Why TIME Cropped This Woman Out of Its 'Person of the Year' Cover

New Delhi: TIME Magazine has named women who spoke out against sexual harassment as the ‘Person of the Year’, featuring singer Taylor Swift, ex-Uber engineer Susan Fowler, actor Ashley Judd, activist Adama Iwu and Mexican strawberry picker Isabel Pascual on its cover.

The cover features a sixth “silence breaker” as well, but her photo has been cropped to include only her right elbow.

TIME editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal has now revealed that the woman in question had opted to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal. He added that it was representative of women and men who were yet to come forward.

Speaking to NBC News’s Today, Felsenthal said the woman "shared her story with us and some others but doesn’t feel that she can come forward without threatening her livelihood.”

“The image you see partially on the cover is of a woman we talked to, a hospital worker in the middle of the country,” he said.

The woman reportedly told TIME magazine that she still wondered whether she could have done something to end the harassment.

“I thought, What just happened? Why didn’t I react? I kept thinking, ‘Did I do something, did I say something, did I look a certain way to make him think that was OK?’”

The powerful imagery by TIME magazine won accolades all around.

"The silence breakers" are women and men who triggered a global reckoning by revealing the pervasiveness of sexual harassment, assault and abuse in life.

TIME designated as "silence breakers" the individuals, mostly women, who came forward this year to publicly expose patterns of sexual harassment, assault and even rape by some of society's most powerful public figures.

Those recognised by TIME range from famous actresses who took on disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein to everyday women who shared their stories of abuse using the hashtag #MeToo and its foreign language equivalents.

The accusations against Weinstein, who has denied engaging in non-consensual sex, proved a tipping point for a flood of sordid revelations involving other titans of Hollywood, big business, politics and the news media. Many once-admired leaders in their fields have been fired or suspended, their careers left in tatters.

The Person of the Year announcement came as The New York Times published a report detailing a widespread "complicity machine" of powerful relationships that enabled Weinstein to silence or intimidate his accusers for years.

A number of men also have revealed they were victims of sexual abuse, including Anthony Rapp, who accused Oscar-winning actor Kevin Spacey of making sexual advances on him when he was a teenager.