Ohio

Ohio enters the book not through a detailed portrait of its cities or institutions, but through Rachel Crooks’s experience of living and speaking there. It is her home state, described as a rural, conservative setting in which the consequences of accusing Donald Trump remained close to everyday life. Crooks’s account shows how a nationally visible allegation could become a local identity, and how that exposure could lead both to political opportunity and to sustained personal costs.

Geographic Frame and Public Life

Crooks had told Megan Twohey that Trump forcibly kissed her at the elevator in Trump Tower. By the time the book brings her into view in Ohio, that account has moved beyond the original encounter and into the conditions of her public life. She had made television appearances and held a press conference about the accusation; she was also living in a community she described as more aligned with #HimToo. The book does not identify her town, so Ohio is rendered at the scale of home, local community, and state politics rather than as a set of named places.

That distinction matters. The accusation was tied to a prominent New York location, but the continuing consequences reached Crooks where she lived. Her experience in Ohio is not simply a backdrop to a story about national politics: it is where public attention met her local relationships and prospects. The state’s rural, conservative character, as Crooks described it, helps explain why visibility could feel politically charged, while the absence of a named town keeps the account focused on her experience rather than on a specific locality.

From Accusation to Political Campaign

After Crooks’s television appearances and press conference, local Democrats invited her to run for a seat in the state legislature. She initially thought the idea was terrible. Critics had already suggested that she had told her story for political purposes, and a campaign seemed likely to intensify that suspicion. Her hesitation was therefore not just about entering politics; it was also about how any subsequent choice might be used to reinterpret why she had spoken.

Crooks nevertheless had concerns she wanted to act on, especially education and health care. She viewed the incumbent as a rubber stamp for the Republican Party and began to consider whether her newly acquired public profile could be put to use. She recognized that her national visibility might help her raise money, and she decided to run. The campaign required her to learn how to lead rallies and give speeches, shifting her from the role of a person recounting an allegation into that of a candidate seeking political power.

Her candidacy connected Ohio to a broader surge of women seeking office. The book places Crooks among an unprecedented wave of female candidates campaigning across the country, but her particular route into that movement was shaped by the accusation and by the attention it had brought her. Ohio was where that national moment became a concrete local race: an invitation, a decision to stand, and an electoral outcome. Crooks lost. She did not describe the night of the loss as one of self-pity; Democrats had generally lost across Ohio. The emotional difficulty came later, as she considered what the campaign had made harder to escape.

The Cost of Being Recognized

Crooks said that coming forward had brought crippling anxiety and self-consciousness. Her experience complicates any simple account of publicity as either a burden or a source of empowerment. The national profile opened doors and gave her a possible route into public service, yet it also drew her more tightly into an identity defined by the allegation. On television, she was sometimes identified only as “Trump Accuser,” a label her mother disliked. A male friend told her that it had become her identity.

That reduction was especially troubling after the campaign. Crooks had chosen to run partly because she cared about policy and believed she could make constructive use of her visibility. But even taking that step could reinforce the suspicion that her original account had served an agenda. The sequence exposes a bind: public recognition could provide political resources while also encouraging others to treat every later action as evidence about the accusation. Crooks’s description of doors opening alongside an unwanted attachment to Trump captures both sides of that outcome without resolving the tension.

Ohio in the Gathering's Wider Map

The book returns to Ohio when Crooks travels to California for a gathering of women whose accounts had become part of the reporting. She arrived from Ohio still dealing with the fallout of sharing her story, which had brought more opportunities and problems than she had imagined. In the room, her experience stood alongside those of women from other settings and with different forms of public standing. The gathering did not erase those differences; it made them visible as the women listened to one another.

Crooks told the group about her anxiety, the invitation to run, and the campaign’s effect on how others saw her. Her experience also became a point of connection for Christine Blasey Ford, who listened closely because the fears Crooks described resembled her own. Ohio thus serves as more than a location attached to Crooks’s biography. It is the setting from which the book makes tangible the uneven aftermath of speaking publicly: a new political path can emerge, while the person who took it may remain publicly confined to the story that first made her visible.