"Rape Accusations Will Ruin Men's Careers" And Other Lies We Tell Women

Welcome! I’m Ash BG, a toddler mum, writer, and founder of You Wanted This, a publication about modern motherhood, the mental load, and what relationships really look like after kids. I’m also the founder of Tether: The Mental Load App, a couples app that makes the invisible labour in your household visible. If you’re new here, I’m so glad you could join us. Pull up a chair. You don’t have to pretend you’re fine here.

I saw a video on socials recently of Gloria Steinem gathering a group of women in her New York apartment to talk about the current state of feminism.

And I had two thoughts simultaneously.

The first was: Ummm, how cool. What a bloody honour it would be to sit in that room, with that woman, who has given more of herself to this fight than most of us will ever fully comprehend.

The second was: how depressing.

Gloria Steinem is 91 years old. She has spent more than six decades fighting for women’s safety, their autonomy, their right to be believed, their right to own their bodies and their futures. And all I could think about was how do you look GS in the eye knowing that we are still having the exact same conversations she’s been having for decades.

That is not inspiring. Or rather, it is inspiring and it is devastating at the same time, and I think we have been too quick to lean into the inspiration and not nearly willing enough to dwell on the devastation.

She should be watching younger women live inside the world she built but, instead, she is watching that world be actively dismantled in front of her eyes. Reproductive rights are being stripped away in the country she devoted her life to. The conversation about women’s safety happening in exactly the same terms it was happening in 1969. Progress has not even just stalled but reversed, in her lifetime, in front of her eyes.

I have had this queasy, unsettled feeling lately. I’ve been feeling almost sick to my stomach, a motion sickness that I think is this sensation of going backwards. Of looking around and realising that the fight my grandmother’s generation thought was nearly won is being refought from scratch, and that the systems designed to protect women are failing them with a consistency that can no longer be called accidental.

And then last week a story broke in Australia that crystallised exactly why I feel that way.

The three unnamed athletes

Three high profile Australian athletes obtained a court order preventing the ABC from publishing an investigation into their private group chat messages.

The group chat, according to the NSW Supreme Court’s own records, contained shared jokes, insults of named people, crude descriptions of sexual acts, and references to domestic violence.

Two of the athletes are married. Their identities remain legally suppressed.

A woman had accessed messages on a phone that had belonged to her former partner and those messages were passed to a journalist at the ABC. The ABC investigated. Their lawyers concluded the story met the public interest threshold. They prepared to publish.

And then the athletes went to court and made it disappear.

Justice McGrath, in granting the injunction, found that “nothing in the messages exposed any wrongdoing.” So the court heard what was in those messages and the judicial conclusion was that it did not expose wrongdoing. That one line itselftsays everything we need to know about how the system defines harm and whose experience of it counts.

A group chat containing crude descriptions of sexual acts and references to domestic violence.

Nothing to see here.

The suppression order protects the men who wrote the messages, not the people the messages were about. Not the women described in that group chat and not the public, which has an interest in knowing how people in positions of significant power and public trust behave when they believe nobody is watching.

The system worked exactly as it should… for them.

Let’s talk about what rape accusations actually do to a man’s career

Because before we can talk about suppression orders and reputation protection, we need to establish what exactly these men are protecting themselves from.

Based on available evidence… not very much actually.

Conor McGregor was found liable for sexual assault by a civil jury in 2024. He was ordered to pay substantial damages to the woman he assaulted. That same woman had to have her tampon removed by forceps after the assault.

He subsequently appeared on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. They made jokes and laughed and all I could think about was how the world had somehow forgotten that this man raped a woman and got away with it. Did we all just forget? Or did we decide that it’s okay when you’re that famous? It wasn’t just glossed over, he was welcomed back as though the verdict were a minor inconvenience rather than a formal legal finding that he had sexually assaulted another human being.

And did you know that Alexander Zverev has faced accusations of physical and emotional abuse from two former partners? One incident was witnessed by other people. What do you think he is doing now? Is he in prison? Is he serving a sentence? Or is he, at the very least, laying low? No, no and nope. He is currently competing at Wimbledon.

And then of course, there’s Donald Trump was found liable for sexual abuse by a civil jury. He faces accusations from multiple women across multiple decades. He was recorded on tape describing sexual assault as something he could do freely because of his fame. He is the President of the United States.

These are not obscure cases, and they are certainly not the only ones. There’s Cristiano Ronaldo, Kobe Bryant, Ben Roethlisberger, Chris Brown, and Brad fucking Pitt. These are some the most famous men in the world and in every single case the accusations did not end their careers, they did not remove their platforms and they did not meaningfully change how the world received them.

So when three Australian athletes obtain a court order to protect their reputations from reporting about a group chat containing references to domestic violence, I can’t help but wonder, what exactly are they protecting themselves from?

The evidence suggests that even a formal civil finding of assault is something powerful men can absorb and survive and continue to thrive after. The court order is not protecting them from consequences. It is protecting them from the conversation.

They are not using the law because they need it.

They are using it because they can.

The question I wish we didn’t have to ask

Why does this keep happening?

Why do the systems designed to protect women fail them so consistently? Why does the burden of proof fall so heavily on the woman who was harmed? Why does accountability, when it comes at all, so rarely stick? Why are we constantly telling women to be careful because they could ruin a man’s career?

The answer is the same one it was in 1969 when Gloria Steinem was first asking it. The systems were not built to protect women. They were built by men, for men, at a time when women’s testimony was not considered reliable, when women’s safety was a private matter, when a man’s reputation was treated as a more legitimate public interest than a woman’s own bodily autonomy.

Those systems have been partially reformed. Keyword: partially. The law has changed in some ways. The culture has shifted in some places. But ultimately nothign has changed and powerful men continue to prove this time and time again.

Data published by the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance in March 2026 shows a 14% year-on-year increase in suppression orders granted to high-net-worth individuals across Australian jurisdictions. So basically the wealthier you are, the more privacy you can purchase? How fucking terrifying is that? The more powerful you are, the more legal tools are available to ensure that your behaviour stays exactly where you would like it: away from the public.

The ABC was prepared to publish. The story exists. The evidence was sufficient for a national broadcaster to stake its reputation on. It’s there ready to go. And yet it cannot be published because three men could afford to prevent it.

Why women do not report

We keep asking this question. We ask it after every high profile case, every coronial inquest, every story about a woman who stayed silent for years. We ask it as though the answer is mysterious. As though we genuinely cannot understand what would make a woman decide that coming forward was not worth it.

This is the answer.

Because even when there is evidence, even when a journalist investigates, even when a broadcaster prepares to publish, the law can still be deployed to make it disappear.

And even when the law does not intervene. Even when the story runs. Even when the jury returns a verdict. Even when the tape is played and the woman’s reputation is ruined and her life has been blown to pieces, men walk back onto the court and the stage and into the Oval Office and onto The Tonight Show anyway.

I can’t stop thinking about the women in that group chat did not choose the suppression order. They had no say in whether the reporting would proceed. And if the pattern holds, as it so consistently does, even if the story had been published the men involved would in all likelihood have been fine.

That is what we are asking women to report into.

That is the system we are asking them to be brave enough to use.

A system that, as Gloria Steinem identified sixty years ago and is still identifying today, was never designed with them in mind.

Has feminism gone too far

Sometimes I hate myself for it, but I can’t help myself from feeling optimistic. When I saw the videos of all of those women gathered in Gloria Steinem’s apartment, I felt hope. It felt like a passing-of-the-baton moment, and I love that there are so many feminist icons paving the way for future generations.

The work is not nearly as far along as we would like it to be. The progress that felt so solid in the nineties and the two thousands was more fragile than we knew. The backlash that was always coming has arrived, and it has arrived with legal tools and cultural momentum and men in positions of extraordinary power who are using both to ensure that the status quo is not just maintained but restored.

Gloria Steinem knew this was always possible. She said so, repeatedly, across decades of interviews and speeches and essays. She warned that the work was not done and that the assumption it was done was itself dangerous.

We did not listen carefully enough.

But we are listening now.

And the message is clear. We need to fight harder.

Feminism hasn’t gone too far. It hasn’t gone far enough.