In 2017, women nationwide began sharing painful and personal stories of harassment and abuse in what became known as the #MeToo movement—starting a national conversation about sexual misconduct and revealing dozens of powerful men as predators. All the buzz prompted Austin-based attorney Chandler Baker, an author who’d previously written novels about monsters for young adults, to reflect on a scary situation she’d experienced as a fledgling summer associate at a Texas law firm. At a company event, she’d been sipping a margarita from a salt-rimmed glass when she found herself surrounded by power brokers: a partner and his sidekicks. “They were telling me that they had heard a lot about me—laughing as if they were in on something—and asked if I liked older men,” she recently told the Observer.
Baker wrote that she wrangled an escape only after a female attorney caught her eye and “extracted me from the situation with a lot more grace and social skill than I possessed at the time.”
