The women talked. The men watched. That distinction matters. It’s where the story of one predator becomes the story of a culture. Some of the men watching were simply frozen--deer in the headlights, as Lissa put it. Skeletons in their own closets. Waiting for the other shoe to drop. That’s its own kind of cowardice, but it still lives in the complicity column. Passive. Paralyzed. But then there are the ones who calculate. One man was a mole. Reporting back. And as the reckoning became real, others began lining up--not to protect the women, but to protect their proximity to power. To position themselves as loyalists. To secure their access to what a primary predator always creates around himself: a court of men who believe that his gravity makes their behavior acceptable, too. They moved from watching to choosing. That’s when complicity becomes accomplice. It’s not a feeling. It’s a transaction.