Alyssa Milano Has Always Fought for Justice. Maybe You Just Weren't Paying Attention.

Certain images will forever be linked to Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. There’s Christine Blasey Ford with her hand raised and eyes closed, swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about her alleged sexual assault in high school. Then there’s Supreme Court nominee (now justice) Brett Kavanaugh, red faced, teeth gritted, sniveling as he aggressively denies the allegations. And then, wait, is that Alyssa Milano? With a clipboard? What is she doing there?

At least that’s the question many were asking when images of Milano, front and center at the hearings, went viral. Twitter had a field day meme-ing the Charmed actress as either a real-life good witch or bad witch, depending on whose side you were on. Saturday Night Live seized upon Milano’s attendance as the running gag of its opening sketch that weekend. Her presence sparked confusion—and levity—but within the context of American politics of the past two years, it wasn’t unusual. And in a way, Milano’s familiar, frustrated face in the crowd served as a sort of communal exasperation, expressing what so many were thinking (and what Ford’s face could not), namely: “Can you believe this shit?”

But then again, to a particular subset of the population, Milano is known more for her activism than for playing Phoebe on Charmed. Forget who—anyone born after 2000 is probably asking what even is Who’s the Boss? After all, three days after attending the Kavanaugh hearings at the invitation of Senator Dianne Feinstein, Milano was in Parkland, Florida, “to be with the families of the kids who lost their lives and the youth activists” at the Actions for Change Food & Music Festival. Say what you will about celebrity activism—that it oversimplifies the issues, that it’s a spotlight grab disguised as “awareness-building”—Milano walks the walk.

The morning after the 2016 presidential election, Milano was on set, filming Netflix’s Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later with series co-creator David Wain. “The atmosphere was like a funeral,” Wain recalls. “Everyone that day was inspired to do more, work harder, take action, but she’s the one who really did it. Like, every single day.” In fact, she’s been at it since her teen-idol days. At 15, Milano met Ryan White, a fellow teenager from Indiana who had contracted HIV/AIDS from a contaminated blood transfusion for hemophilia. When White returned to school after his diagnosis, he was shunned by many in his community and eventually banned because of a misperception that the virus could be transmitted through kissing or other bodily contact. The case went to court, and it was ruled that the school acted illegally. On the day he returned, half the students stayed home. The case became a cause célèbre for raising AIDS awareness, and when White was invited to appear on The Phil Donahue Show to share his story, he asked Milano, his teenage crush, to join him. “[He asked me] to kiss him, to show that HIV/AIDS was not contracted through casual contact,” she says. “And so, in the height of my teenage—whatever that was—I said yes and went on TV and kissed a little boy with HIV/AIDS, and we sort of shifted the narrative in that moment. I realized what being a celebrity and having a platform could mean, and the impact it could have on people’s lives.” She’s been politically active ever since, riding through swing districts with a bullhorn in the back of a pickup truck, rallying on college campuses, and driving people to the polls. “Basically the same thing that I do now, just minus the social media, so no one really heard about it,” she says. But right now, she adds, “democracy is a full-contact sport, and the only way for it to work is to be involved.”

At this actual moment, however, Milano is home, relaxing in a pair of cozy black sweats and no makeup. The first thing you see when you drive onto her estate, which is situated in a secluded canyon, just west of Los Angeles, is the stable and a group of horses casually chilling outside in the front yard. There are other residents, too, she says: “Horses, chickens, bunnies, and kids; I have two kids.” Her seven-year-old son, Milo, greets me at the front door on his way to baseball practice. When I ask if she likes L.A., she says, “I do! I love it! Where else could you live on five acres with horses and be so close to a city?” She’s been in this house for about 20 years but notes that she and her husband, talent agent David Bugliari, recently had it remodeled. “I literally feel my blood pressure drop when I get off the freeway out here,” she says. “I knew I wanted to live in a place that was very different from the industry that I was in.” My blood pressure also drops while I’m talking with Milano. She is warm and attentive, and feels faintly like a family member in the way actors who grew up on TV always seem to.

Milano’s parents were also politically active, and they let her know early on that, as a girl, she might have to fight a little harder to get what she wanted. “I think the first time I was really aware of what that meant in day-to-day life was the Anita Hill testimony,” she says. Milano was 18 when Hill testified at the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. “And I had already been sexually assaulted at that point, but I never made the connection. I remember watching [the hearings] and thinking, ‘Oh my God, people are monsters to women.’ And that was an awakening for me, of realizing the systemic grossness of everything. Work is supposed to be a safe place.” Milano’s two assaults occurred in her teens. “The first time, I was 15, and the second time, 19. It was horrible. And I didn’t report it,” she says. “I didn’t tell anybody until I had my first child. People don’t talk about this at all, but my first childbirth was so invasive— they’re trying to get the baby out of your vagina, and I was triggered by that experience back to my assault, from some dark place where I had stored that trauma.”

When Who’s the Boss? ended, Milano’s focus shifted. “There was some exploration of, ‘What do I want to be when I grow up?’ ” she says, as well as some pressure to sex up her image in order to break out of “child star” status. “It was such a different time, and I had to make that choice.” In the end, she chose to continue acting, partly due to the platform it afforded her activism.

This year, she’s focused her efforts on gun violence and sexual assault. The latter was boosted in late 2017, when her tweet asking followers to reply “Me too” if they’d been sexually harassed or assaulted went viral. At the time, the headlines were about abuses of power in Hollywood, but she wanted to make it clear that it happened in all types of workplaces. “We all had our stories, and we could all identify with what was happening, but my initial reaction was for it not to be about me or the industry. So I immediately went to a place of, How do we use this to shine a light on the misogyny and systemic rape culture that we have in this country?”

When she sent the “Me too” tweet, Milano was in the middle of shooting the beauty pageant black comedy Insatiablefor Netflix. “It could not have been a worse time to unpack all that,” she says. “I had to work. I had to have big hair and fake nails and do a Southern accent. It was hard. But unpacking the trauma, and finding solace in other women, I’ve never felt better as far as my anxiety goes. There’s power in that. And if we can harness that collective pain that we all feel and turn it into a collective power, then we’re going to be able to beat this. We’re going to be able to make it better for my daughter’s generation.”

She is confident that despite recent setbacks, things are changing for the better. “When you really break down how far we’ve come in the last year, I think the patriarchy is freaking out, and they’re shifting this narrative to the men being victims. Where people are like, ‘Yeah, it really is a hard time for men right now. Shouldn’t you be thinking about your son?,’ I’m like, ‘I’m not worried about my son. It’s not a hard time for men right now. It’s a hard time for abusers and predators. It’s a hard time for men who abuse and prey on women. They should be freaking out. They should have been freaking out a long time ago.’”

Milano brings up a time when her son asked why her daughter got to pick the book to read that night. “He said, ‘Why? I’m the one who can read.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I understand that, but Bella is going to pick the book tonight because what she wants matters just as much as what you want.’ It’s such a blessing to be able to teach them both by saying that out loud in those little moments. I hope it sticks with them.” Misogyny is endemic in our culture, Milano says, because the system was built by and for misogynists who tell women they have to be “one of the guys” and identify with locker-room talk and behavior. “I think that was all by design.”

On the day of the confirmation, Milano wanted to feel helpful, so she phone-banked for Katie Hill, a candidate for Congress in California’s twenty-fifth district. Soon she’ll be back at work, shooting the second season of Insatiable. At a recent event, she even hinted that she might run for office herself in 10 years. And as dusk falls in the canyon, it’s hard not to feel at least a little burst of optimism about Milano’s dream of a better world.

This article originally appeared in the January 2019 issue of ELLE.

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