What a week. A day off would have been nice, is the dark joke doing the rounds on social media, except women know there’s no such thing really. First Russell Brand sentenced to 10 years and 6 months for one rape and three sexual asaults. Now allegations that David Walliams preyed on girls as young as 15 and groomed teenagers for sex. Walliams has strongly denied all allegations of sexual misconduct, grooming and breaking the law.

Powerful men using – or allegedly using – their fame to get what they wanted, it’s all so nauseatingly familiar isn’t it? It almost feels like we’ve been here before which, of course, we have. The only surprise is that we’re still expected to act as though any of this is a surprise.

The conversation about whether this is a #MeToo 2.0 – or a milestone for consent – has already begun. I’m not sure anyone has declared it a “watershed moment” yet but that’s probably in the post. Could this be a tipping point if we can manage not to squander it?

It does sort of feel that way. A sexual predator jailed. So many of the things that women have been saying – screaming into the void – for years, validated out loud.

“Whatever women wear, wherever they go, indeed whatever they drink, they retain the right to say no and to demand justice from the criminal courts.”

I actually whooped when Justice Bennathan spoke those words, when sentencing Brand. How grateful we are for such crumbs. However obvious to most of us, it felt important to hear it put on public record – that women can say yes at first and then no later, that being tipsy doesn’t make it somehow our fault – as the world watched.

Sir Mark Rowley, the police commissioner, criticised Brand’s barrister for victim-shaming his brave accusers and using rape myths in court. Andy Burnham has talked about changing the law so women don’t feel as though they’re the ones on trial. The judge’s refusal to allow Walliams his injunction sent a message that the potential victimhood of one man doesn’t outweigh that of the many women making accusations against him.

The danger – aside from this all being meaningless rhetoric designed to capture the public mood and quickly forgotten, of course – is that we fall into the “bad apple” trap again. It’s already starting: the narrative that, naturally, we always knew Brand was a wrongun and these men are hiding in plain sight etc.

Plain sight or hindsight? Because they aren’t usually that easy to pick out; that’s partly why they get away with it for so long. Such men aren’t monsters or psychopaths or bad apples, they’re just people with power and the opportunity to abuse it.

Statistically, you know a predator – in your family, friendship group, social circle, workplace, the gym class you go to on Mondays – and that’s why it’s so important that the lessons we’ve learnt this week aren’t filed in a drawer marked “disgraced comedians”. Even that language is all wrong: Brand isn’t a disgraced comedian, he’s a rapist.

And the rape myths persist: I’m tired of explaining to men why women don’t always report assaults at the time and why it’s not just a matter of “growing a spine” when it comes to “handsy men”, as I saw one bloke write on social media. I had hoped not to have so many of those conversations this week.

Which is why this moment of reckoning to trickle down to the one in four women, watching and listening at home, who have been assaulted and are seeing famous men be held to account while their own attackers walk free or get early release. It’s not good enough for this just to be a “watershed moment” for celebrities. It needs to run all the way through the system to have an impact: to the women too terrified to report, the women who drop out of the legal system because of cruel court delays, the women who don’t trust that they will see justice. Rightly – by the end of 2024, fewer than three in 100 rapes recorded by police resulted in someone being charged, according to Rape Crisis England and Wales.

It’s also hard to talk about milestone moments when it’s clear that so many people looked the other way. Brand’s entourage who encouraged one of his accusers to give him a massage and apparently did nothing when he thrust his head into her groin. Jonathan Ross making gags about 15-year-olds going home with Walliams at an awards ceremony in 2004. He has said this week he did not write the joke himself and that he knew nothing of Walliams’ alleged behaviour. These people are scattering like cockroaches running under the nearest rock instead of having grown-up conversations about what happened and their part in it. Because that would mean having to admit enabling a pattern of abuse by rich, famous men like Brand who were lining their pockets. Lawyers who threatened teenage girls with lawsuits on Walliams’ behalf, I’m also looking at you.

That’s why this can’t only be a conversation about Brand and Walliams. I mean, if there’s one thing this week has made women feel it’s that we’ve all been there in some way – from men in positions of authority trying to coerce us into things we don’t want to do or offering us mentorship then expecting something in return, to unwanted advances, touching, grooming, assault, rape. It’s a sliding scale. One of Walliams’ accusers alleges that he tried to coerce her into sex by pleading and making her feel sorry for him – how many of us recognise that tactic? I know I do.

But we have already progressed, even if sometimes it doesn’t feel like it. “She said” is starting to be given as much credence as what “he said”. As one of the women in ITV’s Walliams documentary, called Lily, put it: “When we were 18, we were in a time where men were men. They did what they did. You just had to find a way to survive it. Now, we know that’s not what men should do.”