Cosby is one of the first celebrities convicted in the #MeToo era
Sexual assault allegations against Cosby began to circulate in earnest toward the end of 2014, when Cosby reemerged on a standup tour and had plans for an NBC sitcom and Netflix show and after a standup clip of comedian Hannibal Buress joking about Cosby being a rapist went viral. Dozens and dozens of women started speaking out. It felt like the start of a reckoning.
By now, about 60 women have come forward with sexual assault allegations against Cosby. Some were young models or actresses who attended meetings with Cosby on the promise of reading a script or getting career advice. Many kept their silence for years, assuming their word against that of a famous comedian would not be believed.
“For 30 years I really didn’t think about it,” Janice Baker-Kinney, a Cosby accuser testified at the trial. She paused slightly before continuing: “I didn’t want to think about it. And I will tell you that when women started coming forward and my husband — my current husband — started seeing articles in the paper about it, he kept pointing them out to me. And what I said was, ‘I don’t want to read them. I don’t want to hear about those.’ I … don’t know how to sum it up.”
Yet the women who once feared telling the truth about Cosby for years revealed themselves, and found the public was finally listening and starting to believe them.
It started, in many ways, the surge to come. Sexual harassment accusations eventually ousted Fox News chair Roger Ailes in the summer of 2016; Bill O’Reilly followed from Fox News in April 2017. The New York Times published its exposé on Weinstein in October 2017. Famous actresses and household names accused a powerful Hollywood director of sexual assault, and the silence was shattered. Survivors, women and men, spoke out with allegations — about Matt Lauer, about Kevin Spacey, about Roy Moore, about Al Franken.
Still, for all of the concerns that the movement denies men “due process,” most of the #MeToo claims of harassment have been litigated in the media — not in court.
But what unfolded during Cosby’s trial is hard to separate from the national debate happening outside it. During jury deliberations, the first question asked of the judge was the legal definition of consent.
The judge said he could not answer it, and that the jurors already had the legal definition of the crime.
That left the jury to decide its definition, and it felt like a microcosm of how the country grappled with allegations that poured out during #MeToo.
Ultimately, the jury decided Constand could not, or did not, give consent to Cosby. The guilty verdict is a hopeful sign for sexual assault survivors — and a warning for those that perpetrate it — that the broader social reckoning is translating to the criminal justice system.
