“This is not normal.” It is now just under two months since former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams gave her stand-out speech at The British Book Awards. This is how it began: “To bear witness is one of the oldest moral obligations in human civilisation. It means: I was present. I saw. I will not pretend otherwise.”

Wynn-Williams was referencing Nobody’s Girl, Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s award-winning memoir, co-written with the journalist Amy Wallace, that was joint recipient of the Freedom to Publish prize at the awards, alongside her own book Careless People. But the intent behind the words was wider than either title. Her speech was about being heard. “A book endures,” she said; it cannot be erased or shadow-banned. “It will speak – long after the woman cannot.”

Since then, Wynn-Williams has had to sit in silence at the Hay Festival having been invited to talk – more generally – on Big Tech alongside journalist Carole Cadwalladr and author Tim Wu, and most recently was asked to leave the studio of The News Agents podcast on which she would otherwise have spoken alongside Wallace about the Freedom to Publish award. In a moment of troubling theatre, presenter Emily Maitlis tells Wynn-Williams: “I have to ask you to leave.” 

Since then, her book has been catapulted back up the book charts, and this week is top of the Paperback Non-Fiction chart having sold 10,000 copies over the week (just in print, mind). Meanwhile, an independent bookshop audio exclusive has been released on Bookshop.org, with Wynn-Williams’ Nibbies speech included.

We can argue that we are winning this fight one book at a time. But that is just too sentimental

Last month, Wynn-Williams filed a countersuit in a US court petitioning for the interim judgement to be removed. She questions the unreasonableness of the original edict, as well as its chilling impact. “I have been left to police a boundary that no one has been willing or able to draw clearly for me,” she writes in her own statement.

We can argue that we are winning this fight one book at a time. But that is just too sentimental. Wynn-Williams faces daily pressure to navigate the situation she finds herself in; if Facebook wins its case, or if the interim judgement is maintained, she faces years of litigation and unimaginable fines, while at the same time not being able to earn a living through her writing or her expertise in this area. “Each day I make countless fine-grained decisions,” she writes, stating that that this could ruin her and her family. She is also being watched. In the countersuit, her lawyers state: “Meta’s sanctions campaign has been built on sustained surveillance of Ms Wynn- Williams…  its representatives attended her public appearances in person, assembled photographs and written records of her movements, and travelled the length of the United Kingdom to do so.”

As she said in her speech at the Nibbies: “We know Virginia lived in fear. We know she felt very alone. I suspect there were days she recoiled at every knock on her door, regarded every camera with suspicion and felt a weary dread at the steady flow of lawyers’ emails, demands for discovery and surveillance of her life.”

To echo Sarah, we are bearing witness to something truly extraordinary. Or as Maitlis said on the podcast: “This is not normal.” And yet, where is the clamour and outrage for an author – resident in the UK, and published by a UK publisher – who has been silenced now for more than a year by a US court at the behest of a tech mega-corp?

I cannot dictate how you do it, but we need to stand up for Sarah. No one can pretend not to  have seen this. This is our fight.