Women face dangers in all manner of situations that men rarely do. The news has been full of stories of men sexually assaulting and raping women whom they managed to get alone, some of the most recent and disgusting ones emerging from the trial in the UK of Russell Brand. He is accused of being a “ruthless, calculated and manipulative sexual predator”, almost maniacal in the way he tried to assault women even in spaces where there was little privacy.

Soon after the accusations surfaced, he claimed to have found Jesus and appeared just three weeks ago at a RFK Jr’s MAHA event with Mehmet Oz, where Tony Lyons, the head of the MAHA PAC, strongly supported him.

Brand was charged more than a year ago, based on allegations from four women, but MAHA groups and the movement’s founder, Kennedy, have stood by him. Brand spoke on Lyons’ regular conference call for movement activists on Wednesday, the third day of his trial.

“He’s been falsely accused, he’s been vilified, persecuted, deplatformed, demonetized, censored, prosecuted,” Lyons said in introducing Brand.

Brand has denied the charges, three counts of rape, three counts of sexual assault and one count of indecent assault, saying any sex he had was consensual.

But this post is not about the odious Brand or his supporters but about one of the features of such stories which is that the women who underwent this ordeal are often fearful of speaking out, even after it was over. There are many reasons for their silence. Some women somehow felt the need to not directly confront their attacker and instead tried to avoid giving offense, even though they were the victims of inexcusable or even criminal behavior. Some even second-guess themselves, wondering if they inadvertently created the conditions for the assault, even if the assault itself was inexcusable whatever the circumstances.

This feature can be seen in the story that was recounted in a long article by Molly Fischer about the plusses and minuses of driverless taxi systems like the one run by the Waymo company. It is an interesting article that features among other things ruminations about the relationship of Americans to their cars and the vague sense of control over one’s destiny that driving a car provides. The phrase ‘taking away the car keys’ is both a metaphor and literal statement about taking away someone’s control.

But one passage jumped out at me that relates to this post.

Many women have welcomed the absence of a driver, and with reason. Uber and Lyft have each faced thousands of lawsuits alleging sexual assault by drivers, and even passengers who don’t experience violence deal with quotidian discomforts: unwanted innuendo, the dangers of giving a male stranger their whereabouts. After all, as the comedians Kate Berlant and Jacqueline Novak have noted, a ride share driver is “just a guy in his car.”

A tech worker I spoke to named Hannah told me that she was vigilant about such hazards. When ordering an Uber, for example, she’d use a pickup point a short distance from her home. In transportation, as in dating, “you’re constantly mitigating risk,” she said. Earlier this year, when she began talking to a guy on Raya, she combed his socials, saw that they had a previous employer in common, and spent a while chatting with him before making plans for an afternoon date. After a few drinks, he suggested heading to a bar in another neighborhood, and called a Waymo. A Waymo was more expensive than a normal car—a little bit of a treat. This is a green flag, Hannah recalled thinking.

Once in the car, his manner abruptly changed. Suddenly, he was kissing her hard, and putting her hand on his crotch. He grabbed her by the throat and began jamming a finger into her mouth. She pulled her head away and tried pointing out the car’s many interior cameras. He grabbed her throat again, in a manner that made her feel “that he was capable of violence.” She remembers retreating into a “self-preservation mode” as he groped her breasts and reached inside her pants. When they arrived at the bar, she faked an emergency call from a neighbor and left immediately. “I definitely think he intentionally chose a driverless car so he could attack me,” she said.

A driverless car is a new quasi-private space, with uses (and connotations) not yet established. Like an opera box or an elevator, it might furnish comfort, freedom, danger, or some combination thereof. But although the technology is new, the fallacies it reinforces are not. The temptation to imagine strangers as the chief source of sexual menace is as old as alleys.

Hannah wasn’t interested in alerting Waymo about her experience, she told me. Even if the company still had footage of what had happened, she was appalled by the idea of anyone watching it. She just wanted other women to be careful. In the months since, she’s heard about quiet ways to attract the attention of remote support—pulling a door handle, unbuckling a seat belt. We are cruising fast toward the autonomous future, fast enough that the future’s problems seem to come out of nowhere.

What struck me was the sentence “When they arrived at the bar, she faked an emergency call from a neighbor and left immediately.” Rather than just leaving, she felt the need to fake an emergency call. The fake call is a standard escape technique that people use when a blind date or other meeting goes wrong for whatever reason and one party wants to to avoid giving offense and not be seen as rude by simply walking away.

But this case required no such stratagem since she would have been perfectly justified in leaving as soon as she got out and even calling the police on him. And yet that instinct to avoid being seen as rude is so deeply embedded due to social conditioning that she felt the need to find an excuse to immediately leave.

I have never been in such an extreme situation. But I can understand the instinct to not challenge the perpetrator because I have been in situations where someone made an sexist, or homophobic or otherwise offensive bigoted remark. My initial reaction was to be stunned into retreating into silence and hope that the situation passes since speaking out might cause unpleasantness and I had been conditioned to avoid doing so. But then I realized how absurd it was that I was caring about causing offense to someone who clearly did not care about others. So now I immediately say that I disagree with what they said. But there is less cost in those situations in acting than in one where the victim is in real physical danger.