This week, for the first time since 1647, a member of the royal family was arrested in the United Kingdom, not over allegations of sexual wrongdoing but for trade-related communications with the supplier of those victims, Jeffrey Epstein, to whom he is supposed to have leaked state secrets. The public outrage in the US about Epstein forced the government to release the files, including emails between Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Epstein now under investigation in the criminal case.

The arrestee formerly known as Prince Andrew was accused by Virginia Guiffre with having had sex with her when she was a minor being trafficked by Epstein. He has always denied wrongdoing. Until his arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public office, only his family had held him accountable for his ongoing association with Epstein after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution. “Today our broken hearts have lifted,” Virginia Giuffre’s family stated, “at the news that no one is above the law, not even royalty.”

But while the English proceedings are yet to play out, others are still being protected from the consequences of their crimes and the voices of their victims. The simplest explanation of Donald Trump’s furious, frantic behavior since last summer is that he has a lot to hide, and US attorney general Pam Bondi has proven eager to hide it on his behalf.

Without feminism, the sequence of events that led to Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest would never have happened. It’s a reminder that feminism is powerful and important and even transformative, which is why there’s so much pushback from those who benefit from the old inequalities and the old silences, which are pretty much the same thing.

The milestones on that road to Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest look like this: an international surge of feminist outcry about violence against women and the misogyny around it, in general and in relationship to specific crimes and perpetrators, arose around........

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