Over the weekend, Rep. Eric Swalwell’s house of cards folded. The Democrat from California ended his campaign for governor after multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct, including a former staffer who said Swalwell raped her. He is now facing bipartisan calls to resign from his current position, including from more than 50 of his former staffers. Swalwell has denied all allegations of sexual assault and misconduct, although he publicly apologized to his wife and those who “doubted [their] support” of him. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office is now investigating the former staffer’s allegations, which she says happened in New York City in April 2024.

Once they were investigated and published in major news outlets, the mainstream Democratic political establishment responded to the allegations against Swalwell quickly and decisively. He almost immediately lost the support of his campaign, as well as major endorsements from party leadership.

But online, there was a noticeable backlash to these women coming forward, and not all of it from the usual suspects. Some Democrats were angry that Swalwell, who has been highly critical of Donald Trump, is facing more consequences than the president. Some even spread conspiracy theories—which were in turn boosted by Swalwell’s team—that the allegations were a Republican hoax designed to weaken the party. Not only are these theories baseless, but the victim-blaming rhetoric alongside them does the opposite of holding Trump accountable. It is exactly the same logic that Trump uses to deny the allegations against him.

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Now, back to the allegations against Swalwell and the fallout.

Most of the women who came forward spoke to reporters on the condition of anonymity, but Ally Sammarco, a Democratic strategist, went on-the-record to share her messaging history with Swalwell. She told CNN he sent her unsolicited nude photos and “became very inappropriate, like saying about how hot he thought I was, insinuating we should get together and hook up.” After the story went live, Sammarco posted on X in response to questions about why these women were coming forward now.

“For those questioning the timing: I don’t live in California, and I have no stake in who becomes Governor. I’m a Democrat who wants this party to succeed,” Sammarco wrote. “None of this is our fault. This is about an abuse of power. No one paid us to come forward.”

In her replies, one account with“#RidinWithBiden” in their bio baselessly accused Sammarco of taking a million-dollar payout from Trump adviser Roger Stone, which Sammarco denied. Another chastised her for speaking up now instead of “years ago.” Simultaneously, in the Instagram comments on his video denying the allegations, Swalwell’s account liked ones that said “I don’t trust the timing. And then Roger Stone?? Something’s not right,” and “The timing is suspicious. I believe victims but this doesn’t feel right. We’ll see.” And earlier last week, a spokesperson for Swalwell’s campaign accused women of “team[ing] up with MAGA conspiracy theorists because they know Eric Swalwell is the frontrunner in this race.”

Ironically, Trump has said basically the same thing about the sexual assault allegations against him. When the Department of Justice’s Epstein Files revealed more of Trump’s ties to the deceased sex trafficker, including a new sexual assault allegation against Trump, he and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt referred to them as a “Democrat hoax” and said Jeffrey Epstein was trying to stop Trump from becoming president back in 2016. Of course, Epstein didn’t compel a woman to tell the FBI in 2019 that Trump assaulted her when she was a child. In fact, the FBI encouraged that woman to share her allegations despite her asking what the point would be.

The allegations against Swalwell similarly didn’t emerge from thin air. Based on the flurry of social media posts about him in recent weeks, his alleged behavior was more of an open secret. The San Francisco Chronicle was the first to break the story, and reported that their journalists got in contact with the first woman to accuse Swalwell of sexual assault while reaching out to dozens of his former staffers. Both times, these women were encouraged to come forward as an act of public service. Both times, they were falsely denigrated as political operatives.

Swalwell’s lawyer Elias Dabaie took his client’s defense a step further. Not only does Swalwell categorically deny that any sexual misconduct occurred, but Dabaie has also attempted to undermine the credibility of the two women making the most serious claims, relying on tired victim-blaming rhetoric to do so.

Both of these women are currently anonymous, and both alleged that they became extremely intoxicated while drinking with Swalwell, to the point of being “blacked out,” which means they do not remember everything that happened. Both women alleged that they woke up in Swalwell’s hotel room, and one woman alleged that Swalwell sexually assaulted her while she said “No” and tried to push him away. Instead of addressing what these women said happened on those nights, however, The Chronicle and CNN reported that Dabaie scrutinized how they kept in contact with Swalwell afterward. He reportedly sent them both a cease-and-desist letter threatening legal action if they did not retract their allegations.

In the letter to the woman who accused Swalwell of sexual assault, Dabaie wrote that she had displayed “the conduct of a loyal and supportive colleague, not a victim,” and that her credibility was “fatally undermined” because she had a “voluntary and cooperative relationship” with Swalwell for years after the alleged assault. In the second letter, Dabaie said friendly text messages the woman later sent Swalwell cast doubt on her allegations, including one where she wrote “you would be an amazing governor.”

These actions only undermine a victim’s credibility if you don’t know that it’s actually completely normal for survivors of sexual violence to maintain friendly relationships with their perpetrators and send these kinds of appeasing messages after an assault. In nearly every sexual violence case I’ve reported on, survivors remained cordial with perpetrators in the immediate aftermath, no matter how serious or harmful the violations were. One of the women Swalwell sent a cease-and-desist to compared this to Stockholm syndrome. Psychologists have another name for it: the fawn response.

You’ve probably heard of the fight-or-flight response as the most common way people react to danger. But survivors often exhibit other responses to sexual violence: freeze and fawn. Freezing is pretty self-explanatory. Fawning is less understood. It’s a form of people-pleasing, and sometimes it’s a learned behavior from childhood (girls in particular are often taught to put our needs on the back burner in order to appease others). Decades of research have shown that people who have been exposed to trauma throughout their lives are more likely to develop the fawn response, and perpetrators will often target people who have been victimized before. Examples of fawning can include complimenting your abuser, staying in contact with them at your own expense, having trouble saying “no,” trying to solve other people’s problems for them, and apologizing even when you are the victim.

There can be psychological reasons why people exhibit the fawn response, but there can also be practical reasons. Most victims live in close proximity to their perpetrators, and may need to appease them just to survive. Others have to coexist in the same schools, workplaces, and industries as their perpetrators—or else they may have to abandon their prospects. In the case of the woman who accused Swalwell of sexual assault, she was only 21 when she first started working for him. He was the bulk of her résumé. If she didn’t maintain a positive relationship with him, she likely would have had to change careers. And why should she have to make that sacrifice after he hurt her? Take this excerpt of her interview with The Chronicle:

This is precisely why so many perpetrators pursue leadership positions. If you have power over other people, if their future is reliant on you in any way, then they are less likely to speak out against you or even sever their relationship with you. This is also why a boss cannot ethically pursue a relationship with a subordinate. When your boss tries to kiss you or sends you a nude over Snapchat or takes out his penis in front of you, there is an obvious risk to saying no. Your career could suffer. In fact, some viral commentators suggested that Swalwell’s employees should have quit if he tried to have sex with them. That is often the result of workplace sexual violence, which is why it is a systemic function of patriarchy, a weapon to block women and other marginalized people from having equal access to opportunities.

Still, our cultural expectations and narratives around how sexual violence victims behave have not caught up to the reality of things like the fawn response. When people hear that a survivor initially kept in contact with the person they later accused of sexual assault, they often feel this undermines the survivor’s credibility. When text messages show the survivor complimenting their alleged abuser, the defense can seize on them as evidence of the survivor’s duplicity. What they actually show is who has the upper hand. People act like victims always have a choice. But to be victimized is to have your choices unjustly limited and taken away from you.

Attorneys like Dabaie know how to use their client’s upper hand, as do press secretaries like Leavitt. They know that people are often swayed by the narrative that a victim was not acting like a victim in the immediate wake of an alleged assault. They know that people like to imagine survivors are actually fabulists who invent their allegations later on to try and collect a payday or sway an election. The perception that survivors stand to benefit from coming forward persists despite years of Me Too backlash showing just how much survivors are punished for doing so. A negligible number of survivors profit from speaking out, while the costs of being victimized—both literal and metaphorical—outweigh any payout.

When Democrats try to undermine sexual violence allegations against members of their own party to level the playing field against Trump, it’s not just a sickening exercise in dehumanization. It has the opposite of the intended effect. It bolsters the very excuses that Trump uses to avoid accountability, feeding into the same anti-victim biases that have aided Trump in his rise to power. Me Too backlash is a conduit for Trump supporters, because once you’ve undermined some victims, you now possess the tools to undermine any victim.