Tina Johnson never had much. She grew up in the sixties, outside of Gadsden, a hilly city in the green mountains of upper 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, because she had bought a gallon of paint and painted someone’s house. She worked as an electrician—it was a mystery how she’d got her license—and drove diesel trucks. Sometimes she would go to a local warehouse and collect a truckload of potatoes that had been nicked and wouldn’t sell. She’d store them in the basement with lime on them, and the family would eat potatoes for months. “I don’t want to say it like this, baby, but I’m gonna say it—we were like the Black folks,” Johnson told me recently. “We didn’t have the opportunities that white folks had.”

Johnson was a beautiful girl, with blond hair and radiant blue-green eyes that didn’t seem God-given. And she was scrappy. She helped her mother take care of their hog, cows, and goats. The family grew crops on land they leased: one year they planted green peppers, another year sugarcane. They didn’t have farm equipment, so they cut down the cane themselves, stripped it, and took it to the mill to be turned into syrup, then used the money to go on vacation to Disney World and Yellowstone. Johnson and her siblings didn’t play sports or do extracurricular activities like other kids, so they created their own fun. They went to the lake and made mud pies, climbed trees to gather fruit, and busted open the watermelons that their neighbors grew, to eat the flesh. “We thought that if you ate it in the field, it wasn’t stealing,” Johnson said. (To this day, it’s hard for her to eat watermelon, because she ate so much back then.)

She was used to various men moving in and out of their home. Katherine had run off with a d.j. when she was just twelve years old, the first of five men she would marry. She had three kids with him—Johnson’s older half siblings—before the couple split. Johnson was the result of an affair with a married man who owned a local tractor company. He paid for Katherine’s prenatal care, and when Johnson first came home from the hospital she was dressed in brand-new clothes. But she didn’t know that he existed until she was twelve. The man she considered her dad was named Griffin. His family had lost everything during the Great Depression, and he hid money in milk jugs, couch cushions, and spare tires. “A lot of people call crazy people that’s got money ‘eccentric,’ ” Johnson said. “But if you ain’t got no money you’re crazy. Daddy had a touch of crazy.”

Johnson once found a stack of hundred-dollar bills, and started giving them away at school, until a teacher stopped her. Her mother yelled at her for being reckless, but Katherine herself kept Griffin’s money whenever she found it. And it was Katherine who taught Johnson how to get money out of him, through flattery and passive aggressiveness. “I didn’t like playing those games,” Johnson said. “But Mama knew how to use those men.” When her mother felt that a man was no longer bowing to her needs, she was through with him. That was how Johnson learned to be a woman: she was a pretty girl and had a gold mine between her legs, everyone told her. She should never give it up, but she could use the promise of it to get what she wanted.

When Johnson was about four, her uncle William, Katherine’s brother, started sexually abusing her. He would take her to his darkroom, put her on his lap, and rub between her legs. Johnson thought that this must be the way the photos were developed. It made her feel like dirt, and she ran whenever she saw him. This lasted for a few years. At about the same time, another uncle—Katherine’s brother-in-law Claude—started abusing her as well. He touched her at family gatherings while other children played in the same room. He threatened that if she told anybody about the abuse, he would beat her, and hurt her mother, too. She would later discover that William had also abused her sister Robin, and Claude had molested her niece Michelle.

Back then, sexual abuse wasn’t something that you discussed. “It’s drilled in from birth—you don’t talk about sex at all,” Johnson said. Women weren’t supposed to be powerless anymore, exactly; Katherine owned a rifle and showed her kids how to use a shotgun. But you were still supposed to submit to what a man wanted. And there was no such thing as being violated by a man with means: that was a form of flattery. Johnson could get an education and a job, but pleasing the men in her life would always be the ultimate way of proving her value.

The abuse from Claude stopped only because Johnson got mad. She was washing dishes in the kitchen one day when she was twelve, after a family gathering at her house. Everyone else was outside. As Johnson stood at the sink, her uncle came inside and put his hands on her vagina. She happened to be cleaning a cast-iron skillet, and before she knew what she was doing she hit him over the head with it. Seeing him bleeding, she grew terrified: she thought that her mother was going to beat her to death. “I was more scared about getting a whupping than realizing what I had done,” she said.

Johnson went outside with her head down, nearly shaking. Then her uncle told the group that he had accidentally hit his head. He looked scared. It was the first time she truly understood that what he had been doing to her was wrong. He never touched her again. But the rage stayed with her—over the abuse, and over how powerless she had felt. She just knew that she would never put up with that kind of behavior again.

Family cycles are hard to escape, and Johnson repeated her mother’s pattern. She got her first boyfriend, James, when she was thirteen and he was about seventeen. She agreed to sleep with him when she was sixteen, and got pregnant that first time. The couple married, but she soon filed for divorce. The relationship left her with a son, Daniel.

Johnson briefly married a medical student, but it ended when she had an affair with a carpenter named Earl, whom she later married. He was sweet, though after he got home from work he would drink in his truck, then pass out. That marriage lasted a decade. By then, the couple had two daughters, Ashley and Candelyn. In the past, Johnson had made a little money modelling for department stores. Now she got a job managing a convenience store.

In the years that followed, Johnson lost interest in dating. She was afraid that one of the men she brought home might touch her daughters. If she did have a man over, she made sure the girls were out of the house. It was only after she had young daughters of her own that Johnson realized the abuse she had experienced was not her fault. One day when they were four and five years old, she was watching them watch TV, and it came to her: she hadn’t invited the attention, as she once had feared. “It didn’t register till then,” she said. “I’m thinking, Oh, my God, how could you even think that?” She had heard some people minimize child abuse by saying that at least abusers didn’t kill the children. But they might as well have, Johnson thought, because it stopped them from becoming who they might have been. She used to act out in school, and she struggled with depression. She always felt as if she might fall prey to men looking for victims. “They could spot me a mile off,” she said. “All this had been built up for all these years. And it was a dam ready to bust.”

Then it did. Johnson’s mother had helped raise Daniel. He’d lived at her home on and off, and she doted on him, giving him new shoes and toys. In 1991, when Daniel was twelve, Katherine filed for custody. He wanted to go, so Johnson decided not to fight it.

Johnson and Katherine showed up at the office of a prominent lawyer to transfer custody. His name was Roy Moore. Johnson could immediately tell what kind of man he was. It was more than the way he was eying her; it was his questions about the ages of her two small daughters and the color of their eyes—if theirs were as pretty as hers. He asked her to get a drink with him afterward, which she declined. Katherine liked that Moore was paying attention to Johnson: he had money and influence. Johnson just wanted to leave.

But when she made her way toward the door, she recalled, walking behind her mother, Moore grabbed her so far up the back of her thighs that she felt his fingers on her vagina. One minute she was simply moving through space, and the next minute a stranger’s hand was on her body. “I didn’t even turn around, I just kept going,” Johnson recalled. For a survivor of sexual violence, another assault “brings all that weight and that torture you went through right back, all raw.” She couldn’t remember much else from the meeting. The only thing that stood out was his hand on her body. “You never forget it,” she said.

For a long time, sexual violence was seen as a part of life—something women were told to avoid, and blamed for when they couldn’t. Police departments often did little to investigate claims. Accusers were humiliated in court. But when the #MeToo movement began, in the twenty-tens, something changed. Powerful men like Harvey Weinstein were accused of serially assaulting women and then actually faced punishment. Women came forward with stories of harassment by prominent journalists and Silicon Valley founders, and the internet took up their cause. Men lost their jobs; some went to prison. “The awareness shifted,” Jennifer Mondino, the senior director of the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, told me. “For advocates who had been working on gender-based violence and gender-justice issues, that was very exciting.”

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

Corfman said that Moore had initiated a sexual encounter with her in 1979, when she was fourteen and he was thirty-two. He had approached her outside a courtroom, where she was sitting with her mother, and then taken down her phone number after her mother stepped inside. He later brought her to his home twice, where they were physically intimate. The situation felt both exciting and terrifying to Corfman. Only later did she understand that it had been inappropriate. “I got mad about it again as a grown-ass woman,” Corfman told me. “I realized really what had happened and put it in the proper framework of what it was.”