Updated at 1:55 p.m. ET on January 16, 2025

Imagine that a foreign-born billionaire buys Facebook, asks its engineers to boost his own posts, and then introduces a payment system that rewards users for pandering to his whims and prejudices.

Also imagine that the billionaire happens across a news report on the death toll in Iraq following the allied invasion back in 2003, and links that carnage to the intelligence failures that were used to justify the war. Bristling with righteous outrage, our fictional billionaire then suggests that the state and the media have covered up this whole incendiary topic.

This was how Elon Musk sounded to many Britons after he belatedly discovered the organized child-sexual-abuse networks known as “grooming gangs.” Here was a real scandal: Networks of adult men, primarily British citizens of Pakistani descent, had trafficked and raped young girls in towns across England, over many years, aided by failures of local governments and the police. But the scandal wasn’t new, nor had reporters ignored it en masse. “You don’t hate the legacy media enough,” Musk insisted at one point during his multiday spree of posts on X, his social-media platform. Never mind that a legacy media outlet—Rupert Murdoch’s London Times—first broke the story of the child-sex-abuse ring in Rotherham, 14 years ago.

[Ali Breland: Elon Musk has appointed himself king of the world]

Musk’s horrified reaction to the scandal, which appears to have been prompted by a viral post on New Year’s Eve, is entirely justified. However, it comes quite late, and demonstrates his usual self-centeredness: His thinking seems to be that if he didn’t hear about the scandal during the 2010s, then surely no one else did, either. His ownership of X, and his alliance with Donald Trump, gives him the power to force any issue he likes into the political conversation. Lately he has used that power to intervene in European politics, berating British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, boosting the German far-right Alternative für Deutschland, and attacking the European Union for its efforts to regulate his businesses. Starmer’s opponents on the right, including the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, have been quick to echo Musk’s interest in the grooming gangs—even though Badenoch’s party was in power as the story originally unfolded.

The Times reporting kicked off dozens of prosecutions, multiple public inquiries, and even a primetime British Broadcasting Corporation drama. The story was well known enough that one of the police whistleblowers appeared on a celebrity reality-television show in 2018. The news even reached America: In 2014, the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat observed that “what happened in Rotherham was rooted both in left-wing multiculturalism and in much more old-fashioned prejudices about race and sex and class.” The ethnicity of the perpetrators mattered, he argued, but so did the status of the victims—working-class girls whom the police saw as “‘tarts’ who deserved roughly what they got.”

Musk’s newfound revulsion at the details of the abuse is entirely justified—read the sentencing reports if you have the stomach for it. “Girls were raped callously, viciously, and violently,” the judge told nine men convicted of grooming offenses in the northern towns of Oldham and Rochdale in 2012, adding, “Some of you acted as you did to satiate your lust, some to make money out of them. All of you treated them as though they were worthless and beyond all respect.”

The sexual abuse of children occurs in all human societies, but the forms it takes are culturally dependent. Like school shootings in the United States, grooming gangs are a particular type of crime that emerged from the laws and social conditions of a specific time and place. The gangs are not representative of the whole picture of what researchers call “group-based child sexual exploitation”—a phenomenon that in Britain appears to be dominated by men who are white, as you would expect from the makeup of the population. (England and Wales are more than 80 percent white, census data show; “Asian ethnic groups” are about 9 percent of the population.) Most grooming-gang defendants in the cases that have attracted media attention, however, were men of Pakistani descent. Many were connected to the nighttime economy, such as by running minicab firms and delivering takeout. They primarily targeted vulnerable girls—runaways or those who lived in foster homes. We know all this because of extensive reporting, testimony by victims and whistleblowers, and the bravery of politicians such as Ann Cryer and Sarah Champion, two Labour Party members of Parliament who were shunned by their own side for speaking out.

[Ali Breland: Elon Musk’s X endgame]

It is entirely reasonable to ask why they were shunned. In the 2000s and early 2010s, the racial dynamics of the grooming gangs made English towns extremely reluctant to face what was happening. Local South Asian communities were afraid to report the perpetrators in their midst. Police did not record complaints or investigate the issue actively; by some accounts, race riots in Oldham in 2001 made police emphasize “community cohesion” over what should have been their primary concern—dismantling organized-rape gangs regardless of the demographics of the perpetrators. White members of municipal councils fell into a pattern of assuming that problems among British Pakistanis were best left to their fellow councilors from that community. “Rotherham isn’t a very PC place, I think that is why the council overcompensated too much,” one local officer told an investigator in 2015. “It doesn’t want to be accused of being racist.”

Living through this story, experiencing the slow accretion of details and convictions and inquiries in real time, clearly felt very different from learning about it all at once. One of the main complaints to have surfaced since Musk reheated this story is that much of the original coverage was piecemeal and overly restrained: Had gangs of white men been trafficking immigrant women, it might have prompted a reckoning comparable to America’s protests over the 2020 murder of George Floyd. What qualifies as a “reckoning” is arguable—but I agree that the left would have raised hell about such a story, as the right has done with this one.

In response, some commentators, on both the left and right, have called for a “national conversation” about the gangs. What that conversation would sound like, however, is the tricky part. Would it include calls for the mass deportation of migrants, as many on Europe’s emergent right want? Is the answer militant secularization of Britain? Or a renewed insistence that the United Kingdom is a Christian country? Should Britain enact a “Muslim ban” or reject asylum seekers from Muslim-majority countries? When liberals are still queasy about engaging with this topic, it’s because they sense that these shadow arguments lie just out of sight.

Although Musk is powerful enough to draw new attention to the Rotherham scandal, polling suggests that most Britons see his interventions as opportunistic. The X owner has a deep animus toward Starmer, the Labour prime minister, whom Musk sees as an enemy of free speech in general and of his platform in particular. Many of Musk’s posts called for implausible scenarios such as the King dissolving Parliament or the country holding fresh elections, adding to the sense that Musk had not deeply researched the topic before picking up his phone to post.

Nonetheless, the Conservative opposition, led by Badenoch, pandered to him, demanding a fresh national inquiry to “join the dots.” That reverses the Tory position of a year ago—back when the party was in power and had the ability to commission whatever inquiries it deemed necessary. (In 2019, the future Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that investigating historic sex abuses was money “spaffed up a wall.”)

Badenoch’s decision to echo the Musk line also minimized the work that the Conservatives did do in government to tackle rape gangs. Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak created a “grooming gangs task force” that has helped police make more than 550 arrests. The Tories also accepted that some sentences given to gang members had been too lenient, and proposed to create a new aggravating factor in sex offenses involving grooming. That will likely be included in the Crime and Policing Bill this spring, alongside a mandatory-reporting measure requiring social workers and others to notify police when they suspect children are being abused. Despite all that progress, Badenoch understands that calling for a new investigation is one of the few ways for an opposition leader to attract attention. (Today, Labour caved and promised a “rapid audit” and more funding for local inquiries.) Just as the activist left sometimes refuses to believe that civil-rights victories have been achieved—remaining instead in a state of politically lucrative perma-war—so the right will not claim victory in having already forced Britain to take these gangs seriously. Conservatives want the fight, not the win.

[Read: He’s no Elon Musk]

Intriguingly, Britain’s other right-wing party, Reform, has been less harmoniously in tune with Musk in the past couple of weeks than the Tories have. Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage, has joined Badenoch in calling for a new nationwide inquiry into the gangs. But he has refused to fulfill a peculiar demand from Musk: to normalize the pseudonymous agitator Tommy Robinson, whom the far right credits for making the grooming scandal public. Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, is not a folk hero. A founder of the xenophobic English Defence League, he risked collapsing one of the grooming trials by filming the defendants outside it. He is also a convicted mortgage fraudster and is currently in jail for contempt of court in a different case.

Robinson badly needs mainstream support to shake off his thuggish reputation, and Musk has taken up his cause. “Free Tommy Robinson!” Musk declared on X. He also faulted Farage—who has sought to keep racist “bad apples” out of Reform—for distancing himself from Robinson. Farage “doesn’t have what it takes,” Musk complained. Once again, the billionaire seemed out of touch with the British political scene: Farage, a key champion of Brexit, is the most successful leader that the British populist right has ever had. Reform won more than 4 million votes in last year’s election and looks set to make big gains in local contests in May.

To many Britons’ relief, Musk seems to be moving on to other subjects, including the California wildfires. His intervention has presented liberals with a difficult terrain to navigate. Yes, his interest was opportunistic. Yes, he spread conspiracy theories as well as the true scandalous details. But at least part of his instinctive reaction was correct: This was and is a scandal that shames Britain, as the Times asserted in 2012. It just isn’t a hidden one, thanks to the many victims and whistleblowers who have brought it into the open , beginning more than a decade ago. They deserve the tribute of having their bravery acknowledged.

One of the most powerful inventions of the 20th century is also an object that no one ever wants a reason to use. The sexual-assault-evidence collection box, colloquially known as the “rape kit,” is a simple yet potent tool: a small case, perhaps made of cardboard, containing items such as sterile nail clippers, cotton swabs, slides for holding bodily fluids, paper bags, and a tiny plastic comb. Designed to gather and preserve biological evidence found on the body of a person reporting a sexual assault, it introduced standardized forensics into the investigation of rape where there had previously been no common protocol. Its contents could be used in court to establish facts so that juries wouldn’t have to rely solely on testimony, making it easier to convict the guilty and exonerate the innocent.

The kit, conceived within the Chicago Police Department in the mid-1970s, was trademarked under the name “Vitullo Evidence Collection Kit,” after Sergeant Louis Vitullo. The Chicago police officer had a well-publicized role in the 1967 conviction of Richard Speck, who had murdered eight student nurses in one night. Vitullo’s second claim to fame is more complicated. The Secret History of the Rape Kit, a revealing new book by the journalist Pagan Kennedy, doubles as an account of the largely unknown history of the collection box’s real inventor—a woman named Martha “Marty” Goddard, whose broader goal of empowering survivors led her to cede credit to a man. In a cruel irony, a woman who drove major social change failed to get her due as a result of politics and sexism.

Kennedy became obsessed with the rape kit in 2018, after hearing Christine Blasey Ford testify during the confirmation process for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and wondered, “Had anything ever been specifically invented to discourage sexual assault?” Her investigative dive begins in 1970s Chicago, where the women’s-liberation movement was gaining ground and the police had a reputation for corruption. The brutality of the police crackdown on protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention was still fresh in the public mind. Rape was also rampant throughout the city, Kennedy writes—in 1973, according to an article in the Daily Herald, an estimated 16,000 sexual assaults took place, only a tenth of which were reported. And less than 10 percent of those 10 percent led to a criminal trial. In court, the proceedings usually devolved into “he said, she said.”

In 1974, Goddard was a divorcée in her early 30s working for a philanthropic organization that tapped into a local family department-store fortune to help Chicago’s needy. The job gave Goddard, whom a friend once described as “fucking relentless,” access to a wide swath of the people who formed the city’s civic backbone. She also volunteered for a teen-crisis center, where she heard stories from runaways who had experienced sexual abuse. Goddard, who grew up with an abusive father and had briefly run away from home as a teenager, became consumed with the question of why so few women reported rapes—and why perpetrators were rarely punished.

That year, she met with the state’s attorney Bernard Carey to discuss the “failure points in the sexual assault evidence system.” He soon appointed her to a new citizens’ advisory panel affiliated with the city’s new Rape Task Force. Goddard thus gained access to the police department and, more important, to its crime lab. She discovered that it was a mess. Cops told her that they didn’t even receive usable evidence from the hospital, such as properly collected swabs of semen, saliva, and blood. This was in part because hospital staff had never been trained to collect it properly. But even when police officers did have evidence, they weren’t always trained to preserve it.

Goddard approached Sergeant Vitullo, the crime lab’s chief microanalyst, with a written description of her vision: a sexual-assault-evidence collection kit. As one of Goddard’s colleagues told Kennedy, Vitullo “screamed at her” and told her to leave his office.

A few days later, Kennedy reports, Vitullo invited Goddard back and, to her surprise, showed her a complete mock-up of exactly the box she had described. Both the sergeant and the State’s Attorney’s Office wanted the credit for Goddard’s idea. As a compromise, Goddard agreed to have the kit recognized as a collaboration among them. Her accommodation was realistic and also strategic. She knew that “[Vitullo’s] name could open doors—and hers couldn’t,” Kennedy writes. Goddard was a visionary, but she was not a lawyer, a cop, or an expert, and she had no formal experience in forensics.

[Read: American law does not take rape seriously]

In 1978, a nonprofit group Goddard had formed, Citizens Committee for Victims Assistance, filed a trademark for the Vitullo Evidence Collection Kit. With this move, Goddard had, as Kennedy puts it, “seemed to collaborate in her own erasure.” That same year, The New York Times noted that the “Vitullo kit” was being used in 72 hospitals across Chicago, citing Goddard as the kit’s co-creator. Mentions of her in the media were otherwise glancing at best. Upon Vitullo’s death in 2006, Kennedy writes, “an obituary in a local paper celebrated him as the ‘man who invented the rape kit.’”

Many women inventors have shared a similar fate. This past November, Kay Koplovitz, a co-founder of the business accelerator Springboard Enterprises and the founder of television’s USA Networks, noted in an interview with The New York Times that “if a woman co-founder has at least one male co-founder, the woman somehow does not get credit for raising the capital.” In science, this phenomenon is so common that it even has a term of art: the Matilda Effect, named for the writer and women’s activist Matilda Joslyn Gage. There are scores of examples of the Matilda Effect, but to pick just a couple: Lise Meitner described the theory behind what she named nuclear fission, but credit went to her former lab partner Otto Hahn, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1944. Eunice Newton Foote described the greenhouse effect in 1856, but posterity remembers John Tyndall, who presented his own experiments three years later. No known photograph of Foote remains today.

Every one of these backstories carries its own particular ironies. In Kennedy’s telling, Goddard’s obscurity stems from the sacrifices she made for the rape kit to exist. Not only did she relinquish credit for her invention, but she also did all the grunt work to get it out into the world—including the fundraising. Conservative philanthropists were just as squeamish as Sergeant Vitullo had initially been about the idea of being associated with sexual shame; the word rape simply carried too much stigma. And so she turned to an organization that had made shamelessness its mission; through her nonprofit, she applied for and received a grant of $10,000 from the Playboy Foundation. “I decided,” she later said, “we had to put aside our feelings for objectification of women in [Playboy] magazine.”

Taking money from the philanthropic arm of a nudie-magazine publisher turned out to be a canny move. Playboy’s foundation, also headquartered in Chicago, gave generously to progressive causes. Hugh Hefner, the founder and editor in chief of Playboy, considered the feminist movement “a sister cause to his own effort to free men from shame and guilt,” Kennedy wrote in The New York Times, in an opinion article that fueled the book.

Kennedy does not mention that Hefner was the subject of several accusations of sexual assault, both before and after his death in 2017. (The director Peter Bogdanovich claimed in his book The Killing of the Unicorn, published in 1984, that Hefner sexually assaulted Bogdanovich’s late partner, the playmate Dorothy Stratten. Hefner denied the allegation.)

Still, when it came to Goddard’s invention, Playboy stayed true to its public mission, and the organization donated more than money. The magazine’s graphic artists designed the outer box of the original rape kit to feature a bright-blue line drawing of a woman’s face swathed in a thick mane of wavy hair. An early “Vitullo kit” was recently acquired by the Smithsonian.

In 1982, New York City adopted the Vitullo kit, and Goddard commuted to the East Coast to train doctors, nurses, and cops. The Department of Justice paid her to travel to other states that wanted to develop their own rape-kit programs. Goddard invented not just the box but the entire training system, teaching hospital staff and the police to collaborate on evidence collection.

Without that essential training to help surmount powerful systemic barriers, the kit would have been useless—and in that sense, the job is still woefully unfinished. Untested rape kits have languished across the country: In 2009, more than 11,000 were discovered abandoned in Detroit; in 2014, Memphis had backlog of more than 12,000 kits, and 200 more were found in a warehouse. One study estimates that from 2014 to 2018, 300,000 to 400,000 kits remained untested in the United States. Since then, aggressive fundraising efforts with help from survivors, combined with $350 million from the Department of Justice, have whittled down that backlog significantly.

[Read: An epidemic of disbelief]

Kennedy examines the gaps that still remain in the medical system. In 2021, just over 2,100 Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner–certified nurses were registered with the International Association of Forensic Nurses. The examination requires survivors to undergo hours of waiting and testing, and can feel invasive and re-traumatizing. This may be one reason so few people—only one-fourth of victims— report rapes, she writes.

Some of these limitations can be traced to a lack of effective innovation in the 50 years since the Vitullo kit was developed. In recent years, several women have conceived of and even sold at-home rape kits that would allow a victim to collect evidence of her assault herself. These ideas and products were met with strong resistance—and in one case, death threats. Detractors argued that self-collected evidence would never be taken seriously by juries. Apparently, accusers were still considered unreliable. Only after COVID made virtual doctor visits a necessity did the push for at-home testing gain a modicum of traction. With an at-home test, the victim received instructions, sometimes via a virtual nurse, on how to swab her own body, collect other physical evidence, and seal the kit.

In the late 1980s, Goddard abruptly disappeared from public life and lost contact with friends and family members. Kennedy painstakingly traces the confluence of events that may have led to her decline: In the late ’70s, she survived a violent rape while on vacation in Hawaii. A workaholic, she seems to have reached the point of burnout by the end of the decade. Somewhere along the line, she developed a problem with drinking. Kennedy concludes that she “bounced around the country, taking odd jobs and drinking heavily,” until finally settling in Arizona.

Kennedy works deftly with sometimes scant information, weaving her reporting on Goddard’s life and contribution into the narrative. The result is less a true-crime story, as advertised in the subtitle, than a page-turning mystery. The subject is also personal for Kennedy, who was molested in childhood. She confesses that her book was fueled by rage, pain, and her desire to restore “the woman who had believed little girls” to her rightful place in history.

As Goddard’s life shrank, the influence of the rape kit grew exponentially—especially after DNA fingerprinting was invented in 1984, eventually making it possible to trace a single drop of sperm or blood to a specific person. Evidence stored in the kits, sometimes for decades, allowed cold cases to be solved and wrongful convictions to be overturned.

Goddard’s last years were marked by alcoholism, erratic behavior, and diagnoses of dementia and “manic depression.” In 2015—the year of her death—a CNN reporter managed to track Goddard down. The resulting article credited Vitullo with the invention but noted Goddard’s role in distributing it, describing her as the “formidable woman” behind the “successful man.” During the interview, Goddard expressed anger at how her role had been downsized, calling Vitullo “an asshole.” The sergeant “had nothing to do with it,” she told the reporter. But those comments never made it into the story, partly because Vitullo was no longer around to defend himself and partly because Goddard struck the journalist as an unreliable witness—a woman who couldn’t be believed.

Thanks to Kennedy’s dogged reporting, CNN’s story wasn’t the final one, and Goddard can step out from the shadows of history. Upon Goddard’s death, no ceremonies or memorials marked her passing. In accordance with her wishes, there was no funeral or obituary. Nevertheless, her work leaves a remarkable legacy. The rape kit reoriented the public attitude toward survivors—as not potential liars but “an eyewitness whose body might reveal real evidence of a violent crime.” Yet Kennedy’s book isn’t just the hero’s journey of a forgotten heroine. It acknowledges that the system works best when it can be improved by those who are most affected by sexual assault—and the women who are willing to risk obscurity or damage to their reputation in order to finish the job Goddard started.