(Trigger warning: discussion of sexual assault, rape, abuse, violence)
Bill Cosby is free.
The 60 women he assaulted are not.
As he steps into the undeserved light of a life without restraint or limitation, they are profoundly injured once again.
This is why so many survivors of sexual assault don’t come forward.
This is why after their initial trauma, they always experience a second one.
This is why they often live for decades in self-imposed silence and unmerited shame.
This is why they often bear their unimaginable suffering in secret for their entire lives.
They do this because they know that the burden here is still on the abused and not the abuser.
They know that if they find the courage to step into the light and speak the most painful truth—that their pasts and their dating histories and their clothing choices will all be put on trial in courts of law and of public opinion.
They know they will have their characters maligned and their motives assailed; that they will be gaslit into believing they did not experience what they experienced, that they were partially culpable for their injury or even willing participants in it.
They know that the minutiae of the law will often fail them and favor their assailants.
And they know that most of the time, justice will be evasive and fleeting and ultimately temporary: that with enough money and enough power and enough privilege, men who commit the most reprehensible acts will escape accountability. Long after their abusers return to the lives they had before—they never can.
For decades as a student pastor, I saw how difficult it was for victims of abuse (especially young women) to come forward and to bring their assailants to justice. The misogyny baked into a system already rigged for men prone to violence made pursuing accountability for their abuser, let alone healing for themselves—nearly impossible. Far too many of them decided that it was less painful to simply secretly carry their trauma than expose it to a world that would likely only exacerbate it. My heart breaks for them, because I know that days like this day are reminders why they believe they made the right choice.
And so, while Cosby, a man proven to have violated dozens of women now walks free due solely to a technicality that defies any sense of reason of justice; buoyed by the applause of millions of sycophantic supporters, by the tone-deaf tweets of delusional, self-serving friends, and by men of affinity who themselves benefit from such miscarriages of justice—his abusers are injured yet again.
And not only those Bill Cosby directly victimized, but every survivor of sexual assault who will feel solidarity with them, those who understand their outrage, and who are wounded anew realizing how little has changed.
Despite high-profile hashtag social campaigns, momentary award show posturing, and occasional media exposes, the truth is that our culture is still one where men who abuse have really good odds of never having to face meaningful and lasting accountability.
Millions of people who know well the wounds and the terror and the frustration of those 60 women, will be even less likely to brave the taunts and the threats and the shame that come with stepping into the light, and will instead retreat to a darkness they do not deserve.
Bill Cosby is free today.
Those whose bodies he violated and whose wills he disregarded and whose lives he upended will not be.
The rest of us cannot be okay with that.
