dream hampton wishes she could be more optimistic these days.
The filmmaker and activist could be taking a well-deserved victory lap right now. In 2019, she executive produced the intense and damning Surviving R. Kelly, a Lifetime documentary series about the popular R&B singer—and the decades of accusations that he sexually abused Black women and girls. Kelly had evaded most consequences until after the #MeToo movement went viral, and several of the abuse survivors went public in hampton’s documentary—leading to a long-delayed but decisive reckoning. This June, Kelly was sentenced to 30 years in prison, for sex trafficking and federal racketeering; just last month, another jury found him guilty on charges of child pornography and sex abuse.
But when I interviewed hampton in early September, for Fortune’s new feature on the five-year anniversary of #MeToo going viral, she was preoccupied with something else that had happened in June: The Supreme Court’s ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating the federal protection for U.S. women’s right to have an abortion. More than 20 million women have already lost access to reproductive health care as a result of the ruling—and hampton, who’s been “a Black feminist for my whole adult life,” sees the court’s decision as part of a larger reaction to #MeToo and the overall “Sisyphean nature” of working towards racial and gender equity.
“We are certainly in the backlash phase,” she says. “I just didn’t think I would live in a world where Roe would be overturned.”
Even when it comes to Kelly and his long-delayed legal comeuppance, hampton isn’t exactly exulting—in part because she’s a longtime critic of the U.S. criminal justice system and its structural racism.
“I have organized against the carceral system, against our system of punishment, for a very long time,” she says. “And I think it might have been even more meaningful if R. Kelly had apologized. If there had been contrition, and restitution, he would have actually changed the culture.”
In the following conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, hampton reflects on the complicated legacy of, and backlash to, #MeToo—including the recent celebrity trial that turned into the “biggest public flogging I’ve ever seen.”
Fortune: It’s been five years since #MeToo went viral, and more than 16 years since Tarana Burke first coined the phrase “me too” to support women and girls of color who survived sexual abuse. How do you think about the movement’s legacy today?
hampton: The thing about #MeToo was that it wasn’t just saying, “Only speak up if you experienced severe violence, rape, and trauma.” It was a wide-open conversation. So many stories were nested under that hashtag—about all of the gaslighting that happens in corporate or educational spaces, or whatever spaces you enter—and there were all these women sharing the things that they’d experienced, and being validated.
There was a real calling out and naming of names. That has been how we’ve organized around racial justice—we didn’t just say “Corporations are supporting apartheid,” we named those corporations—but we’d not seen this kind of naming of individual men before.
How much did #MeToo going viral help Surviving R. Kelly have an impact, after he’d avoided consequences for so many public accusations in the past?
I don’t know about #MeToo. But R. Kelly was a genre artist, who sings Black music for Black people, and Black Twitter is a force. I was mocked in meetings, by the people in charge, when I told them that we better have a Twitter campaign [for promoting the documentary]. Which was insane, because at that point there was a Twitter president! But they were like, “Do not listen to dream and her Black Twitter talk.” [laughs]
And so [Lifetime executive] Brie Bryant thankfully got together a social media plan that involved identifying leaders in the space, people like [Black feminist writers and activists] Feminista Jones and Mikki Kendall, who appears in the doc. These are people who have set conversations on this space for more than a decade at this point. It was Black Twitter, and not #MeToo, that made R. Kelly a story.
Given what you’ve said elsewhere about R. Kelly’s prison sentence, is it fair to call your reaction ambivalence?
Yeah, absolutely. I have organized against the carceral system, against our system of punishment, for a very long time. And I think it might have been even more meaningful if R. Kelly had apologized; if there had been contrition, and restitution, he would have actually changed the culture. That would have been more meaningful than a prison sentence, where you continue to have fans and other powerful people in the community who tell you that you’re innocent.
After a sentence of 30 years, what do you expect out of his second trial [which, a week after this conversation, resulted in a guilty conviction on several counts of child pornography and sex abuse]?
I thought it was interesting that they went forward with it. Usually when you get a conviction, other states just decide to drop the case. But given the reversal of Bill Cosby’s conviction, maybe someone thought, “Perhaps we should fortify this.”
Have you seen any progress, in terms of infrastructure or support or just a more receptive environment, for assault survivors who come forward today?
I don’t know. I mean, I watched the Amber Heard–Johnny Depp trial. [Heard, Depp’s former wife, had described herself after their marriage ended as a survivor of “domestic abuse”; Depp sued her for defamation, in an ugly and widely publicized trial, and won.] If I’m a young survivor, I’m watching how Amber Heard became this kind of shorthand—and this is a young, beautiful, blonde, white woman, you know? I mean, yes, our girls got dragged and doxxed and abused by the public. But I think that the trial was probably the biggest public flogging that I’ve seen. And that is part of this about-face.
We are certainly in the backlash phase. It’s painful to be in this phase. I just didn’t think I would live in a world where Roe would be overturned. All of these things are connected; all of these things are about restricting the progress that women have made. I wish we could say that we were marching toward freedom, as opposed to fighting for abortion rights.
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