Who benefits when a movement fractures? It is not the survivors who risked everything to speak. It is not the families still grieving, confused, and searching for answers. It is not the children still locked in the very programs we are trying to dismantle. When survivors are discredited and organizers are turned against each other, we hand power back to the institutions that thrive on secrecy and silence. The focus shifts from the harm to the spectacle. The truth gets buried under gossip. And the perpetrators keep doing what they have always done, uninterrupted.
Legal threats. Smear campaigns. Public shaming dressed up as accountability. These are not tools of justice. They are tactics used to isolate, intimidate, and destabilize. They drain the energy out of movements and redirect the narrative. Webinars are replaced with subpoenas. Testimony gets drowned out by rumor. Every hour spent defending a name is an hour stolen from the fight to protect kids.
It rewards opportunism. It distracts from reform. It weakens trust in leadership and scares new voices away. And at the center of that collapse is a truth no one wants to say out loud: fractured movements protect power. Not survivor power. Not community power. Institutional power. The kind we were working to dismantle.
I am telling this story now because I stayed quiet for too long. I believed the work would speak for itself. It didn’t. The lies filled the silence. And while I tried to hold the line, misinformation took root. So I am setting the record straight.
This is not about revenge. This is about protecting the future of the work. I want people to learn from what happened. I want advocates to see the signs and know how to protect their boundaries. I want the next generation of organizers to understand how easily justice can be hijacked by ego and control. I want us to break the pattern before it repeats.
We built something powerful once. It was not perfect, but it was real. And I still believe in what we set out to do. I still believe that survivor-led change is the most effective force for reform. We owe it to every survivor whose story was buried. We owe it to the kids still inside. And we owe it to the parts of ourselves still healing. The movement is not lost, but it will take courage to return it to what it was meant to be.
Jenna Bulis