Amid everything else happening in the world right now, a settlement in a relatively obscure lawsuit involving two writers may not seem like a big deal. Yet the settlement disclosed earlier this week in a defamation case that has dragged on for over four years may turn out be an important cultural landmark punctuating the rise and decline of the #MeToo movement.

In the movement’s early days in the fall of 2017, as women — and a few men — came forward with accounts of sexual misconduct and exploitation, a list of media men behaving badly appeared online. (The actual name of this list is unsuitable for this newspaper.) It was a Google spreadsheet where anyone with access could enter, anonymously, the name of an accused wrongdoer and the nature of his alleged misconduct — ranging from “flirting” and “weird lunch dates” to stalking, sexual assault and rape. What could possibly go wrong?

As the list grew to about 70 names and started circulating and generating rumors, even some people generally supportive of #MeToo were alarmed by the ease of making anonymous allegations. But they still shrugged off concerns about false accusations by arguing that accused men usually rebound easily from whatever reputational damage they suffer and that it might even be a good thing for men to be on their toes and question their past interactions with women as potentially abusive.

In fact, many men named on the list did suffer — fairly or not — serious career damage. One of them, writer and literary magazine editor Stephen Elliott, later sued the list’s creator, identified as journalist Moira Donegan. He recently settled for a six-figure payout.

Elliott was accused of rape and sexual harassment by an anonymous person whom he believes to be a disgruntled ex-employee. In an interview after the settlement, he told Confider, a newsletter of the online publication The Daily Beast, that his publisher and editor — both of whom publicly supported the list — privately told him that they knew he was innocent, and his literary agent cut ties to him. He regards the settlement as vindication and says that he filed the lawsuit primarily for “moral reasons,” to “push back on false accusations and presumptions of guilt.”

Such a pushback has been happening already. Some high-profile #MeToo scandals have been reconsidered after new reporting cast allegations in a different light. Al Franken, the Minnesota Democrat who resigned his U.S. Senate seat due to sexual harassment accusations at the height of #MeToo, was largely vindicated in a long investigative piece by New Yorker writer Jane Mayer published two years later. Writer Junot Diaz, who kept his MIT faculty posts after a #MeToo investigation but remained tarnished by the allegations, was recently the subject of an article in the Semafor newsletter revealing, among other things, that the unwanted kiss alleged by a female writer was a goodbye kiss on the cheek.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that #MeToo should be reviled as a slander campaign. The movement made a serious dent in the pattern of impunity often enjoyed by high-status men who abused their power to sexually coerce women (and sometimes men or even underage boys, as in the case of the late, disgraced Metropolitan Opera conductor James Levine). But men subjected to public shaming and career destruction over either false or trivial accusations, or over complicated and messy relationships, should never have been regarded as acceptable collateral damage. That, one can hope, is a lesson of Elliott’s lawsuit.