media. Or women anywhere. My wish for all the women who are or will be in media is that they never come across SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY-SIX PAGES of lies and cruelty about themselves.

At this point, it might as well be me. After all, there are already SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY-SIX PAGES of garbage about me. What are a few more?

— — -

Julie DiCaro is a sports radio host and writer in Chicago, IL. You can follow her on Twitter @JulieDiCaro and like her page on Facebook.

I am tired of very bad sports takes from men. And women. But mostly men.

I am tired of men who have very little experience with sexual assault, domestic abuse, and violence against women weighing in with their misinformed opinions on the legal system and how it works. On what evidence is credible and not credible. On who deserves second chances.

I realize that these men think it’s their job as sportswriters. It is not.

Let’s examine the recent case of Oregon State pitcher Luke Heimlich. In 2017, the Oregonian reported that Heimlich had pleaded guilty to sexually molesting his 6-year old niece in 2011. And let’s be clear, while Heimlich pled guilty to a single count of child molestation, the allegations against him were that he repeatedly molested his niece from the ages of four to six.

The young victim had reported Heimlich’s abuse to her mother, and the father later contacted authorities, according to a probable cause document filed by prosecutors.

The girl told investigators that inside Heimlich’s bedroom, he pulled down her underwear and “touched her on both the inside and outside of the spot she uses to go to the bathroom,” according to court records.

“She said that she told him to stop, but he wouldn’t,” the documents state, and that “it hurt” when he touched her.

Prosecutors initially charged Heimlich with two counts of molestation for incidents between September 2009 and September 2010, and between September 2011 to December 2011. In Washington, child molestation in the first degree is a Class A felony.

“She said that the first time the respondent touched her she was four years old and that she was six years old the last time he did this,” according to court records.

Heimlich pleaded guilty to the sexual abuse after working out a plea deal with his private attorney, in open court, before a judge, denying that he had been coerced or promised anything in exchange for his plea.

Heimlich acknowledged guilt in his own handwriting.

“I admit that I had sexual contact” with the girl, Heimlich wrote.

He was required to register as a sex offender, complete two years of probation, and undergo counseling.

Typically, when athletes are accused of violence against women, we are met with men, sports fans and media alike, asking “where’s the proof?” Demanding to know “If this really happened, why wasn’t he charged with a crime?”

In this case, we have a criminal charge. We have a guilty plea. We have an admission by Heimlich himself that he committed the act he was accused of.

And yet.

Since the allegations against Heimlich came to light, several baseball luminaries, including Peter Gammons and Royals GM Dayton Moore, who is considering signing Heimlich, have been going out of their way to defend Heimlich’s indefensible act. Behold:

That’s true,technically. But the spirit of the statement is intellectually dishonest. We know what happened officially, because we have a court transcript and plea documents and charging papers. We know what Heimlich and the prosecutors agreed happened. And it’s not a pretty story.

As for Moore, here’s a question he was asked by broadcaster Ryan Lefebvre in an interview aired on Fox Sports Kansas City:

“From what I’ve read, he’s done everything that the state of asked him to do, and he continued to pitch. Some think he’s a first-round, second-round type of talent. Somehow, his record became public, and now all 30 teams passed on him in all 40 rounds. I know you care a lot about people, you care a lot about character, and №1, what do you know about Luke Heimlich? And №2, what is fair and what is unfair about his situation?”

As far as I can tell, the only thing Oregon state did was ask Heimlich to pitch. Secondly, he didn’t do everything he was legally required to do. It was Heimlich’s failure to report in for his annual sex offender registry check in that brought the story to light in the first place. But here’s Moore’s response:

We were very interested in Luke last year. And obviously this accusation came out. So we immediately put everything on pause, as we should, to gather facts, gather information. He went out and performed this year. Not only did he achieve athletic excellence, he achieved academic excellence along the way. He went undrafted, all 30 teams. I think teams are still trying to find out more and more information. They’re trying to come to grips with this. This is something that happened in their family. Their family has dealt with this. Their family remains very close today, all parties involved.

The ramifications of talking about “gathering facts” and then limiting those facts to one’s athletic performance are problematic enough. But Moore appears to be making up facts at the end, implying that Heimlich’s family has forgiven him, which doesn’t appear to be the case:

The victim’s mother said she doesn’t understand why Heimlich has been allowed to play baseball at Oregon State. The Oregonian/OregonLive does not name the victims of sexual abuse and is not naming the girl’s mother to protect the identity of the child, now 11 years old.

“I’m appalled that the college he’s going to would even have him on their team,” she said.

Further,

The victim’s mother said she does not keep tabs on Heimlich but knows he’s one of the top players in the United States. She said her daughter was young enough that “she doesn’t really remember everything that happened,” but nonetheless has been ostracized from family events because most members of the Heimlich family have sided with Luke.

“He got two years of counseling and ‘classes,” she said. “My daughter’s life has been changed for the rest of her life.”

It’s also worth noting that it was Heimlich’s brother who brought his daughter’s allegations to authorities. He no longer speaks to Heimlich.

For his part, Heimlich has been afforded a redemption tour unavailable to sex offenders on a non-MLB path, receiving profiles in both the New York Times and Sports Illustrated, both which attempted to delve into the complexities of signing a convicted child molester to one’s team. As if there is anything complex about it.

Despite admitting his guilt before a judge in a court of law, before a judge, with an attorney as his side, Heimlich has maintained his innocence whenever he has spoken to the media.

In another life, I was a criminal defense attorney. I represented men and boys accused of raping and hurting women. I also represented men and boys who were railroaded into pleading guilty for reasons beyond their control. The concept of pleading guilty in order to limit the damage to the defendant is one I know well. I often said to my clients, “Sometimes the best I can do is to limit and control what is about to happen to you.”

At the same time, my clients were largely people of color. Because I was a public defender, all my clients were poor. Many didn’t have a support system, a job, a family that backed them. They definitely didn’t have the money to hire an attorney that could devote unlimited resources to their defense. They faced an uphill battle from the moment they were arrested. They were disposable in the eyes of the legal system.

Luke Heimlich likely saw a very different side of the criminal justice system. He had a family able to afford an attorney to represent him, parents who believed him over his 6-year old niece. He was treated like a true juvenile, kept out of prison, given a sweetheart deal. He was given a second chance the minute the prosecutors decided not to hammer him. That’s not the case for so many equally-deserving young men in the justice system. Do innocent people plead guilty? Of course. Does it usually happen to guys like Luke Heimlich? Not as often as Law & Order would have you believe.

What Heimlich appears to regret most are the lasting consequences of his guilty plea. Here’s what he told SI:

Throughout the judicial process, two words stuck in Heimlich’s mind: five years. After that, he was sure, “This’ll be like it never happened,” he says. “It’ll all be done… . So for those five years, or mainly the first two or three where I was in Washington and had to do more stuff on probation, it was, I just need to follow every rule to a T, and then when the five years come I’ll be fine. I was not doing anything to go out of my way to talk to somebody or confront anybody. It was, just, What do I need to do? Tell me, I’ll do it, and we’ll be good.”

What Heimlich wanted, ultimately, was both the plea deal that gave him a second chance, as well as people to believe he was innocent of the charges he swore he was guilty of. What has has learned, presumably, is that the genie of sexual molestation doesn’t go back in the bottle so easily.

Never mind that, before criminal charges were approved, the victim would have been subjected to medical exams, looking for physical evidence of sexual abuse, as well as repeated interviews by experts trained in ferreting out false allegations by children, as well as child psychologists who specialize in interviewing children of sexual abuse. Nevermind that plea deals in sex cases are often long, negotiated, drawn out affairs, with dozens of opportunities for the defendant to change his mind. Nevermind that those who deal with sex crimes involving children are often very good at what they do. We may not know what really happened, but I bet they have a pretty good idea. After all, they decided to charge him.

Heimlich believes his word that “nothing happened” should be enough. It’s an incredibly naive and immature view of the world and what he thinks it owes him.

It’s worth noting that, despite his repeated professions of innocence, Heimlich has not sought to vacate his guilty plea. He hasn’t claimed he was coerced into it. He hasn’t said it was involuntary. He hasn’t charged his attorney with ineffective assistance of counsel. He hasn’t sought to expunge his record. Heimlich simply wants the best of both worlds: The privileged treatment of a white man with means by the justice system as well as the presumption of innocence by the rest of the world. That’s not a luxury afforded to other convicted sex offenders. Neither should it be to him.

Speaking of immature views of the world, the men defending Heimlich and proposing that none of us know the real story reveal much about how they views crimes of violence against women, where the only evidence is often a victim’s testimony. I doubt guys like Dayton Moore and Peter Gammons would tell us we don’t know the real story if a player was accused of armed robbery or property damage.

The thing I haven’t been able to get past is why it’s so important to some men (and women!) that Luke Heimlich play baseball at the major league level. No amount of yelling ‘scarlett letter!” or saying “what should he do now? Kill himself?” hold any sway. As if the only two options Heimlich has in his life are baseball or suicide. As if millions of people in America, convicted of crimes far less serious than Heimlich’s, don’t struggle to put their lives back together afterwards. Would it be so terrible for Heimlich to get a job in middle management somewhere?

I believe second chances, when earned, should be freely given. To earn a second chance, the abuser must take responsibility for his actions, show remorse, and demonstrate that he has worked to mitigate and reverse the damage of his crime. To date, we’ve seen none of that from Luke Heimlich.

This piece was edited to accurately reflect Ryan Lefebvre’s question to Royals’ GM Dayton Moore and to add a hyperlink to Rustin Dodd’s story at The Athletic, which was inadvertantly omitted.

Julie DiCaro is a former attorney who currently works as a sportswriter and radio host in Chicago. You can follow her on Twitter @JulieDiCaro.

“ I am NOT a victim,” Jenny Fox repeats over and over throughout the course of HBO’s groundbreaking film The Tale. Over the course of two hours, viewers watch an adult Fox, played by Laura Dern, come to terms with the sexual abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of a female riding instructor and male running coach. While the film blasts through taboos by showing both the grooming and abusing a child in graphic detail (the film uses an adult body double for the sex scenes), it’s Fox’s perception of herself at the time of her abuse that rocks her and the audience to the core.

In the beginning of The Tale, when Fox views herself as a willing participant in a consensual relationship with both adults, she’s played in flashbacks by a coquettish, confident young woman in her mid-teens, reflecting how she remembers herself in the context of the “relationship.” It’s only after Fox’s mother, played by Ellen Burstyn, shows her a photo of herself at age 13 that Fox sees herself for the baby-faced, pre-pubuscent child that she was at the time of the abuse.

The Tale is as much about breaking down the artificial memories Fox has constructed for herself in able to move past the abuse as the abuse itself. The term “victim” is one she rejects vehemently from the beginning of the story, culminating with an argument between an adult Jenny and her childhood self over the label. This is an argument those who have suffered rape or sexual abuse know all too well, and the film begs the question of whether the words we use to talk about ourselves affect our coming to terms with trauma.

When we talk about those who have been raped, we either use the term “victim” or “survivor” if we believe the subject, the much more suspect “accuser” if we don’t. I’ve never personally identified with any of those labels, though I have felt forced to choose between “victim” and “survivor” when describing my own sexual assault. “Survivor” has always felt like an over-reach when it comes the aftermath of my rape. I wasn’t bashed on the head and dragged into an alley. I wasn’t beaten. My physical well-being was never in danger. By the same token, “victim” is not a word I like to use when talking about myself. It feels too damaged, too vulnerable, too fragile. I’m lucky not to have been the victim of a horrific rape that left me broken physically or emotionally. While I would never begrudge anyone identifying as the victim of a sexual assault, it feels reserved for those who suffered a more horrific assault than I did.

So what is the word to describe those of us whose biggest battle was within ourselves? How do we talk about the inner dialogue with our younger selves, in which we argue for months or years or decades about what constitutes a rape? It was years after my assault that I finally got my college-age self to call a grown man holding down and forcing himself inside me against my will “rape.” Before that, it was a “bad situation” I had “gotten myself into.” And like so many other women, I took a pregnancy test, got tested for STIs, and quietly seethed at the injustice, but mostly raged at myself. And then I put the memory away, taking it out only rarely to turn it over in my head, to examine it like a prism, trying to see it from every angle. But mostly, I moved on.

The brilliance of The Tale is how it nails that using conventional labels to describe rape and abuse prevent us from seeing an assault for what it really was. Fox can’t see past what the label “victim” means to her, therefore she can’t accept her abuse. I, too, spent years talking myself out of my assault because the term “victim” felt so wrong. I wonder how many other men and women struggle to come to terms with rape because they don’t view themselves as “victims,” regardless of their violation.

Twenty years after my rape, I still struggle with how to identify myself when speaking to younger women about sexual assault. “I’m a rape victim” doesn’t feel like me. I am no longer a victim and haven’t been for a long time. “I’m a rape survivor” feels like I’m assigning myself more credit than I deserve. I usually try to get away with “I was raped,” because, truthfully, rape is something that happens to us, not something that defines us.

I spent the night pouring over a digital thesaurus, trying to come up with an alternative label for those of us who experienced a rape. I’ve considered “rape subject,” “rapee,” and a dozen other iterations without finding a perfect fit. But I think I’m partial to “rape victor.” Not only does the word “victor” combine elements of both “victim” and “survivor,” but means “one who wins a struggle or conquest.” After all, it doesn’t matter if you won your struggle with your rapist. The only struggle that matters is the one inside yourself.

Julie DiCaro is a former attorney and current sports writer and radio host in Chicago. Follow her on Twitter @JulieDiCaro.

Since the beginning of the #MeToo movement, where women have identified themselves as victims of sexual harassment in the workplace by using the hashtag on social media, some of the biggest names in entertainment have fallen. Harvey Weinstein. Kevin Spacey. Garrison Keillor. Matt Lauer. Louis C.K. In journalism, we’ve seen ABC News’ Mark Halperin, PBS’ Michael Oreskes, VOX Media’s Lockhart Steele, and Charlie Rose fired for sexual misconduct. In politics, George H.W. Bush, Alabama Senate Candidate Roy Moore, Senator Al Franken, and Representative John Conyers have all faced accusations of non-consensual sexual contact with women. Yet one unlikely industry has remained unscathed in the age of #MeToo: Sports media.

Lest you think sexual harassment doesn’t exist in sports media, let me assure you it does. I’ve had a boss who insisted I kiss him hello every morning. I’ve walked in on co-workers discussing porn in graphic detail. I’ve had co-workers brush up against me a little too hard, a few too many times. And I’m far from alone. The stories I’ve heard from other women in the industry make my blood run cold.

Women are underrepresented in media across the board, but nowhere more so than in sports. A 2017 Women’s Media Center report found that only 11 percent of women in working media report on sports, and a 2014 report found 90 percent of sports editors are white males. Outside of ESPN, who employees by far the largest number of women in sports media, the ratio of women to men is much worse. Add to the mix a bunch of former pro athletes and a large number of very young men with no experience in a traditional workplace, and it’s dumbfounding that #MeToo hasn’t gotten more of a foothold in the world of sports.

I reached out to 10 women currently working in sports media for their thoughts on why we haven’t seen #MeToo in our industry, and nearly all of them declined to speak on the record. It’s not that they didn’t have stories upon stories of sexual harassment, they told me, but they were afraid of backlash from their employers and coworkers if they talked about their experiences publicly. That doesn’t bode well for the feelings of courage and strength #MeToo has engendered in other areas of media.

You see, in the world of sports, behavior that has gotten men fired in other industries is too often accepted as par for the course . Baseball analyst Harold Reynolds, reportedly fired by ESPN for sexually harassing a production assistant, was quickly scooped up by MLB Network. Mike Tirico, whose history of stalking and sexual harassment was detailed in the book Those Guys Have All The Fun, has one of the highest-profile jobs at NBC Sports. NBA great Isaiah Thomas was found by a jury to have sexually harassed a Knicks team executive, and was promptly put in charge of the WNBA’s New York Liberty. Yes, that’s a team of women.

Worse, no industry ignores allegations of violence against women like sports media. Day in and day out, women see their colleagues praise and lionize men like Kobe Bryant (who was arrested, charged, and settled a rape case in 2003 and later admitted his victim did not consent to sex ), Ben Roethlisberger (suspended under the NFL’s personal conduct policy after rape allegations), Derrick Rose (who couldn’t describe “consent’ during a civil sexual assault case deposition), and Floyd Mayweather (arrested multiple times for domestic violence and sentenced to 90 days in jail in 2010).

So who does a women working in sports media go to with her complaints of sexual harassment when her boss’s favorite Yankee is Aroldis Champman? How is a woman to feel she works in an environment where her feelings are respected when her coworkers debate whether Mike Tyson or OJ Simpson, one convicted of rape, one charged with killing his wife, would be a better guest? What does it say to women when athletes who have been accused of sexual assault or domestic battery become regular guests on sports talk shows?

“We don’t have enough allies behind the scenes to feel protected,” says CJ Silas, Host of The CJ Silas Show oN ESPN Radio 1280am . “Women might be afraid of losing their jobs and all we worked so hard to accomplish. We tolerated it all to get ahead and to follow our dreams Speaking up was always dangerous. I know for me, I could get my stories from a 30 year career, but what would it do? Would I get the jobs back? Would I get all of the money I have lost because of the black balling? If I wanted the individuals to go down, then that would be the main objective. The worst are still big names in this business. If I tell my stories, do I get dragged through the mud, sued for slander, etc.”

Rhiannnon Walker, of ESPN’s The UnDefeated, says the gender imbalance in sports media works to discourage women from coming forward. The fact that sports media is heavily male dominate definitely plays a part,” Walker says. “To that same end. I feel like that’s a lot of the reason we haven’t heard about much misconduct in the tech/Silicon Valley industry. There is no balance it’s clearly run by men for the most part.”

There remains a strange kind of compartmentalization in sports media where men promote men who have done terrible things to women and women are expected to go along with it and not make waves. Of course, no one expects sport journalists to use the phrase “accused rapist Kobe Bryant” in perpetuity, but painting athletes with violent allegations in their past in nothing but glowing terms is far too common. The message “We don’t care about women” couldn’t be more evident if the industry hired a skywriter.

Still, women in sports aren’t the first to feel powerless in the face of their male coworkers and superiors. So why haven’t we seen women band together to bring allegations? First, there are so few women working in some sports media outlets that it’s impossible to find a number with a shared set of experiences. If there are two women working in a sports department, one having been harassed and one having not, there’s not enough of a number to provide any kind of safety.

More depressing, though, is that the low number of women in sports media fosters an innate feeling of competition. Women sports journalists know that major outlets aren’t going to put together a show with three women hosts or have an MLB beat made up of nothing but women reporters. Because women have come to expect that only one of them will get a shot at a coveted role, too many women in the industry have come to view each other as rivals rather than allies. Because women feel so easily replaced, no one is willing to risk giving up her spot. Because we’re so few, we don’t always support each other as we should.

There’s still hope that, while sports has experience significant lag time in the #MeToo reckoning, it will eventually make its way to the industry. Women in sports media are a small community, and speak often about which men to avoid, which men are overly and uncomfortably “affectionate,” which men go out of their way to make women’s lives hell. Recently, Blue Jays analyst Greg Zaun was fired for “inappropriate behavior” following complaints from several women. Recently, word came from NFL Network and ESPN that multiple men, including analysts Marshall Faulk, Heath Evans, Donovan McNabb, have been suspended pending allegations of sexual harassment. Just last week, the Boston Globe’s Spotlightpublished an account of sexual discrimination and harassment at ESPN, in which both Adrienne Lawrence and Jenn Sterger talked about being harassed and propositioned by co-workers.

Only time will tell if more women in sports are willing to rock the #MeToo boat or if they feel their career is better served keeping their heads down and noses to the grindstone. A few women have told me they believe sports media will have its #MeToo moment, and soon. Some think the hostile work environment is so endemic to the industry there is no way to dislodge it. Others believe women can’t come forward about harassment until more women are in positions of power in media.

So while #MeToo continues to topple powerful men in a multitude of industries, the women of sports media watch, bide their time, and wait.

You see, Lou Bettino, until I received your message, I hadn’t thought about my rape for almost a week. I’d been thinking about lots of other things, my kids, my dogs, where my career was headed, whether picking up Boston Market for dinner made me a bad (or worse, a lazy) mother. I’d been busy working on my a story for a media outlet I’d long wanted to write for. I’d been thinking about writing a book. My carpets need to be cleaned.

But the your message came, Lou Bettino, and it reminded me that not only was I once raped, but that men like you exist in dark corners of the world.

I hadn’t been talking about my rape when you decided to message me, Lou Bettino. I haven’t spoken publicly about it for some time. There’s nothing to indicate what prompted you to send me such a vile message, other than you clearly came across something online where I *did* discuss being raped, found my appearance wanting, and decided it was your duty as a Man on the Internet to tell me so.

I was raped more than 20 years ago, not that it matters, Lou Bettino. Given your message, I’m guessing you aren’t the most enlightened guy around when it comes to the dynamics of sexual assault. So let me explain something to you, Lou Bettino, in the hopes that you and men like you will begin to understand.

Rape isn’t about sex, or love, or even physical attraction. It’s not about what a woman is wearing or how she acts or what men like you think of her appearance. Rape, Lou Bettino, is about one thing: Power. It’s about humiliating and dominating another human being. That’s why, Lou Bettino, rape is not only inflicted on women, but on men as well. It’s why we see sodomy in high school sports locker rooms and frat houses as part of “hazing” rituals. It’s why invading armies have raped women (and men) since the dawn of time. The shame and humiliation that always flow from being raped are what make it so difficult to talk about.

Not that I would expect you to understand any of this, Lou Bettino. But since you asked me a question, let me ask you one back: Do the women in your life know that you talk to women this way on the internet, Lou Bettino? Does your mother? Your girlfriend? Are you proud of yourself, Lou Bettino, for your incredibly tired remark? You can’t think this is the first time a guy has said this to me online. Did you think you were being original, Lou Bettino?

Did you expect to ruin my day, Lou Bettino? Did you set out to knock me on my heels? Do you have deep, unresolved issues with women?

Most importantly, who the hell do you think you are, Lou Bettino, to question my experience? What makes you think you have the right to pop up in my life, unbidden, and call me a liar?

These are questions I honestly want answers to, Lou Bettino, but you changed you settings so I can’t respond to your message. When I tried to contact you, you deleted your FB profile. You’ve since returned to Facebook, but won’t accept my friend request or respond to my messages. So what gives, Lou Bettino?

I’m sure you thought of your message to me about as much as you probably do tossing garbage out your car window (you seem like the kind of guy who would do that, too, Lou Bettino). Just a drive-by. Leave it and run. Too cowardly to stick around and see the results of your recklessness. But the fact is, Lou Bettino, you caught me on a bad day. I’m tired of guys like you. Emotionally exhausted by guys who lurk in the corners of the internet and wait to sling social media arrows at women who overstep their bounds.

Did you think your message would shatter me, Lou Bettino? (Seriously, in the time it took me to write this, some other guy declared me “Public Enemy #1” on Twitter, so up your game, Lou Bettino).

I’m not sure what set you off, Lou Bettino, but I hope you’ve gotten over it. I hope you choose kindness going forward. I hope you decide to be a different kind of person. I hope, that before you decide to say something terrible to another woman on social media, you stop and think about your words, Lou Bettino. I hope you picture a stranger saying those words to a woman you love. And I hope you decide not to hit “send.”

I guess I should thank you, Lou Bettino, for the reminder. When you surround yourself with kind, loving, supportive men, it’s easy to forget that men like you exist. Thank you for forcing me to remember that women have always been the target of the rage spewing from men like you, Lou Bettino.

I dreamed about my rape last night, Lou Bettino. The funny thing about dreams is that you can remember details of things your conscious mind had been kind enough to make you forget. I woke up with my heart racing, tangled in sweat-soaked sheets. My throat was on fire from crying, Lou Bettino.

But I did appreciate that you started your message by saying “Hello.”

OPINION | Wherein I find myself in the awkward position of defending the NFL

If you’ve been following the recent bout of chest-pounding between the NFL and NFL Players’ Association (NFLPA) on Twitter you might have forgotten that at the heart of the matter lay an ugly domestic violence case and a reportedly seriously injured victim.

Earlier this month, the NFL concluded a 13-month investigation of domestic violence allegations against Dallas Cowboys running back Ezekial Elliott, announcing his six-game suspension under the league’s nascent domestic violence policy. You can probably guess what happened next. The decision was met with a chorus of criticism from talking heads, Cowboys fans and the NFLPA, the union that represents NFL players in their dealings with the league.

This spat between the league and the NFLPA quickly took an ugly turn, and should upset both fans and players. Had the NFLPA confined their disagreement to the NFL’s oft-criticized and haphazard way of imposing discipline on its players, they would have had a fair amount of public opinion on their side. After all, the league had recently fumbled the Josh Brown investigation badly, and was still smarting from a U.S. District Court ruling overturning their suspension of Adrian Peterson following his plea of no contest to misdemeanor reckless assault. The NFL ultimately prevailed, but had to go all the way to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals to so.

Suffice it to say that, when it comes to enforcing its domestic violence policy, the NFL isn’t all that accustomed to being in the right. Enter NFLPA President DeMaurice Smith, here to ask the league to hold his beer.

Last week, several media outlets, including Yahoo! Sports reported on text messages and other documentation that appeared to show Elliott’s accuser contemplating blackmail with a sex tape. The exchange between Elliott’s accuser and a friend was included in a 160-page report prepared by the NFL in detailing the decision to suspend Elliott. Despite the fact that the league’s investigators were aware of the exchange and took it into account in judging the accuser’s credibility, the NFLPA jumped on the chance to get the information into the public domain. A move, shockingly enough, that didn’t sit well with the NFL.

Brian McCarthy on Twitter

New NFL statement

The NFLPA, bristling at being chastised by the likes of Roger Goodell, fired back.

NFLPA on Twitter

The public statement issued on behalf of every NFL owner is a lie. The NFLPA categorically denies the accusations made in this statement.

Moments later, the NFLPA took another shot at the league:

Despite the fact that an official league investigation devolved into a group of grown men bickering on Twitter (with questionable use of emojis), let’s be clear about what exactly what we’re looking at: The head of a union of high-profile athletes using social media to publicly smear an alleged domestic violence victim.

It’s important to note that the allegations against Elliott’s accuser, upon which the NFLPA is hanging its collective hat, are well-known to NFL investigators. Moreover, these same allegations were not news to the attorney who declined to bring criminal charges against Elliott, but nevertheless found his accuser to be credible, as evidenced in a letter to Elliott from the league detailing the reasons for his suspension.

The league continues, in painstaking detail, to lay out evidence that Elliott engaged in multiple incidents of physical violence against the accuser in July 2016, adding that it interviewed more than a dozen witnesses, investigated photographic and digital evidence and consulted with medical experts about the accuser’s alleged injuries.

There was no way the NFL was going to suspend one of its biggest stars (from a team owned by one of its most powerful owners) without having their ducks in a row, and though it feels odd to say it, the league actually got this one right.

At the end of the day, the NFL’s investigators took their time, looked at mountains of evidence, and decided they believed the accuser more than the accused. This is what every woman that watches football hoped for when the league put its domestic violence policy into place.

What the NFLPA hopes to do, it seems, is to put pressure on the league to reduce Elliott’s suspension on appeal, driven by a media outcry that he’s been set up by a she-devil and her diabolical plot to ruin his life. Not to be left out of this moral disaster, cue Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who notoriously signed Greg Hardy after he was found guilty by a North Carolina judge of beating his girlfriend, to declare the team’s support for Elliott. (Women of Dallas, would you consider cheering for Houston?)

Though the NFL has at least paid lip service to educating players, coaches, and even owners about domestic violence in the wake of the Ray Rice incident, it looks like the NFLPA could use a refresher course.

The victim-smearing attempts by Smith and his organization show a fundamental misunderstanding of the dynamics of violence against women.

Searching for a “perfect” victim in a violent relationship is a fool’s errand.

Victims, like abusers, can be weak, emotionally stunted, manipulative, lacking in social skills, and even downright dishonest and mean. They can threaten, lie, extort, and bully. Victims can seek to wield what little power they have to punish their abuser for the violence they endure. They can lash out, set out to ruin their abuser’s reputation, intend to ruin their life. Domestic violence, at its core, is about an imbalance of power between two people. The abuser uses physical, emotional, financial, verbal, and other violence to control the victim. The victim often uses whatever she can get her hands on to fight back. And given that abusers are often skilled manipulators of public opinion, it’s not unusual for a victim to want to expose her abuser for what he really is.

What Smith seems unable to grasp is that Elliott’s accuser can be both a woman who attempted to “ruin” Elliott’s career (how many players have actually had their lives “ruined” by allegations of violence against women?) and the victim of abuse at Elliott’s hands. The two states of being are not mutually exclusive. The insinuation that a victim who lies about one thing must therefore be lying about everything is childish and intellectually shallow. Uncovering a victim’s lie is not fatal to a domestic violence allegation, it simply demands more corroboration of the victim’s story. In this case, the NFL had that evidence in spades.

It’s odd to be a in a position of praising the NFL for making the right call in a domestic violence allegation, and to find yourself cheering the league for their statement on the nuances of victim-blaming. But maybe, just maybe, the NFL is finally getting some mileage out of all that domestic violence training after all.

When it comes to domestic violence, the NFLPA doesn’t get it was originally published in The Lily on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Get over it.”

“Move on already.”

“Suck it up and deal with it.”

“Special snowflake has hurt feelings.”

“We survive Obama, you’ll survive, too.”

All things that have been said to me, ad nauseum, on Twitter by dozens (hundreds) of (usually anonymous) Trump voters in the last 48 hours.

But I can’t move on.

Had this been any other election in my lifetime, I would agree with those testing the limits of gloating at us on social media. After all, I would want voters to oppose my choice for President to do the same. It’s a implicit understanding we all have in this country: No matter who gets elected President, whether you agree with it or not, you suck it up and deal with it. Out of respect for the office if not the man.

But this election hasn’t been like any other. Liberals are coming off of 8 years of (barely) tolerating Americans who have never stopped challenging Barack Obama’s legitimacy as President. From Trump’s “birther” movement to those who said they had no respect for our Commander in Chief because he “didn’t act Presidential’ or “had no respect for the office,” the right wing of America has made it very clear that they did not accept the results of both the 2008 and 2012 elections, both of which Obama won handily. What other President in our collective lifetimes has been subjected to calls of ‘you lie!’ by a sitting Congress in the middle of the State of the Union address? And even though Obama’s virulent critics used terms like ‘establishment politician’ or ‘intellectual elite’ (which sounds like a compliment, but whatever) as their reasons for their strong distaste of the POTUS, most of us had a pretty good feeling we knew what their real problem with him was.

Fast forward to the 2016 campaign, in which Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign was repeatedly called “the most corrupt campaign in history’ (without a shred of evidence to that effect) by Donald Trump and parroted all over media by his followers (really? Worse than Watergate? Worse than 1960? Worse than any campaign in the 1800s? Have you guys even SEEN “Hamilton?”) She was denigrated by Trump for her appearance, her husband, her supposed “health problems,” and her disposition, among other things. He promised to jail Clinton if elected, a promise never before made by a Presidential hopeful in this country, and responded with glee when his supporters regularly chanted “Lock her up!” (one even yelled “Execute her!”) at his rallies. Trump regularly had Americans of color removed from his rallies.

During the course of his campaign, Trump repeatedly made assertions with no basis in fact, statements he often repeated even after he’d been informed what he was saying was untrue. He suggested the majority of Mexican immigrants are drug dealers and rapists, he threatened to deport Muslims and ban anyone of the same religion from entering the country. He suggested that Americans observe and report on their friends and neighbors. He believes climate change is a hoax.

Trump nominated a Vice-President who believes members of the LGBTQIA community can be electro-shocked into “normalcy” and who has a peculiar fascination with regulating how women can use their bodies. As governor of Indiana, Mike Pence presided over an AIDS outbreak largely attributed to his crusade to defund Planned Parenthood. Pence also backed a religious freedom law that essentially codified discrimination against the LGBTQIA community. Pence proposed using funds earmarked for AIDS patients to fund gay conversion therapy.

All of this, of course, happened independent of a number of women in double-digits coming forward to accuse Trump of everything from inappropriate groping to flat-out sexual assault, an allegation that prompted Trump to promise to sue all his accusers. Women who voiced their opposition to Trump on social media were instantly attacked and harassed by his followers. In the days since Trump’s election, the harassment has only gotten worse, so much so that many women, and especially women of color, are deactivating their accounts rather than subject themselves to the vitriol. The hatred, once mostly limited to the online world, has spilled over into the lives of people of color, immigrants, foreigners . . . anyone deemed by Trump’s supporters as “other.”

I could spend days listing all the things that frighten the left about Donald Trump. But the bottom line is that we’ve never seen an election like this one in recent memory. An election in which kindness, compassion, politeness, and basic human decency were rejected as weaknesses. In the new world, the strong harass and belittle anyone they deem different from their white male (and female) core. They luxuriate in using racial, ethnic, and gender slurs that have been banished from polite society for decades. They don’t shy away from using swastikas in Trump’s name or a noose to depict President Barack Obama. They have no problem with Trump’s history of violence against their sisters. They don’t mind voting for a candidate endorsed by the KKK.

This election has been far from normal, and the President-Elect far from tolerant, inclusive, or even decent. When nearly half the voters in America cast their ballot in favor of a candidate who has promised to roll back civil liberties to an unprecedented extent for every group of people who are not white men, it’s not a “get over it and move on” situation. It’s unfair to blame Americans for anxiety over believing Trump will do exactly what he promised during his campaign: Create an America few of us born after Jim Crow South will recognize.

False equivalencies have been the story of this election. Clinton and Trump were not “equally” bad candidates. What Clinton did was not “equally” as bad as what Trump did on the campaign trail. Trump is not “equal’ to the men that have come before him. Americans should not be held to the same standards in accepting him as President as in the past. Trump supporters can tell Americans to “get over it” as often as they want, but it doesn’t make their attempt to normalize a candidate that appealed to white, male supremacy to win the White House any more valid. Or American.