This week reported the New York Timesthat one of the most revered figures of the American left – a man whose name is on schools, streets and national holidays – raped Dolores Huerta. He abused girls as young as 13 years old.
Sixty years of silence, bought not with threats but with conviction. With love for something. With the belief that if they protected him, they were protecting something real. That’s what patriarchy does to women who believe: it makes our silence the price of our own liberation.
I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse myself. I was ten years old. When I read Dolores Huerta’s words – “I have never considered myself a victim, but I now understand that I am a survivor – of violence, of sexual abuse, of domineering men who viewed me and other women as property or as something to be controlled” – I did not read them as strangers. I read her as a woman who had to decide for far too long what to wear, what to name and what to finally take off.
Silence in the name of the cause
The silence required of survivors is never accidental. It is demanded in the name of something larger – the cause, the legacy, the movement – until the cause itself becomes an instrument of cover-up.
Women’s History Month is intended to be the 31 days in which we celebrate what women have built. Instead, we reckon with what women have been forced to hide. We are witnessing the disintegration of a legacy that women have literally bled for. And we should call it history.
It’s history. Just not the kind you hang on walls.
Her name was missing from the sign
This is what this story really looks like: Dolores Huerta built the United Farm Workers. She coined the slogan “Sí se puede”. She organized boycotts, negotiated treaties and put her life in the service of the disenfranchised. And Cesar Chavez was on the sign for all of this. He got the schools. He got the state holiday. His face was emblazoned on the mural. She was wiped out.
She was raped.
This sentence is not a metaphor. He is not rhetorical. He describes what happened to a woman who fought for sixty years for a movement named after the man who abused her. The New York Times’ investigation – 60 interviews, union documents, photos, recordings – also found two other women who were minors when Chavez first abused them. Girl. Agricultural workers. The most vulnerable people in a movement dedicated to protecting the most vulnerable.
I have to word what I say next carefully because it’s important: Cesar Chavez was a fighter for workers’ rights. He fought for the disenfranchised. He was also an abuser who used progressive moral authority as a cover for abuse. Both are true. And that’s exactly what the left needs to work through.
Power remains power
We cannot cite Epstein as evidence of what the right produces and at the same time turn a blind eye to what the left produces. Epstein’s client list was not biased. She crossed every ideological boundary. Men who showed up at the right events, said the right things, wrote the right checks—and used that credibility as a cover. And Chavez, a working-class hero, an icon of the civil rights movement, a man who fought for the most vulnerable, used the movement’s moral authority to silence the women he abused.
What I’ve learned about power – as someone who used to clean other people’s houses and now leads one of the largest feminist organizations in the country: Power is not guaranteed because it is held by people with the right political beliefs. Wherever power accumulates without accountability – no matter who holds it – it is abused.
I have watched men on the left pat themselves on the back for their feminism while building the same uncontrolled structures, the same inner circles, the same cultures of subjugation and silence that they claimed to be fighting. And progressive institutions closing ranks around powerful leaders – just as conservative ones do. I have heard women in these rooms say time and time again that now is not the time. Too much is at stake. The movement needs this person more than the truth.
Not a movement, but a protective ring
I’ve been doing this work long enough to know what that pressure feels like and what it costs the women who absorb it. And I’ll say it clearly: A movement that doesn’t hold its own accountable is not a movement. It is a protective ring.
Meanwhile, beyond this concrete reappraisal, the war against women is gaining momentum. The UN Secretary-General warned last year of a “rise in misogyny and a furious backlash against equal rights”. Active regression in women’s rights was recorded in one in four countries in 2024. Project 2026, the Heritage Foundation’s government plan for the year we are living in, is a blueprint for forced motherhood, state-policed sex, and the eradication of every legal protection women have fought for over generations. The Manosphere has worked its way from the fringe into the mainstream, from Reddit to the White House. The backlash is organized. He is financed. It is transnational. And he’s banking on us being too exhausted, too fractured, too busy picking up the pieces of our own trenches to fight him.
“This is the story of the world. His story is told, hers is not,” Dolores Huerta said in a 1995 interview. She spoke about what it meant to have built a movement to which history would credit a man. She didn’t know then – or maybe she did, and the weight of it is something I can hardly imagine – that the man to whom history gave credit was also the man who had abused her.
Worn for 31 years
She wore this for 31 more years.
And she filed it this month. During Women’s History Month. While at the same time fighting for the survival of women’s rights, against coordinated national regression. The Epstein files are still withheld. A generation of young men are being radicalized online into the belief that equality is an attack on them. As we try to hold a movement together under conditions that would break most institutions.
Tell me again that the timing is coincidence. Tell me again that isn’t all of this – every bit of it, from the abuse to the cover-up to the political context in which it lands – a single story about what happens to women when men hold all the power and pay no price for how they use it.
I refuse to be surprised. I am a Latina, survivor, former domestic worker, and Executive Director of the Women’s March. Spent my entire adult life in spaces I shouldn’t be in, refusing to be silent for what was supposedly bigger, refusing to make myself smaller so someone else could feel bigger. That won’t change.
We are no longer protecting the matter
What will change is this: We stop protecting the cause at the expense of the women who built it. We stop giving deference to leaders who do not and do not deserve it. We stop being told to wait, to moderate, to be patient, to trust the process.
The process produced exactly this. But we are building something different – for women. For all of us. Not as a side effect. Not as a group of voters to be managed. As the actual goal.
His story has been told long enough.
Ours begins now.
Rachel O’Leary Carmona is Executive Director of the Women’s March, a movement mobilizing for a feminist future.
