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Two days before the debate, my team and I had finished a grueling morning debate prep session. We had taken a break for lunch. The television was on in the room, with no volume. Then a commentator came on to warn viewers that they were about to hear something vulgar. Boy, was that true.

I don’t have a lot to say about the Access Hollywood tape that hasn’t been said. I will just note that Donald Trump is gleefully describing committing sexual assault. That got somewhat lost in the shock of it all. Too many people focused on his boorishness—such a crude man, so vulgar. True. But even if he were the height of elegance and graciousness, it wouldn’t make it okay that he’s describing sexual assault.

For many, hearing the Donald Trump tape was literally sickening. As for me, it made me sad—for women and girls, for men and boys, for all of us. It was . . . horrible, just horrible. It still is. And it always will be, because that tape is never going away. It’s part of our history now.

To divert attention from his own ugliness, Trump brought to our second debate three women who had accused my husband of bad acts decades ago, plus a woman whose accused rapist I had been ordered by a judge to represent back in Arkansas. It was an awful stunt.

I don’t know what the Trump campaign was hoping to accomplish other than the obvious: dredge up old allegations that had been litigated years before, divert attention from the Access Hollywood tape, throw me off my game, and distract voters from the election’s unbelievably high stakes. He wasn’t trying to make a stand for these women. He was just using them.

This was a presidential debate. That’s a big deal. We were supposed to talk about issues that mattered to people’s lives. Instead, Trump used this moment to get back in his comfort zone. He loves to humiliate women, loves to talk about how disgusting we are. He was hoping to rattle me. I was determined not to give him that satisfaction.

Before I stepped onstage, Ron Klain said to me, “He’s trying to get in your head.” I said, “Ya think?” Then I went out there and won the debate.

Something I wish every man across America understood is how much fear accompanies women throughout our lives. So many of us have been threatened or harmed. So many of us have helped friends recover from a traumatic incident. It’s difficult to convey what all this violence does to us. It adds up in our hearts and our nervous systems.

A few years ago, the hashtag #yesallwomen was trending for a while. It spoke to me, like it did to so many others. In college and law school, we had a million defensive habits: hold your keys like a weapon when you’re out alone at night, walk one another home no matter what. Many women I know have been groped, grabbed, or worse. It even happens to members of Congress. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has written frankly about how Congressmen have leered at her and grabbed her waist in the congressional gym.

I’m very lucky that nothing too bad ever happened to me. One time in college, I went on a blind date with a young man who wouldn’t take repeated nos for an answer, and I had to slap him to get him away from me. But he did back off, and I went to bed that night shaken but not traumatized. And when I was twenty-nine, working for Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign in Indiana, I had dinner one night with a group of older men who were in charge of the Democratic Party’s get-out-the-vote operation in the state. I had been pestering them for a while for information about their Election Day plans, and they were annoyed with me. I started explaining once again what I needed to know from them and why. Suddenly one of the men reached across the table, grabbed me by my turtleneck, and yanked me toward him. He hissed in my face, “Just shut up.” I froze, then managed to pull his hand from my neck, tell him to never touch me again, and walk out of the room on shaking legs. The whole incident probably lasted thirty seconds. I’ll never forget it.

Yet that’s nothing compared to the violence that millions of women and girls across our country endure on a regular basis.

About four months before Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood tape was released, a very different message went viral. An unnamed woman known as Emily Doe who had been sexually assaulted while unconscious wrote a letter about her ordeal and read it in court to her attacker, a Stanford athlete. A friend forwarded the letter to me. I read it once, then immediately went back to the beginning and read it again. I hope I can meet the author someday and tell her how brave I think she is.

“To girls everywhere,” she wrote, “I am with you . . .

On nights when you feel alone, I am with you. When people doubt you or dismiss you, I am with you. I fought every day for you. So never stop fighting, I believe you. As the author Anne Lamott once wrote, “Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.” Although I can’t save every boat, I hope that by speaking today, you absorbed a small amount of light, a small knowing that you can’t be silenced, a small satisfaction that justice was served, a small assurance that we are getting somewhere, and a big, big knowing that you are important, unquestionably, you are untouchable, you are beautiful, you are to be valued, respected, undeniably, every minute of every day, you are powerful, and nobody can take that away from you.

Early on the morning of November 9, when it came time to decide on what I’d say in my concession speech, I remembered those words. Inspired by them, I wrote these:

“To all the little girls who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams.”

Wherever she is, I hope Emily Doe knows how much her words and her strength meant to so many.