THE recent release from prison of popular United States (US) TV personality, Bill Cosby, after the overturning of his conviction for rape by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on appeal, has raised and continues to raise fundamental issues with the way society treats women and rape and sexual assault against women and the whole essence of what justice should entail in the society for victims and survivors of rape and other violent sexual assaults. This is because the Pennsylvania Supreme Court did not inquire into the veracity or otherwise of the evidence presented before the court that tried and convicted him, nor the truthfulness or otherwise of the narratives from the many women assaulted through the years by him, but ruled to overturn the conviction on the basis of the technical issue of whether the prosecution ought to have been instituted in the first place against the background of the assurance of no further prosecution given by the earlier prosecutor to secure Cosby’s cooperation for the many civil cases arising from the botched criminal case on account of the effect of the statute of limitation on the case.
The contention is that on the strength of the assurance on no further criminal prosecution by the prosecutor, Cosby gave evidence in the proceedings of the civil cases to show that he had the scheme of drugging his victims before assaulting them sexually, and that it would be a violation of his rights to now use the evidence he voluntarily gave in the civil cases against him in a renewed criminal prosecution in negation of the earlier assurance of no further criminal prosecution. To be sure, this is a finely argued legal point especially in the light of the US Constitution’s Fifth Amendment which precludes self-incrimination. The prosecutors had problems successfully handling the criminal cases against Cosby especially because of the statute of limitation as many of the complaints were far into the past. But there were also many civil cases against Cosby arising from these complaints that the prosecutor must have thought it best to jettison the criminal case and see how to help firm up the civil cases. Without signing any agreement with him, the prosecutor, at the press conference announcing the decision to not proceed with the prosecution, also gave an indication that that would be the end of the matter as far as criminal prosecution was concerned in that he was making the decision to not charge Cosby again in the future with respect to the allegations and complaints.
Realising that he was off the criminal prosecution tentacles, Cosby did not have any qualms about giving evidence in one of the civil cases against him to the effect that he procured medicine to drug women he was interested in sexual encounters with before sexually assaulting them. And the new prosecutor did not see anything wrong in reopening criminal prosecution against him in one of the complaints that could still beat the statute of limitation because the former prosecutor also hinted about another prosecutor being at liberty to reopen the criminal case anyway. Except that now the new prosecutor had the self-incriminating evidence of Cosby at the civil case to use against him to prove the case. This is the context in which the Pennsylvania Supreme Court thinks that the prosecution has been unfair to him by allowing him to incriminate himself through the reopening of a criminal prosecution which he thought he had the understanding that it would not again be reopened.
Yet, the point has to be made that in all this consideration of the legal fine points about the rights of Cosby, no thought was spared for the rights and interests of over 60 women that had come forward with evidence and complaints about being drugged and raped and sexually assaulted by him. It was and is as if these women and their plight do not matter to the extent that the Court could strain itself to the point of getting to the legal loophole that would prevent Bill Cosby from being held accountable for the heinous crime he committed against these women. Nobody was concerned with the trauma that the sexual assault by Cosby, which was never disputed by the courts and upon which the lower court rightly convicted him – must have imposed on these women all these years and how they needed some form of justice to relieve them of a quantum of the debilitating trauma.
Now, these women are left to continue to carry the burden of their trauma without any help from the society and its legal and criminal justice system. This must be seen as the society greatly failing these women, with the scar of the failure going to be with them for ever. This is the sense in which Andrea Constand, the woman whose complaint earned the conviction for Cosby, could only lament: “(the court’s) majority decision regarding Bill Cosby is not only disappointing but of concern in that it may discourage those who seek justice for sexual assault in the criminal justice system from reporting or participating in the prosecution of the assailant or may force a victim to choose between filing either a criminal or civil action.” And Victoria Valentino, who accused Bill Cosby of raping her in the late 1960s, added: “We now have a sexual predator on the street. … What does this say about a woman’s worth? A woman’s value? Do our lives mean nothing? All of the lives that he damaged, not to mention our children and our personal relationships. He’s impacted the lives of well over 60 women … (and) so here we are, back to square one.” Beyond the trauma of the women is what this whole saga says about the continuing place of women in the society. We have been complaining about the persisting import and influence of patriarchy through which women and girls are treated as second class members of the human society, with their interests and rights made subservient to those of men and boys. And here we have the signpost of the same patriarchal diminution of the interests and sufferings of women survivors of rape and sexual assault by men under the refined toga of the law and the criminal justice system.
For we know that the laws of the society and the criminal justice system are all set up by the men and serve the purpose of their continuing overlordship of the society. Which is why it would be so easy for the court and the criminal justice system to be so concerned with and uphold the interest and right of a male rapist and sexual assailant at the expense of the interest and right and concerns of the female victims and survivors of his debilitating assaults. And this tells us that there is indeed a lot of poignancy and truth to the observation by yet another one of the victims and survivors, Patricia Leary Steuer: ‘I am … angry that the laws in the system is devised in such a way that it favors powerful and wealthy people, and in this particular instance, a powerful and wealthy man, and that needs to change.’ The implication is that we really need to continue to impress and press it on the society to stem this persisting pervasive influence and import of patriarchy in the running of the society in order to have the chance of not just relieving women and girls from its debilitating effect, but to also be able to harvest the unstinted, true and full contributions of women and girls to the progress and development of the society.
- Yakubu is of the Department of Communication and Language Arts, University of Ibadan.
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