"But there is something the powerful have never been able to destroy. Not princes, not presidents, not lawyers, not the grinding machinery of institutional silence. The power of a book.... Virginia [Roberts Giuffre] and Amy Wallace did not write their book so that we would mourn her. They wrote it so we would read it. So that things would change.
"It is on the shelves of beautiful bookstores. It is in libraries. It is on nightstands. It is being read tonight by people who will close it and know--with absolute certainty--that her testimony cannot be ignored. That the world she described demands an answer. The woman can be silenced. The book cannot.
"This is what the greatest acts of witness always do. They do not close a story. They open it outward--into all the other stories that were never told, all the voices that were silenced before they found a page. Books are not monuments. They are instructions. Not merely to record what happened to one person. But to change the way the reader sees the world.
"That is what we do. That is why we write, publish, and sell books. This is what one book can do--when it is written honestly enough, published bravely enough, and read by enough people willing to be changed by it. And the truth, once a book unleashes it in the world, has a way of outlasting everything that tried to stop it. It makes the world a little less safe for the predatory and powerful, and a little more possible for the rest of us."