And by publishing last month a detailed account of her ordeal, about how she was groped for 30 minutes, frozen with fear, in a van in the presence of several other campaign workers, and how she mustered the courage to do something about it, she did something rarer still.
It does something rare, restoring humanity to an icon.
Mendelsohn does something rare in the Holocaust literature I've read, which is to see the lives of the future victims not as completely "backshadowed" (in the scholar Michael André Bernstein's phrase) by the tragedy to come, but illuminated by their innocent ordinariness.
It's difficult to read this novel and not stop to consider your own misunderstandings and wasted opportunities through its sharp, clear lens, and in actually giving us a way to see our lives, Normal People does something rare and special.
Merrill, who died two years ago, does something rarer and more interesting: she does almost entirely without children.
If he kills the judge, he will make the world a better place, and he will have done something rare and remarkable, too.
Dressed in a short-sleeve, light blue shirt and cream khakis, Guillermo Ravelo stepped up to the podium in a Miami federal courtroom last week and did something rare: He admitted to being a dirty cop.
Additionally, instead of fading away after his heartbreaking semifinal loss to Djokovic in last summer's U.S. Open, where he squandered two match points, Federer has done something rare in modern-day sports: he has become better with age.
In her sixth month, she passed out from dehydration during a tournament, and the director did something rare for her: he stopped the game.
After a shaky performance in Wednesday's Republican debate in Mesa, Arizona, Rick Santorum did something rare for presidential candidates in his situation: He walked into the "spin room," the raucous space where campaign advisers ply reporters with reasons why their candidate won the debate.
