#MeToo is five years old. These trials show how far we’ve come | Jill Filipovic

As Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey and Paul Haggis are all in court, it is clear that there has, in fact, been forward motion - in the courts, in our workplaces, in society

Five years nearly to the day since the New York Times and the New Yorker published their explosive exposes on Harvey Weinstein and his myriad misdeeds - all of them leveraging his vaunted position in Hollywood to extract sex and force humiliation on hopeful actresses - Weinstein and several other men accused as part of the broader #MeToo movement are seeing the inside of a courtroom.

Weinstein, who was already sentenced to 23 years in prison for rape and sexual assault in New York, now faces trial for similar crimes in California (Weinstein is appealing the New York conviction). Paul Haggis, who won an Oscar for directing the film Crash and has famously pulled back the cover on the Church of Scientology, goes to trial next month in a civil suit filed by a film publicist who says he raped her. And Kevin Spacey is also facing a civil suit filed by actor Anthony Rapp, who says Spacey got on top of him and made a sexual advance when he was just 14 and Spacey was 26.

All three men have a few things in common. They are (or were) among Hollywood's most powerful men. They are a tiny minority among men accused of assault as part of the #MeToo movement to actually see the inside of a courtroom. They have all been accused of sexual wrongdoing by multiple people. They all deny the claims against them. And they all demonstrate both the benefits and the limitations of the legal system adjudicating sexual assault claims - and their stories, five years on, show how much the #MeToo movement changed, and how it hasn't.

That these three men are in court at all is itself extraordinary. The vast majority of sexual assaults are never even reported to police, let alone prosecuted or heard in a civil proceeding. And the fact that Weinstein has been convicted once, even though he is appealing, is a highly unusual outcome, especially for powerful men accused of sexual violence.