On Dec. 10, 2015, Daniel Holtzclaw, a police officer in Oklahoma City, was found guilty on 18 of 36 charges of rape, sexual assault, stalking and oral sodomy. The jury recommended 263 years in prison to be served concurrently and on Jan. 21, he was sentenced to that exact term. His legal team has said they would appeal the decision. Holtzclaw assaulted at least 13 women from December 2013 through June 2014. All of these women were black, and the majority of them were either low-income women or had minor criminal records. The youngest victim was only 17 years old. According to a number of the victims, Holtzclaw operated under two specific modi operandi: He would either assault women after he had them in custody for an active warrant, or he would threaten to arrest them unless they had sex with him. After all, nobody would believe a low-income black woman who had a criminal history if they said a police officer had sexually assaulted or even raped them.

Holtzclaw “messed up,” according to an Oklahoma City prosecutor quoted in a Sept. 5 2014 Buzzfeed article about the case, when he targeted a 57-year-old black woman, Jannie Ligons, and forced her to expose her breasts and perform oral sex on him. Ligons is a middle-class grandmother without any criminal history and, thankfully, she felt comfortable enough to go forward to the police and tell them exactly what had happened to her. Ligons was not the first woman to report Holtzclaw, however. In May 2014, a woman known only by her initials, TM, told the police that Holtzclaw had arrested her on active warrants and then forced her to perform oral sex. The police did not do anything with TM’s report until after Ligons’ testimony sparked an investigation. There is no information about if the department is being investigated for not acting earlier. Through arrest histories and GPS records, the Oklahoma City police found at least 13 women Holtzlcaw assaulted. The women who testified were able to share consistent details, like how Holtzclaw would expose himself through the fly of his police uniform before assaulting them.

The Holtzclaw case is horrifying on many levels. At least 13 women were assaulted or raped by the same man, a man who had a position of power and privilege over these women. The women he targeted were vulnerable because of their race, their class and their occupation — several victims had participated in survival sex work at some point in their life, according to the Sept. 5 Buzzfeed article. Holtzclaw targeted them for this reason; he knew that they had criminal records and lived in a high-crime community — that they were unlikely to go forward to the police, that nobody would believe them. In fact, a number of the victims, in transcripts gathered by Buzzfeed in December 2015, said just that: They knew the police would not believe them or they would never get justice because they were poor black women who had criminal records accusing a biracial, white-passing male police officer of a crime that only results in convictions around three percent of the time, according to FBI data. TM, for instance, admitted, “I didn’t want to because people were telling me … they wasn’t going to believe me over a police …” Holtzclaw’s defense attorneys made that exact argument to the all-white and predominantly male jury — that the victims could not be trusted because of their pasts and that they may even have an agenda. As with so many sexual assault cases, the victims were seemingly more on trial than the accused, but this time, justice was ultimately served.

What makes the case even more upsetting is how widely ignored it was, especially by mainstream feminist movements. As a feminist who cares deeply about combatting sexual violence, I did not even find out about the case until I read the September 2014 Buzzfeed article in passing one day, and then, admittedly, completely forgot about it again until author and New York Times contributor Roxane Gay referenced the case on Twitter. Molly Redden pointed out in a Dec. 10, 2015 article for the Guardian that, unlike at many other high-profile rape trials, there were few representatives from national women’s groups in the courtroom. Not one major news network covered the trial or the verdict, according to the same article. Treva Lindsey, a columnist for Cosmopolitan, called the lack of national media attention “both blaring and disconcerting” in a Dec. 15, 2015 article about the trial. 

Further, while Black Lives Matter is a powerful and transformative movement that has brought serious concerns about racial inequality and police brutality to light, Lindsey points out that even within that movement, both black women and victims of sexual violence at the hands of the police, go unheard from within their own community, from major feminist organizations like the National Organization for Women and from the national press.

Many systems failed the 13 or more women Holtzclaw attacked. The criminal justice system failed when the Oklahoma City police department did not take TM’s first report seriously and only acted when a “respectable” victim came forward. Although Holtzclaw will hopefully never leave prison, the court system failed by appointing an all-white jury to hear a case where a male cop systematically attacked black women, rather than a more racially diverse jury. The media failed by not giving what should have been a shocking and high-profile case national coverage. And activists, especially those who have privilege and the ability to be a voice beyond just social media, failed by not helping to share this story or raise more awareness. That is not to say there were not people who raised awareness, especially on Twitter; both Mikki Kendall, a prominent blogger and cultural critic and Black Lives Matter activist Johnetta Elzie had an absolutely amazing and informative livestream of tweets during both Holtzclaw’s verdict and his sentencing, but the movement as a whole did not unite around the Oklahoma City victims as they have in other high-profile cases involving murdered black men. 

However, the silence from mainstream feminist groups is absolutely unacceptable. It is not enough to pay lip service to fighting sexual violence or to demand that black women alone raise awareness for these atrocities. To be truly intersectional and truly feminist, white, upper-middle class women, who will most likely never be targeted in this way, must also speak out for, but never over, the 13 survivors in Oklahoma City and other survivors around the country — especially when nobody else will listen.