Rachel Crooks

Rachel Crooks’s story follows the consequences of speaking publicly about Donald Trump: an accusation that brought her new opportunities and a path into politics, but also intensified anxiety and threatened to reduce her public identity to a single label. Her experience became especially consequential when she met Christine Blasey Ford at a gathering of women who had spoken about abuse. Crooks could describe not an abstract risk of exposure, but the everyday scrutiny and self-consciousness that followed it.

Public Exposure and Its Costs

Crooks had told Megan Twohey about her account of being forcibly kissed by Donald Trump at an elevator in Trump Tower. By the time she joined the later gathering of women, she had traveled from Ohio and was still dealing with the fallout of sharing her story. The consequences had been mixed: her account had brought opportunities as well as problems she had not imagined. The book places that unsettled aftermath alongside the other women’s experiences, making clear that going public did not resolve what came next.

After coming forward in 2016, Crooks experienced crippling anxiety and self-consciousness. She was the only woman at the gathering who lived in a rural, conservative area, which she described as “more of a #himtoo community.” Her location mattered to how she understood the audience around her: disclosure could meet not only national attention but also the judgments of a local community where she felt politically isolated. Her experience therefore differed from that of women whose public lives and work had brought them into other kinds of visibility.

From Accuser to Candidate

After television appearances and a press conference about her accusation, local Democrats invited Crooks to run for a seat in the state legislature. Her first reaction was that it was a terrible idea. Critics had already suggested that she had told her story for political purposes, and she worried that entering electoral politics would seem to confirm that suspicion. The invitation put her in a difficult position: the public attention surrounding her account could be used as a resource, but using it risked reinforcing the very interpretation she feared.

Crooks nevertheless cared about education and health care, and she judged the incumbent to be a rubber stamp for the Republican Party. She considered whether her new profile might help her act on those concerns, acknowledging that her national visibility could give her greater fundraising potential. She ran, learning to lead rallies and make speeches. Her campaign placed her within a broader surge of female candidates seeking political power, transforming a personal public accusation into a platform from which she could pursue other issues.

The run did not erase the personal price of that transformation. Crooks said she did not cry or feel self-pity on the night she lost; Democrats had, for the most part, lost across Ohio. The more lasting difficulty became apparent in the months afterward. She felt that the campaign had strengthened the tendency to see her only through her story about Trump. On television, a caption sometimes identified her simply as “Trump Accuser,” a description her mother disliked. A male friend told her, “This has become your identity.” Crooks recognized both sides of her new public standing: it had opened doors and provided a new path, yet tied her to a person and an episode she experienced as awful.

A Gathering of Different Lives

At a joint interview held at Gwyneth Paltrow’s home in Brentwood, Crooks met women whose experiences and circumstances were far from interchangeable. The women had come from different parts of the country and the world, and their stories ranged across entertainment, work, politics, and public testimony. Crooks’s presence brought the perspective of a woman from a rural, conservative community into a room where the risks and resources of speaking out varied widely. The gathering was intended as a journalistic interview, not group therapy, but its participants were also listening for what others had encountered after deciding to tell their stories.

The contrasts extended beyond geography and public profile. Kim Lawson, a low-paid McDonald’s worker who had recently experienced homelessness, described workplace activism and the power she felt in filing a complaint and joining a strike. Zelda Perkins spoke about challenging confidentiality agreements and finding authority in addressing members of Parliament. Crooks’s own route into public life had been electoral: she converted her new visibility into a campaign, while also struggling against the way that visibility narrowed how others saw her. These different paths did not make the women’s experiences equivalent; together, they showed how speaking out could lead to new forms of agency while leaving each person with distinct pressures and constraints.

What Crooks Could Tell Ford

Ford listened closely when Crooks described the burden of being publicly identified with her allegation. Their circumstances were not identical, but Crooks had already faced a version of the future Ford feared: the possibility that strangers would recognize her, interpret her through the accusation, or make ordinary activities feel newly exposed. Ford asked how long it had taken before Crooks could get into her car and go to a restaurant without wondering whether people were looking at her. The question made Crooks’s experience a practical point of reference for someone approaching public disclosure.

Ford was also struggling with online attacks, including fake social media profiles claiming that she had recanted. She said she was not brave enough to answer them and found the volume overwhelming. Crooks responded that she sometimes wrote replies and then never posted them, describing the private act as cathartic. Her answer did not offer a simple solution or promise that attention would pass quickly. Instead, it gave Ford a concrete account of one way Crooks managed the impulse to respond while facing a hostile audience.

Narrative Role and Significance

Crooks’s arc is marked by a double movement: public speech widened what she could do, and the same visibility threatened to make her accusation the only story people saw. Running for office gave her a route toward political participation on issues she cared about, but losing the race did not settle the struggle over how she would be defined. Her campaign’s opportunities and its narrowing effects remain intertwined rather than resolving into a straightforward triumph or defeat.

At the gathering, Crooks’s importance lies partly in the knowledge she could offer Ford. She was neither a distant commentator nor a guarantee of what would happen after disclosure; she was someone who had already experienced public identification, anxiety, campaigning, and the persistence of a label. By sharing those consequences, she helped make the costs of speaking out legible to another woman weighing the decision. The book’s portrait holds together the political possibilities of her new voice and the personal burden of being continually read through the story that first made that voice public.