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Alyssa Milano remembered the fifth anniversary of the day she tweeted #MeToo.
The former Charmed star posted a screenshot of her 2017 tweet, which went viral and was one of the first calls for abusers in the entertainment industry and elsewhere to be held accountable, on Instagram on Saturday. “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted, reply to this tweet with “me too!”,” it said.
Under those words, she put the quote, “Me too. A friend came up with this idea: “If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote “Me, too” as their status, people might realize how big the problem is.”
Milano’s #MeToo tweet came soon after The New Yorker and The New York Times broke shocking stories about Harvey Weinstein’s alleged sexual misconduct.
At the time, celebrities like Evan Rachel Wood, Debra Messing, and Anna Paquin commented on Milano’s post to say that they, too, were survivors.
Tarana Burke started the #MeToo movement in 2006 when she used the words “Me, too” to talk about how common sexual assault was through her Alabama-based organization, Just Be, Inc. The organization, which works to help young women have healthy self-esteem, first put the words on its MySpace page and got a lot of responses.
Burke said in a video for Insider, “#MeToo is a movement that started in 2006 to help black and brown girls who had been sexually abused and were in the program we were running. Since then, it has grown to include helping adults, women, men, and other survivors, as well as helping people understand what community action looks like in the fight to end sexual violence.
In a January interview for her Netflix movie Brazen, Milano talked about how the #MeToo movement has changed how she thinks about having a platform as an actor.
“There were a lot of times in my career and activism when I felt like they didn’t go together,” she told me. But now I really believe that having a platform means something.
There was a time when the only time we could talk about things that mattered to us was when we were doing an interview, writing an article about you, or doing something similar. But now, thanks to social media, we can write our own stories.
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