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Cultural Comment
The Galvanizing Shock of the Bill Cosby Verdict
For a jury to convict Cosby, its members had to understand that the absence of a yes was a violation of consent.Photograph by Matt Rourke /Pool / NYT / Redux
Early on Thursday afternoon, at the culmination of his retrial in Norristown, Pennsylvania, Bill Cosby was found guilty on three counts of sexual assault. This should not have been surprising. Women have accused Cosby of drugging and molesting them on a timeline that stretches from the mid-sixties to 2008. In 2000, a report of his misbehavior made the New York Post. In 2005, Andrea Constand’s allegations against Cosby became public, and Tamara Green went on the “Today” show to accuse Cosby of assaulting her in the nineteen-seventies. By the time that Philadelphia magazine and People covered the story, in 2006, there were a dozen accusers. In 2014, Gawker resurrected the accusations, Newsweek investigated them, and Hannibal Buress called Cosby a rapist during a standup routine, prompting thirty more women to come forward. In the summer of 2015, New York put thirty-five of Cosby’s accusers on the cover of the magazine. At the end of that year, Cosby was charged with raping Constand. His trial, in 2017, ended with a hung jury, but a public consensus had formed that the comedian and TV star would be remembered as a rapist. A few months later, starting with the Harvey Weinstein story, man after man after man was exposed and investigated for sexual assault and harassment. The tables, everyone said, were turning.
Nonetheless, I went blank with shock when I saw the verdict on Thursday. So did a lot of people. It didn’t matter that this was, by now, a he-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said, she-said situation. For all the fears that the #MeToo moment will be marked by overreach, the fact remains that a single instance of justice feels more surprising than several decades of serial rape.
I covered Cosby’s first trial, last summer, from Norristown, where I sat in a pack of reporters, inexperienced and reeling. I had never covered a trial before, let alone a rape trial. I had not watched a woman try to prove to twelve strangers, under cross-examination, beyond a reasonable doubt, that a man had raped her. Before Constand testified, a woman named Kelly Johnson told her own story about being drugged and assaulted by Cosby. (Johnson was the only prior bad-act witness allowed by the judge.) To watch the defense question Johnson and then Constand was to watch an essential part of our criminal-justice system align with some of the worst things about being a woman. Women put their sanity and selfhood on the line in the process of securing sexual justice. They accept that they will be dressed up like paper dolls to look cruel, selfish, naïve, dishonest, slutty, greedy, stupid, or just unwanted—another woman talking about something we’d rather not know.
I wasn’t surprised, last year, when the first jury couldn’t settle on a verdict. I wasn’t surprised by the Weinstein story, or by the excruciating months that followed. It’s hard to graft new values onto an old world. There are a lot of people who think that men’s jobs are as important as women, period. (The careers and happiness and earning power that women have lost as victims of sexual assault and harassment, rather than as perpetrators of those crimes, still mostly go unmourned.) But people kept speaking up. Women kept voluntarily reëntering a world they had been dragged into, their pain and bravery always inextricable and twinned.
Writing about sexual assault, you get a tiny glimpse of what these women deal with: the way they are asked to answer for the entire spectrum of sexual encounters, the way they open themselves up to a firehose of other people’s pain. In February, I wrote about sexual assault again, this time at Columbia. It was the thirteenth story I’d written about the subject in a year. I had gotten sad and tired, and wanted the sort of peace that all of these women had denied themselves. I never suggested to my editor that I go back to Pennsylvania for the retrial. I expected a not-guilty verdict. There were far fewer reporters in Norristown this time around.
At Jezebel, Diana Moskovitz, who attended both trials, suggested that, the second time, the gloss of celebrity scandal, the shock of seeing an iconic cultural father figure on trial, had worn off, leaving the mundane fact of violence against women. My surprise at the verdict has reminded me how much fear and cynicism I’m still carrying around. Inequality has all of history on its side. Stories have already been published about how Matt Lauer and Louis C.K. could stage comebacks; Charlie Rose is reportedly in talks to do a #MeToo-themed television series interviewing his predatory peers. The President, who has been accused of sexual misconduct by nearly twenty women, remains inconceivably untouchable. As Andi Zeisler tweeted, many people still think of sexual assault as a matter of opinion rather than as a crime.
But all of the women—and not only women—who have come forward in the past year mattered; what they endured, what they continue to endure, mattered. For a jury to convict in this case, its members had to understand that the absence of a yes was a violation of consent, as Kevin Steele, the Montgomery County district attorney, asserted in the prosecution’s opening statement. The Weinstein case shed light on many aspects of sexual assault that tend to confuse people: that victims often maintain relationships with their attackers, or act irrationally in an attempt to rescue their dignity, or stay silent for years. These past six months have shown that serial abusers behave in predictable patterns, and that these patterns are crucial: the judge in Norristown allowed five bad-act accusers, rather than one, to testify at Cosby’s retrial. The presence of these accusers, I suspect, made the difference. This isolated outcome is the result of the accumulated outpouring of an unfathomable amount of female pain.
To be surprised at this verdict is disheartening, destabilizing. After all of this, are our expectations still so low? (Clickhole caught the mood with its headline: “A Slippery Slope: Could Bill Cosby’s Conviction Lead to a Mob Mentality Where Society Wantonly Punishes Any Serial Rapist After Decades of Inaction?”) It’s also galvanizing. We failed Cosby’s victims for so long. We are always capable of doing better by one another. There are so many people—like R. Kelly’s many, many accusers—for whom the power imbalance between accuser and accused has seemed insurmountable. It’s not.
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