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The Famous Milano Tweet
The “me too” message was well known to Burke’s colleagues
and people throughout the country who were familiar with her
work. It was not widely known beyond those circles—until 2017,
when the phrase “me too” was propelled into the spotlight by
actress and activist Alyssa Milano. On October 15, 2017, Milano
was angry and disgusted after reading articles about the many
women who said Weinstein had sexually harassed or assaulted
them. That night, while getting ready to go to bed, she received
a text message from an acquaintance who attached a screen-
shot saying, “Suggested by a friend: if
all the women who have been sexually
harassed or assaulted wrote ‘me too’ as
a status, we might give people a sense
of the magnitude of the problem.”
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Milano had been sexually assaulted
twice, once when she was a teenager,
and she felt compelled to do as the
screenshot suggested. She decided to
tweet it to her followers. “I thought, you
know what? This is an amazing way to
get some idea of the magnitude of how big this problem is. It
was also a way to get the focus off these horrible men and to put
the focus back on the victims and survivors.” To personalize the
message, Milano added one sentence: “If you’ve been sexually
harassed or assaulted, write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet,”
and then she sent it. “That was basically it,” she says. “I looked
down at my daughter, sent the tweet, and went to sleep not
knowing it was going to snowball.”
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And snowball it did. The next morning, when Milano checked
her Twitter feed, there were at least fifty-five thousand replies
marked with “me too.” Most of the respondents had turned it into
a hashtag, #MeToo, which quickly became the number one trend-
ing hashtag on Twitter—and it had spread far beyond the United
States. In a 2018 article in
Foreign Affairs
, Pardis Mahdavi, who
“I looked down at my
daughter, sent the tweet, and
went to sleep not knowing it
was going to snowball.”
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—Actress and activist Alyssa Milano, on
her original “me too” tweet
