Brooke Nevels

And someone said to me, well, aren't you a journalist?

Wasn't that your job?

And it was my job.

And I didn't ask the right questions.

I didn't know what I didn't know.

You know, we all have these sort of common sense beliefs about how a sexual assault victim would act because so often journalists, you know, like me, we don't want to do the messy stories.

We don't want to do the complicated stories.

We don't want to...

you know, get into the messy gray area that makes everyone uncomfortable.

We're looking for sympathetic victims and stories that are easy to understand.

And so when it happens to you and your story isn't easy to understand, you think you're an outlier when really you're the norm.

And I contributed to that as a journalist.

And the book is in many ways an act of atonement for that.

It's me doing the job I should have done before.

I wrote my own book because I knew that the only way to talk about how truly complicated, how truly frightening, how truly messy these stories are was to do it myself and was to be as honest as I could possibly be.

And I knew writing this book that

Our standards for people who talk about their experiences with sexual assault and sexual harassment are impossibly high.

One imprecise sentence can be used to make you look like a liar.

You change your story.

If you leave out a detail here, you don't leave out a detail there.