Alyssa Milano

In the midst of the Harvey Weinstein “maelstrom” in 2017, Alyssa Milano fired off a tweet before going to bed, said Karen Heller in The Washington Post. It read, “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply.” The actress woke up to 53,000 replies; within two days, #MeToo appeared 12 million times on Facebook and Twitter and trended in 85 countries. “I was in over my head,” admits Milano, 46. Nonetheless, she was struck by the scale on which “collective pain could be transformed into a collective power.” A bedroom-poster idol since co-starring on the 1980s sitcom Who’s the Boss?, Milano got an early taste of activism at 15, going on national TV to kiss the cheek of Ryan White, a teen infected with HIV who was fighting to attend school in Indiana. She experienced her own sexual assaults at 19 and 24, and recently returned to therapy to address her trauma. Now in activist overdrive, she’s prominent on the political front lines, appearing at the Brett Kavanaugh hearings on Capitol Hill, and in Parkland, Fla.; Flint, Mich.; and the Mexico border. Her advocacy has made her the target of vicious online trolling, but Milano says it only fuels her determination. “Are they trying to silence me, trying to hurt me? Because, like, none of it’s working.”

Ian Witlen/REX/Shutterstock, Shutterstock, AP ■