Shaunna Thomas has spent more than a decade at the forefront of many of the biggest cultural and political fights over sexual and gender-based violence.
Now the co-founder and executive director of the gender justice organization UltraViolet is stepping aside to make way for the next generation of leaders.
“It was really becoming clear to me that how we were thinking about organizing women and advancing gender justice needs to evolve,” she said. “We’re in a dangerous moment. We’re in a period of backlash. There will ultimately be backlash to the backlash, and it’s our job to swing the pendulum back. And I think that takes a really high degree of innovation and new ways of thinking.”
Thomas is now undertaking a leadership transition in the aftermath of a presidential election defined by stark gender divides and a backlash to the movement she helped spearhead. Arisha Hatch, who has most recently been vice president and chief of campaigns at Color of Change, will take over as UltraViolet’s interim executive director.
Thomas and her co-founder, Nita Chaudhary, launched UltraViolet in 2011 to adapt the gender justice movement to a new landscape dominated by social media and a fast-moving news cycle and to bring forth a cultural shift toward naming and exposing sexual violence.
“The context when we launched was so different from today,” Thomas said. “No one was organizing women online as women across a range of issues that impact women directly.”
Thomas came to progressive activism from a privileged upbringing in a conservative family in Los Angeles. She, like many young activists in the 2000s, had a political awakening spurred by the Iraq War. But she didn’t become a feminist activist until she was working as a professional political operative in her 20s.
“I wasn’t raised a feminist. And it really took entering the workplace and specifically working with congressmen, frankly, to discover that sexism was not over,” said Thomas, who has written about being harassed by a member of Congress who she was lobbying.
Thomas and Chaudhary co-founded UltraViolet after both working on the Affordable Care Act, which passed with an anti-abortion provision to gain the support of centrist Democrats and whose protections for contraceptive coverage quickly became the target of attacks from Republicans.
While there had long been national organizations dedicated to advocating for women’s rights, Thomas and Chaudhary envisioned creating one with the agility to organize its members on social media, respond to the 24-hour news cycle and fight sexism in multiple arenas of American society.
“Women needed a way to speak up quickly and practically show that there would be a cost to people and institutions who moved against us,” she said.
In its first few years, UltraViolet racked up big victories. When the Susan G. Komen Foundation halted grant funding for breast examinations at Planned Parenthood, an outcry from UltraViolet and other advocacy groups led the organization to reverse course. UltraViolet spearheaded a campaign that led to over 100 advertisers pulling their ads from the late conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh’s show after he insulted a Georgetown Law student with gender-based slurs. And after UltraViolet members protested outside Reebok stores, the retailer dropped its partnership with rapper Rick Ross over song lyrics the organization said promoted rape.
UltraViolet’s grassroots membership wanted not only policy changes but accountability for sexual abuse and the systems that perpetrated it. The organization drew national attention to the rape case of a teenage girl in Steubenville, Ohio, as an instance of how survivors were failed by people in positions of power.
“It was not a national conversation, the epidemic of sexual assault and harassment, at that time in 2012 or 2013,” she said. “But the appetite for exposing that reality and creating the possibility of accountability and justice resonated with a really broad cross section of the country.”
Survivors were seeking to make their voices heard and UltraViolet filled in the gaps, bringing sexual violence into the public discourse and providing a framework of support and recourse for survivors where the laws and institutions were falling short. After President Donald Trump’s first election in 2016, much of UltraViolet’s work became focused on accountability for major figures in the entertainment industry.
“It had been a part of our theory of change for years, at that point, to identify powerful people, particularly in media and entertainment who have enormous power at work, but also whose worldview is shaping the content that billions of people are consuming,” Thomas said.
UltraViolet successfully pushed for Fox News to fire host Bill O’Reilly after The New York Times exposed his past history of paying confidential settlements for sexual harassment. Through that campaign, UltraViolet became connected with Rose McGowan, an actress and outspoken feminist who was working on a book about abuse in Hollywood and said she had been raped by a powerful man in the industry, later identified as film producer Harvey Weinstein.
Thomas suggested to investigative reporters at The New York Times that they probe the allegations that had long swirled around Weinstein. The Times’ exposé on Weinstein’s decades of abuse and intimidation of women broke open a dam for reckonings of powerful men. Weinstein was later convicted of rape and sexual assault in New York and California; his conviction in New York was overturned by a court in 2024 but he remains behind bars ahead of a retrial set to begin in April.
It didn’t stop with Weinstein. After investigative reporter Ronan Farrow’s book “Catch and Kill” documented the extensive coverup of Weinstein’s abuses by powerful figures, UltraViolet called for consequences for NBC News executives named in the book. The #MeToo movement, founded by activist Tarana Burke a decade earlier, became a national phenomenon as survivors shared their stories. UltraViolet charted a plane to fly over Hollywood flying a banner that read: “Hollywood: Stop Enabling Abuse.”
But the seeds of a backlash to #MeToo were also planted in the first Trump term as Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed after being publicly accused of sexual assault, which he denied. UltraViolet was also drawing attention to a rise in online harassment and gendered hate speech on social media platforms.
All of those forces came to a head in 2024 when Trump, who has been accused of sexual misconduct by dozens of women and was found liable for sexually abusing the advice columnist E. Jean Carroll, won reelection to the presidency. Trump staked his campaign on an aggressive, ascendant view of masculinity that resonated with many young men voters, and has picked numerous officials linked to sexual misconduct allegations to his Cabinet.
In 2019, Thomas argued that institutions hadn’t caught up to the cultural repudiation of misogyny and sexual abuse. Now, things are different: While the height of the #MeToo movement led to far more laws and protections for survivors of abuse, the culture has swung back to a place of more hostility toward gender justice and equity, advocates say.
“I don’t think the lesson here is that feminism is unpopular,” Thomas said. “I think the lesson is that if we don’t educate and organize people to consider their gender biases and to advocate for feminist values in a way that a majority can hear it and absorb it, the right wing is going to continue to be successful weaponizing gender bias.”
The current moment requires “humility” from across the progressive and gender justice movements, Thomas said, including new strategies to broaden the tent of those movements.
“We launched under the assumption and belief, which turned out to be true, that there are millions of people who are with us who haven’t been mobilized or activated, and this moment calls for something different,” she said. “It’s not enough. Our job has to be to organize and expand the base of people who are with us. We can’t just be happy with the people who call themselves feminists now.”
UltraViolet had for years been sounding the alarm about social media companies platforming hateful misogynistic speech and the rise of right wing content targeted toward young men on social media blaming women, people of color and immigrants for social ills. Those warnings, she said, went largely unheeded by much of the Democratic political apparatus until it was too late.
“When you’re not willing to engage in the playing field, you’re conceding the whole playing field. And I think we saw the impact of that having devastating consequences,” she said.
Aside from the accountability campaigns UltraViolet won, Thomas said she’s especially proud of her work toward broader cultural shifts like believing women who come forward with allegations and recognizing gender disinformation as its own form of online harassment.
“We’ve introduced the structural reforms that I think can lead to gender justice,” she said. “Long term, it’s going to be on the next generation of leaders and activists to make that happen.”
Thomas said she believes that the Trump administration is overreaching and miscalculating with its widespread purge of the federal bureaucracy and congressional Republicans’ efforts to renew massive tax cuts passed in Trump’s first term. She also believes Hollywood is also “overestimating the appetite” for backing away from embracing #MeToo and welcoming previously-exiled figures back into the fold.
“This is not permanent. This state of the world is not permanent,” Thomas said. “Our opposition is making massive mistakes, and it’s our job to expose those, to hold them accountable and be ready for when the pendulum is swinging back — and to be ready to know what you are going to do with power when you have it.”
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