Actor, Judge, #MeToo and #WhyIDidntReport

They laughed and cried in the rain as the news sank in: Inside, Bill Cosby, whom they had all accused of sexual assault, had just been sentenced to three to 10 years in prison, punishment for violating one woman, Andrea Constand.

Across the country, many more women joined in that victory, a win for a movement that began with a hashtag and trickled up to real consequences in the highest halls of culture and power. It was for them proof that the slings and arrows that women have endured for eons are now weaponized to not just topple, but to convict, culpable men at the apex of their game.

“This is a milestone because somebody finally got justice,” said Rocky Pierson, 22, a podcaster from St. Paul, Minnesota.

“We look at people who have such a high profile as untouchable,” she said. “This chips away at that.”

But at the very same moment, another milestone of the #MeToo movement has cracked open deep fractures in American society.

Just over 120 miles to the south, issues of sexual assault racked the nation’s capital and the country, as a third woman came forward on Wednesday with accusations against a man who stands to become one of the most powerful of those accused so far: Judge Brett Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court pick.

As the familiar agony of he-said-she-said plays out, there are some who see the episode as the movement’s zenith, and others for whom it is its nadir. The former are pouring out their stories under hashtags like #WhyIDidntReport, sharing their own experiences of burying their attacks silently in their memories. The latter are repelled by a worthy cause that some feel has at points gone too far, and is now being used for political gain at the expense of innocent men.

“You want to believe her if it’s true,” Susan Smith, 53, a jewelry designer in Houston, said of Christine Blasey Ford, the first woman to accuse Kavanaugh.

But Smith, who said she had friends who knew the judge, was suspicious of the timing. “When he went through law school and wanted to take the bar, you didn’t write a letter,” she said, as if to Ford. “You didn’t follow him as he worked his way up the bench.”

In a news conference Wednesday, Trump put it his own way. “I could pick another Supreme Court justice,” he said. “Somebody could come and say, 30 years ago, 25 years ago, 10 years ago, five years ago, he did a horrible thing to me.”

“It is a very dangerous period in our country, and it is being perpetrated by some very evil people,” he said. “Some of them are Democrats, I must say, because some of them know that this is just a game that they’re playing.”

Polls show the country divided on whether or not to believe Kavanaugh’s accusers. Many are not really sure where they come down.

“I struggle with this because I think that there are women who are coming out and it changed their life. When it gets into a he-said, she-said — how do you go about that?” said Karen Dohling, 57, from Los Angeles, who described herself as a conservative who voted for Trump but no longer supports him.

“You could have a vindictive woman coming out about someone to hurt them,” Dohling added. “But then, that other person on the flip side could have done exactly what the woman said.”

Few people would equate Cosby’s conviction for drugging and sexually assaulting a woman (he has been sued by others) with a Senate hearing covering Kavanaugh’s high school and college behavior. But in the space of three days, both men are being called to account in a way that might have seemed unimaginable just a few years ago.

Cosby’s sentence on Tuesday, and Kavanaugh’s hearing on Thursday, have breathed new life into #MeToo a year after the first reports about Harvey Weinstein.

#WhyIDidntReport has become a blackboard for women angry that the judge’s accusers have been criticized for not speaking up sooner. For Marita Green Monroe, who works in marketing, the headlines have unearthed a buried memory of being raped during law school, which she never reported, in part because she blamed herself.

“I completely forgot about it until the Kavanaugh accusations,” said Monroe, who lives in Harlem. “I started to think about it when people started doubting Dr. Ford and saying it happened such a long time ago, and it just triggered the memory.”

“I know that it happened,” she said, referring to the account of Blasey, also sometimes known by her married name.

For many victims of assault and harassment, seeing Cosby led out of the courtroom in handcuffs evoked a different emotion, one described by Victoria Valentino, one of the accusers celebrating outside the courthouse on Tuesday. The sentence, she said, is giving victims “courage to speak out and find their voice and confront their perpetrator, and free themselves from this prison of victimhood, of shame, of blame, of fear.”

In many cases the feelings regarding the accusations against Kavanaugh have fallen along party lines. Liberals tend to see in them a conservative blindness to sexual misconduct. Conservatives more often see them as a ploy to keep a conservative off the bench.

On Tuesday, comedian D.L. Hughley posed a question on Twitter to people who cheered Cosby’s sentence while discounting the accusations against Kavanaugh:

“For all those who are saying that #Kavanaugh’s accusers accusations were 35 years ago! I wonder if thats what u said during the #Cosby trial!”

Smith, the jewelry designer, allowed that her satisfaction with Cosby’s sentence might not jibe with her support of the judge. But to her, the difference was that the accusations against the judge date back to his student years. “Let’s do a background search on every senator and congressman starting in eighth grade and see what we get,” she said.

Another person who has come to Kavanaugh’s defense is someone he would most likely rather not be associated with. After Cosby was led from the courtroom in handcuffs, his publicist, Andrew Wyatt, described him as the victim of an anti-black and anti-male judge, prosecution and news media. “What is going on in Washington today with Judge Kavanaugh is part of that sex war,” he said.

For Smith, the moment was above all one of re-examination. She has found herself revisiting her past beliefs, and looking at past scandals with a new lens, such President Bill Clinton’s sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky. “I never thought I’d stick up for her,” she said.

“It shifts and you see the patterns in things,” she said. “And you just think, should I trust my gut on this one?”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Actor, Judge, #MeToo and #WhyIDidntReport

Huddled under umbrellas outside a suburban Philadelphia courthouse on Tuesday, a group of women embraced.

JOIN OUR PULSE COMMUNITY!