I doubt it is a single bad actor, but I bet its highly asymmetric, since most offenders are likely serial offenders.
TL;DR, of the men asked a series of questions about sexual misbehavior that met legal definitions of attempted / completed rape but did not use the “r” word, 6-13% admitted to at least one offense, and 50% of those across both studies were repeat perpetrators with an average of 6 offenses each (and a median of 3, so there were some who were super-offenders).
The studies cited only looked at male perpetrators, an obvious limitation, but I think the work is really relevant nonetheless.
Otherwise, how would you explain why this happens? Logically, the women to whom something happened would say something. But statistics show that most don’t, or that most only communicate to close friends, despite stats from the original article.
So we know that incidents are rampant. We also know that most men don’t know this, as represented by the surprise at this article as evidenced in this thread.
We can only deduce that there is an emergent dynamic that actively discourages women from speaking up and encourages/allows these offenders to continue. This might look like bias by men that men are blind to. This might look like messages that discourage women. It’s only logical that men wouldn’t be able to see this and that men would have huge blind spots around sexual harassment issues.
(And of course, this is what women have been saying continuously — if only men would listen.)