TIME Magazine named “The Silence Breakers” of the #MeToo movement — the social media-born status symbol for sexual assault and harassment survivors — as its 2017 Person of the Year, referencing President Donald Trump in its cover story more than a dozen times.
The #MeToo movement made waves in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein sex misconduct scandal as women spoke out in protest against sexual harassment in Hollywood, the media, and beyond.
The TIME cover story honoring the social media-driven moniker name-drops President Trump nine times and references him on several other occasions despite the fact that the allegations of harassment or misconduct against him were made public in 2016, not this year.
In one instance, the TIME cover story mentions the 2005 Access Hollywood recording that surfaced in October 2016 in which then-TV personality Donald Trump is heard engaging in a lewd conversation about women.
TIME notes of Trump, who made this year’s shortlist for Person of the Year after being selected in 2016:
That Donald Trump could express himself that way and still be elected President is part of what stoked the rage that fueled the Women’s March the day after his Inauguration. It’s why women seized on that crude word as the emblem of the protest that dwarfed Trump’s Inauguration crowd size. “All social movements have highly visible precipitating factors,” says Aldon Morris, a professor of sociology at Northwestern University. “In this case, you had Harvey Weinstein, and before that you had Trump.”
Megyn Kelly, the NBC anchor who revealed in October that she had complained to Fox News executives about Bill O’Reilly’s treatment of women, and who was a target of Trump’s ire during the campaign, says the tape as well as the tenor of the election turned the political into the personal. “I have real doubts about whether we’d be going through this if Hillary Clinton had won, because I think that President Trump’s election in many ways was a setback for women,” says Kelly, who noted that not all women at the march were Clinton supporters. “But the overall message to us was that we don’t really matter.”
Read the full story here.
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