“People started texting, Facebooking, tweeting, e-mailing, calling immediately,” said Maggie Quiroga Mainor, who graduated from Holton-Arms, one of an elite network of private schools outside of Washington, D.C., in 1974. “Whether we agree or disagree or hated each other as classmates, we would unite behind even our worst enemy in our class, if we felt like someone was being treated the way we saw her being treated.”

“Her,” in this case, meant Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, a fellow Holton alumna, who friends called “Chrissy,” and whose letter accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault made its way to Senator Dianne Feinstein in July. Months later, Ford reluctantly disclosed her story to The Washington Post, describing how Kavanaugh had drunkenly cornered her in a bedroom at a party with his friend, pinned her down and attempted to remove her clothes, and covered her mouth and turned up music to muffle her screaming. On Thursday, Ford is expected to testify about her experience before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Ford’s story ignited a national news cycle. More locally, it lit up the Holton alumnae network almost immediately, in part because the community is so tightly knit: each class is made up of about 65 young women, many of whom are still in touch, some of whom still live in the area. Many of the 1,800-odd members of the private Holton alumnae Facebook group immediately rallied behind their fellow classmate, whose story has dominated the national discourse—even as it spurs an equally crucial dialogue in the suburb she once called home.

To many Holton students, Ford’s description of the party she attended in 1982 felt familiar. Beginning in middle school, there were parties with young men from surrounding schools like Georgetown Prep, Landon, and St. Albans every Friday and Saturday night, at big houses set back from winding, dimly lit streets. There was money to get alcohol. Parents were absent. The homes had pools and movie theaters and sweeping yards. They were teenagers in a candy store. “It was a highly professional culture of parents, many of whom self-selected those schools to be a big babysitter . . . a lot of them just parked the kids and left,” one 1980s Landon alum who socialized with Ford in high school told me. A woman who graduated from Holton in 1988, and lived down the street from Ford, recalled students from the boys’ schools pulling up to parties with duffel bags full of alcohol. “I never went to a party where there wasn’t alcohol; it was a drunk fest,” she said. “You’re living in a bubble where a lot of the families are exceedingly wealthy, a lot of parents are not tuned in to their kids, and, a lot of times, parents were away and the mice would play.”

In interviews with more than a dozen alumni from area schools who graduated between the mid-1970s and the early 2000s, I repeatedly heard stories of parties spiraling into debauchery, with drunken, unsupervised teenagers coupling off with various degrees of privacy. Because the students came from a handful of schools, it was not uncommon for the party’s host to be a stranger. Indeed, many of the people I spoke with said they couldn’t necessarily pinpoint a particular house or give an address. “I remember my parents would say, ‘Whose party are you going to?’ And I’d say, ‘I have no idea,’” the Holton alumni who graduated in ’88 told me. “You’d just drive there and look for all the cars.” Another Holton alum, who was on the cheerleading squad with Ford, told me that the squad’s captains warned them not to go anywhere without two other people, and that if they were alone and drunk with local boys, the boys would say something had happened, whether it did or not. “This was like an organized sport,” she recalled. “It was very clear that they would pick out a girl and start complimenting them.”

Many witnessed moments like the one Ford described, or heard about them, or experienced them firsthand. “When I first read the story on Sunday, I said, ‘Of course this happened,’” a woman who graduated from Holton in the early 2000s told me. “This happened so much that there was nothing difficult to believe about what she’s saying. How could anyone doubt this? It felt personal to a lot of us, because her story is so similar to a lot of ours, and so the attacks on her felt personal.” (Kavanaugh has repeatedly denied the claims against him. “I have never sexually assaulted anyone—not in high school, not ever,” he told Fox News on Monday. “I’ve always treated women with dignity and respect.”)

Less than a day after the Post published its interview with Ford, Sarah Wolfolds, another Holton alum, posted a link to a Google Doc in the Facebook group. It was an open letter in support of Ford, demanding a “thorough and independent investigation before the Senate can reasonably vote on Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination,” and thanking Ford for coming forward. “Dr. Blasey Ford’s experience is all too consistent with stories we heard and lived while attending Holton,” it read. “Many of us are survivors ourselves.” A week later, more than 1,100 alumni had offered their signatures—more than half the total number of people who have graduated from Holton-Arms since Ford’s commencement. Along with the signatures, a handful of alums began to post their own stories of sexual assault. “I was date-raped at a New Year’s Eve party in college,” Julie Jakopic, an organizational strategist who grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, and graduated from Holton in 1978, wrote on her Facebook page last Monday, a day after Ford’s interview was published. “I was ashamed. We had friends in common. I told no one for a decade. Not until I was in training to become a sexual assault counselor. I learned in that training that my delay and most delay is normal. You blame yourself. Society blames you. Why tell anyone? Today, I remember the date because it was New Year’s Eve of my sophomore year. I remember the house because it was his fraternity house. I remember only his first name. I remember what I was wearing and never wore again. Do you believe me? Then you should believe Dr. Ford.”

Jakopic, who runs Virginia’s List, a political action committee supporting progressive female candidates in Virginia, is open about her Democratic leanings, and said she was not motivated by partisan politics when she decided to share her story. ”One of the things I’ve learned is that if you can speak truth to pain, other people will feel comfortable sharing theirs,” she said, adding that within 16 hours after she posted her story, two fellow Holton alums got in touch with her to share their own stories of sexual assault. “The more people that tell, the more people that tell. You started to see more people post on the group about what they had gone through.”

One of those people was a 1998 Holton graduate who wishes to remain anonymous. In her post, which she published Saturday, she described an incident that she said occurred when she was a 16-year-old sophomore. She was at a friend’s house, when her friend’s older brother and his friends, who were seniors at Landon, admitted that they had been shown naked videos of her that were filmed years earlier without her consent. “My best friend’s older brother had placed a hidden camera in her bathroom ceiling vent and captured hours of footage of me,” she wrote. “When they told me about the videos, my ears started to ring, and my heart raced. I was hit by immediate and intense feelings of humiliation and panic, as my mind raced through every private act and body part they would have viewed: my awkward shape as I entered puberty, me showering and using the bathroom, changing maxi pads. I felt violated and self-conscious. I felt ugly, exposed, and misshapen.” The friend whose house she was at when she was told about the taping independently confirmed the account to me. “I’ve decided to share one of my personal experiences in the hope that it encourages my D.C. friends to also speak up about this problem, especially the men I know who attended these schools,” the post continued. “I also hope that by testifying to the culture I grew up in, my friends who are not from D.C. will keep an open mind when hearing my fellow alumna’s testimony [this] week.”

Over the weekend, seven Holton alums shared their experiences of sexual assault with me. Many had not spoken of the incidents since they occurred in high school or shortly thereafter. All of them said that they had not widely shared their stories out of shame, embarrassment, and fear of backlash. And they all felt compelled to come forward now to support Dr. Ford, and to change the culture of silence and misogyny they’ve experienced.

One such Holton alum, who declined to use her name, is a computer programmer who graduated in 1988. This woman recalled herself as a “slightly geeky girl who crossed over into the popular, party crowd,” and described the D.C.-area social scene as a boys’ club, in which women were routinely dehumanized. “When boys grow up going to all-boys schools, they don’t have experience with girls being real human beings,” she said. “In the 80s, the more privileged the boys were—senators’ sons, people who were old-money D.C.—the more they talked about girls like sex objects.” (In the 1983 Georgetown Prep yearbook, Kavanaugh and several of his friends referred to themselves as “Renate Alumni,” an apparent reference to a student at a nearby girls’ school, Renate Schroeder.)

When she was a junior at Holton, a friend asked if she wanted to go on a double date with two Georgetown Prep alums, who were then freshman in college and home for winter break. Her friend drove them to one of the boys’ houses, a big estate in D.C., as she recalls, where she was quickly left alone with one of the boys, a handsome college wrestler who she said started kissing her. “He was cute. I was into kissing him,” she said. “After that, he held his hand over my mouth and forced himself on me. I really tried to stop it, but women are so deeply conditioned to go along, and the traumatic response is to freeze.”

She tried to push him off, but he was a wrestler. “I was struggling, and totally unprepared for it and his bulk and his skills.” She does not remember what happened immediately afterward, but recalls leaving with her friend soon after. On the drive home, she shook as she relayed the details to her friend. “I told her that he raped me, and she kept telling me that I was lucky, because he was so cute,” she said. “That was almost worse—that sort of response from a girlfriend. I never told anyone after that. Why would I tell anyone after that reaction? What was anyone going to do? I was shamed into silence.” She said that for weeks, she showered obsessively, because she swore she could still smell her assailant. But after that, she cordoned off the event in her mind. “If my mom reads this, she’d ask why I didn’t tell her.”

Another Holton graduate, who graduated in the early 2000s, was still hesitant to come forward. Her hands shook as she told me her story, even after I agreed to grant her anonymity. “I still have a fear of being outed. You see how people are questioning [Ford] about her character and her choices—why didn’t she come forward? What was she doing in that room? Why was she in a swimsuit?” she said. “But for a lot of us who kept silent for a long time, we’ve been waiting for an opportunity to right this. You can’t talk about trauma without talking about shame, because it gets hardwired into the experience. But shame can’t survive the spoken word.”

It was mostly shame that she felt as she emerged from a room at a small party her senior year of high school. She had tried hard alcohol for the first time that night, and she saw a boy who she had met once before. “He was flirting with me, and I rejected his advances all night, but I didn’t realize how drunk I was.” When he pulled her into a bathroom and started taking his clothes off and climbing on top of her, she remembers telling him to stop. She didn’t think to scream; it was a small gathering of people she mostly knew. She told him she was a virgin. “I thought that would stop him. I was trying to reason it, like he was someone who was trying to have sex with me—not like someone who was trying to rape me.”

She said that the boy was an athlete, and she was half his size. “He just kept going,” she said. “In the shock after I left the room, what kept going through my head was, ‘Oh my god, I just lost my virginity,’ not, ‘Oh my god, I was just raped.’ When I talked to my friends about it and was hysterical, I just kept saying, ‘This is so bad. I just lost my virginity.’ It’s not like I didn’t learn about rape and sexual assault, but you pictured rape as a sketchy character in an alley or a guy who drugs your drink, not a friend of a friend at a small social gathering, which was why it was so hard to process.”

Another Holton graduate from the 1988 class, who told me she started drinking heavily because she thought it was her “ticket socially,” eventually stopped going to private-school parties and started going to bars around D.C., where she said she felt safer, even among older strangers. “You were taught that this is the ticket to a social life,” she told me. “What you’re not taught is the reality that you’re going to be putting yourself at risk.” One December night, when she was 17, she told her parents that she was spending the night at a friend’s house, but she went out and drank heavily in Georgetown instead. She was so intoxicated that she passed out on Memorial Bridge. When she came to, she was being raped by a stranger in his apartment. Her parents had called around frantically to find her, so her friends knew something had happened. She went to the hospital to have a rape kit administered and file a police report. “I didn’t really leave the house for three weeks. It was humiliating.”

But she talked about her assault, and spent years working through the trauma. As she read Ford’s account in the Post, she says she was struck by the number of women who said they were burdened with similar secrets. “When I read it, I though it was just really sad. I hope that women who have never talked about it feel some relief. It’s taken me decades and a lot of work, and I can’t imagine if I had just buried it. I feel for them, and for Dr. Ford, who did that and is now having her life torn apart. A young girl’s suffering is being used as a political tool.”

After reading Dr. Ford’s interview, a number of Holton alums told me they were struck by a similar theme: their alleged assaults had also occurred at the hands of multiple young men. (On Wednesday morning, another woman who attended a high school in the Washington, D.C., area, Julie Swetnick, alleged in a sworn affidavit that she witnessed Kavanaugh at parties where inebriated women were “gang-raped,” and that she herself was gang-raped at one party where Kavanaugh was present. On Wednesday, the White House said in a statement on behalf of Kavanaugh: “This is ridiculous and from the Twilight Zone. I don’t know who this is and this never happened.”) One 1998 graduate, who did not want to use her name, said she was assaulted by a boy from Landon, while his friend closed the door and stood in the corner, chuckling. She had known both of them since elementary school, likely from Mrs. Simpson’s ballroom-dancing class, she said, which began in fourth grade. She told me that she was not popular, and she and the boys ran in different crowds. But when she was 16, a girl from a different prep school invited her and her friend to a debutante ball. As soon as they arrived that evening, she said she was handed a glass of champagne, and the drinking continued for the rest of the night. “I walked into a gilded sitting room and saw my old neighbor, another Holton girl, vomit into a large urn that looked like it belonged in the National Gallery of Art,” she said.

Parents rented out four adjoining hotel suites for an after-party, she said, each with two bedrooms and a sitting room, and none with adult supervision. She said that she got drunk—too drunk to walk or speak straight—and the two boys steered her into one of the bedrooms. “I remember we were in the corner suite, the room on the left if you were standing in the sitting room looking at the door to the hallway, and I remember when the drunker one got on top of me. My body and my voice were sluggish, uncooperative.” She said it was all going too fast, and everything about her body was slow. “He was too drunk to get it up, and he rolled off of me. As he and his friend joked about how drunk he was, I pulled myself up and stumbled out of the room.”

She said her friend saw her come out of the room, and heard the boys talking about what had happened “We only spoke about it briefly the next day, and then did not discuss it again until this week. I never told anyone else. I did not tell my parents or my husband, who I have been with for nearly 20 years. What was there to tell? I was drunk. I hadn’t been raped. He was drunk, too, so didn’t that mean he also wasn’t in control of his actions? I felt dirty and ashamed, like it had been a sport for them. They were popular, and I was not. Who would have believed me?”

The friend who went with her to the party confirmed her account to me. “She was troubled, but she also felt like there was nothing she could do,” she said. “She believed that no one would believe she hadn’t brought it on herself or wanted it to happened, and she believed that people would mock or blame or ostracize her. And the sad thing is, she was most likely right.”

On another occasion, in the summer of 1996, this woman was casually dating a student from Georgetown Prep, and she joined him and two friends who attended Georgetown Day School for a night out in Georgetown. They had intended to shoot pool at Georgetown Billiards or stop at Café Northwest, but, as usual, they ended up at a spot on the south side of the canal in Georgetown that came to be known as the “Grassy Knoll”—a secluded area between two buildings with tree cover, overlooking K Street on one side and the Potomac from above. They had all been drinking, and the Holton student and her boyfriend started making out. He got up to light a cigarette, and, heavily intoxicated, she laid in the grass until she felt someone kiss and grope her. “I was so drunk that, at first, I thought it was my crush,” she said, but it was one of his friends from Georgetown Day. Another one of his friends realized that she was too drunk to know what was going on, and told the boy to “cut it out,” she recalls. He didn’t relent at first, but the friend got closer and told him to get off of her. He stopped, and he and her boyfriend left. The friend stayed behind with the Holton girl until she sobered up. “Neither of us spoke about it to anyone,” she said. “I messaged him this week to thank him for being brave enough to stand up to his friends.”

The man, who still lives in D.C., confirmed the account to me. He told me that he was shocked at the time to be put in that situation, but was not surprised in general. “I knew things like this happened, and that women were casually taken advantage of all the time, especially in these circles,” he said. “Guys were fully aware of what they were doing. They had just been raised in a world where consequences did not exist, and they had not been properly taught about consent or how to respect women. I don’t think men are born with an innate lack of respect for women. It is a learned behavior.”

That mentality resonated with another Holton alumna who graduated in the early 1990s. She had been dating a St. Albans student for a few years in high school when she went to a party at one of his friend’s houses in D.C. with a bunch of other Holton girls. They were all standing outside, she told me, razzing the boys. “It was all in good nature. We were just kidding around.” She said something lighthearted to one of the boys, and he replied with a comment she had not expected. “He said, ‘Well, at least I’m not on videotape for everyone to see having sex.’” She looked at her friend, and her friend looked at her, and they both walked away. What she found out in the moments that followed was that her boyfriend had hidden an 8-mm. camera in his room and taped them having consensual sex on multiple occasions. He then showed the tape to his friends, without her knowledge or consent. “He showed it to—I don’t know how many guys. I will never know how many guys saw this tape,” she said, her voice breaking. “I was absolutely destroyed,” not just by the fact that she’d been violated by her boyfriend, but because no one who had seen the tape had told her what he’d done, for who knows how long.

In some ways, things are different now. Parents of current Holton students told me that the student body has been “on fire” for the past week, debating the issue in classes, posting their support for Ford on social media, and pushing to write their own open letter in solidarity. “They’re asking who would make something like this up, and create all this turmoil if she didn’t have to,” one mom told me. Holton’s head of school, Susanna A. Jones, released a statement soon after the Post’s story was published, writing, “In these cases, it is imperative that all voices are heard. As a school that empowers women to use their voices, we are proud of this alumna for using hers.”

A group of current students are talking about how they can go to D.C. for the hearing on Thursday, according to some parents, in order to be there to show their support for Ford. Holton alums have been working on similar plans. “I hope that what’s been happening in the Holton community—people sharing these stories, signing the open letter, coming together—will help make things different for this generation,” said the woman who graduated in the early 2000s, and was raped at the small party when she was 16. “That they’ll have the language, and know there is the support we didn’t have in the past.”

The language of misogyny, too, is persistent. Last Friday, Holton’s upper school had a co-ed dance scheduled. According to several parents, girls were worried that boys would not even show up, because private-school boys posted memes online mocking Holton’s motto, “Find a way or make one.” One of them appeared to be an explicit attack on Ford herself: “Find a way or make one up.”

But even as young girls today forge ahead, an entire generation of women must reckon with how they were treated in the past. For them, the #MeToo movement is not about the fall of titans—the excommunication of once-powerful C.E.O.s, entertainers, or politicians. It is more granular, more personal, and infinitely more complex—a re-examination of past events, guided by a new set of norms. In some ways, his nomination has put Kavanaugh in the former group, among the Olympians to be felled. But before he rose to national prominence, he stood for nothing more than the run-of-the-mill product of a pervasive cultural attitude that is finally being challenged. “It’s systematic,” an alumnus of Landon, the boys’ school closest to Holton, told me. “It’s not just that there are bad apples, either. These places make more bad apples. And they take the bad apples and polish them up to be shiny apples, who can one day be nominees to the Supreme Court.”