Off Duty: Why I Showed Up for Epstein Survivors — And Why Every Man Should

Misogyny Isn't Abstract to Me. It Never Was.

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Read this one first. See if it's for you.

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I grew up the only boy with four sisters.

Four. Sisters. Lol and I absolutely loved it!

I grew up in a house full of women. Four sisters and a mother. A bathroom that was never mine. That wasn’t stressful, it wasn’t weird, it was normal. I learned early that women’s lives, their values, their beliefs, their essence wasn’t a burden because they were different than mine. They’re mine to protect because they mattered to me.

That doesn’t leave you as you get older. It shapes you. Watching then and still watching now, how they moved through the world. Watching what they still have to put up with that I never did. Watching what it costs to be a woman in America every single day. You absorb all of that, even when you don’t realize it’s happening.

Now I’m a dad. I have a daughter named Daphne. And everything I watched growing up, everything I came to understand about what women navigate just to get through their day, it all lands differently when you’re looking at your daughter and thinking about the world she’s going to inherit.

Wednesday this week, I went to the press conference in support of the Epstein survivors. Not because someone asked me to show up. Not for a photo. Because you don’t grow up in a house full of women, you don’t raise a daughter, and then look away when survivors are standing up and asking to be seen, to be heard, for JUSTICE!!! You just go. Because that’s what you do when you truly want to be an ally and be supportive. You just show up!

Being there with them, supporting those women and man, Sky Roberts who is advocating for his late sister Virginia Roberts Giuffre, listening to them tell the truth about what was done to them and the powerful men who got away with it for so long, that meant something to me. As a dad. As a brother. As a son. As a man who was raised to understand that “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” That great quote is attributed to Bishop Desmond Tutu.

After I left, I got some dms and comments left for me. I’ll let this one speak for itself.

Charming. Real charming.

Here’s what I want to say directly to the men reading this, especially the ones who look like me: being an ally isn’t a performance. It’s not a checklist. It’s not complicated. It’s what you already know is right if you were raised right, or if you’ve done the work to get there. Sometimes it’s just showing up. Literally walking into a room and saying, I see you, I believe you, I’m not going anywhere.

We have a lot of loud voices right now telling men that caring about women is weakness. Joe Rogan. Andrew Tate. Pete Hegseth. Some of them have built entire platforms out of making men feel like empathy is something to be embarrassed about and manliness is how much you can bench press. Like protecting the people you love is soft. Like calling out misogyny makes you less of a man.

I grew up with four sisters. I have a daughter named Daphne. My Mother who I love and cherish. And I promise you, there is nothing soft about any of it. Misogyny isn’t abstract to me. It never was. I know what it looks like because I grew up watching the people I love deal with it. And I have never once looked at any of them and thought, caring about you is making me less of a man.

Those guys and their followers have it exactly backwards.

Show up. Listen. Support. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

Happy Friday.

-Harry