In the wake of #MeToo, various documentaries, from Surviving R. Kelly to Finding Neverland, have tried to give victims of sexual assault and rape their long overdue say. On the Record is another painful yet necessary addition to this journalistic endeavor. The film revolves around the many women who have accused powerhouse rap mogul Russell Simmons of raping them.

The film primarily centers on Drew Dixon, who recounts her earlier life as a young, rising, and precocious music executive who worked with Simmons at Def Jam Records in the heyday of 1990s hip-hop. Like so many women whose stories were discredited for decades by men in power, Dixon’s isn’t solely about the assault itself but about what happened afterward. And like so many women, Dixon’s career and private life were destroyed.

Intercut with Dixon’s story, we also hear from Simmons’s other accusers, such as Sil Lai Abrams and Sheri Sher. In one particularly disturbing sequence, the film jump cuts from one account to the next, cutting rapidly between the various accusers whose recollections elicit terrifyingly similar tones. It is at times a lot to handle.

Dixon’s own story is one that covers a breadth of highly urgent and important issues, ranging from her reaction to the alienating, largely white-centric focus of the #MeToo movement to the struggles black women face in a white supremacist society and from the patriarchies imbedded within the black community. It’s a story only she and other black women can tell. It’s also one that is as much about the victims of misogyny and rape culture as it is about the reverberations and still-visible scars left by Western slavery.

On the Record is a painful but necessary watch. Though Simmons, like many of the other accused in power, probably won’t see justice anytime soon, the film and, more importantly, its subjects have made it clear that those who remain silenced are not alone. For documentarians, filmmakers, and journalists, however, the work is far from over, and what has been uncovered today, thanks in part to #MeToo, may very well be the tip of the iceberg.