Activists fight chilling effect of Cosby ruling
When Indira Henard, director of the DC Rape Crisis Centre, received the text message, she thought she wasn’t reading her phone correctly. “Indira oh my god,” said the message from a colleague. “Cosby’s walking out of prison.”
“I put on the news and there it was, and my heart just dropped,” Henard said. “I thought about how all our survivors would be feeling.”
During the afternoon, Henard says the centre’s hotline was “off the hook, with survivors needing a place to process, and people asking, ‘What happened? I don’t understand. He got convicted. Why would they do this?’ ”
When America watched Bill Cosby — once “America’s Dad” — go off to prison nearly three years ago, it was perhaps the most stunning development yet of the nascent #MeToo movement, which had emerged in late 2017 with allegations against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. Advocates and survivors of sexual assault hoped the movement would usher in an era of accountability for abusers — and in many ways, it did.
But this week, as the nation digested the equally stunning sight of Cosby released from prison — albeit on a technicality, some worried it would have a chilling effect on survivors, who often don’t come forward because they don’t believe it will bring justice.
“It’s been a hard day,” Henard said. “It’s a deeply painful moment — not just for survivors in the Cosby case who came forward at great personal risk, but for all survivors.”
For Tarana Burke, the activist who gave the #MeToo movement its name, the first reaction to the Pennsylvania court’s decision was “shock, definitely shock”, and then “real concern for survivors. We’re going to have a hard time sleeping.”
“The fact of the matter,” added Burke, herself a sexual assault survivor in her youth, “is we won’t see the ramifications of things like this for a while. People will look back and say, ‘I was sexually assaulted a week before the Cosby verdict was overturned. And the way that the backlash hit the internet made me change my mind.’ We won’t hear those stories for a while.”
RAINN, an anti-sexual violence organisation, said its hotline calls were up 24 per cent from the previous week. “This is one of those times I really pray people will read beyond the headlines,” said Scott Berkowitz, executive director.
He said RAINN would try to educate people that “the issue that let Bill Cosby out is not an issue that comes up in a normal case”.
That’s the point that Lisa Banks — one of the nation’s most prominent attorneys in #MeToo issues with her partner, Debra Katz — sought to drive home. “The message has to be very clear and simple, that this was a mistake by prosecutors, a very unusual one and a technicality that is unlikely to happen again,” she said.
She was referring to the decision of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that District Attorney Kevin Steele was obligated to stand by his predecessor’s promise not to charge the comedian, though there was no evidence that agreement was ever put in writing.
“Sure, the optics of the first major conviction of the #MeToo era walking out of prison is devastating,” Banks said. “But I will say one thing that [Cosby accuser] Andrea Constand said when the verdict came down: ‘Truth prevails.’ I still think it did.”
Henard said this week’s court decision “in no way diminishes the good work of the #MeToo movement.”
“We’ve made great strides in the last few years,” she said. “There’s more great things that have happened and will continue to happen. What this moment does is remind all of us, especially those of us who have boots on the ground, that there’s still work to do.” —AP