Believing women means starting from a context where women are not liars. It means entering a conversation from a place of kindness and acceptance, and knowing that there is no harm in listening to someone's story with compassion. In a way, it's not very different from how you'd expect to enter most conversations with someone who you have no reason to distrust. It means protecting vulnerable and marginalized women who are most likely to be impacted by a system that consistently attacks, discredits, and harms them. The need for "believe women" as a political slogan came about because of the fact that in situations where women are victimized, they are typically first addressed with suspicion. You should not have to prove that you are not a liar as a prerequisite for discussing your trauma or asking for assistance.
So who needs to believe women? We need emergency and crisis workers to believe women and give them the care they need. We need law enforcement to believe women and investigate the crimes they report. We need our friends and family to believe us when we tell them we have been victimized. We need our peers to believe us when we say someone has violated our boundaries. Sadly, like the #metoo movement itself, the slogan has been distorted and repurposed by privileged liberal feminists. We need this language to describe actual instances of abuse, actual emergencies. In a context where minor disagreements are labeled sexual assault, we lose that language. As Sarah Schulman explains in Conflict is Not Abuse, "rhetorical devices that hide details keep truth from being known and faced." When everything is an emergency, nothing is.
Here's the truth: I don't care if Elizabeth Warren is believed about Bernie Sanders saying a woman couldn't be president. I don't care if a rich white woman has an equal peer tell her something that might be slightly bothersome depending on the context. It's not news, it's certainly not relevant to a presidential election, and it's absolutely not abuse or sexual assault. I do care about victims being believed and getting the support they need, and I care about perverting the language used to empower victims to seek that support. The people engaging in these theatrics care about winning. They care about controlling conversations and selling books. They don't care about women.