NEW YORK (NYTIMES) – Ms Andrea Constand was taking what she has described as a step towards healing: Sixteen years after naming comedian Bill Cosby in a lawsuit as the man who had sexually assaulted her, and three years after he was convicted and sentenced to prison for the crime, she was ready to tell her story in a memoir that is due to be published in September.
The forthcoming book traces her journey from disbelieved accuser to a powerful voice in the #MeToo movement, one of dozens of women who came forward with similar accounts of abuse and misconduct by Cosby but the one who, in the words of her publisher, had “the power to bring him to justice”.
But instead of having the last word, a key part of Ms Constand’s narrative – if not her book – was rewritten last Wednesday when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court freed Cosby on procedural grounds. The court did not exonerate Cosby, 83, but said he should not have been charged because a previous district attorney had given him assurances he would not be prosecuted.
The court’s decision was “disappointing”, Ms Constand and her lawyers said in a statement, which noted that they had not been consulted on, or even been made aware of, the closed-door prosecutorial manoeuvrings more than a decade ago that eventually allowed Cosby to walk out of a maximum-security prison near Philadelphia on Wednesday.
And in a case once seen as a harbinger of women’s right to justice, the effect, Ms Constand and her lawyers feared, would be to once again silence victims of assault.
Ms Constand, 48, who is now a licensed massage therapist in her native Canada, has movingly described how much the Cosby case upended her life.
She called her memoir The Moment – as in, the moment everything changed.
“I’m a middle-aged woman who’s been stuck in a holding pattern for most of her adult life, unable to heal fully or to move forward,” she said in her victim impact statement before Cosby’s sentencing in 2018, describing the rippling aftereffects of the night when she said he drugged and violated her in his suburban Philadelphia mansion.
At the time, in 2004, she was a 30-year-old director of operations with the Temple University women’s basketball team, and she considered Cosby, then 66, a grandfather-like friend and mentor. Their encounter – when she was literally immobilised by the pills Cosby gave her, according to her testimony – was a profound betrayal, she said.
“Bill Cosby took my beautiful, healthy young spirit and crushed it,” she said in her statement to the court. “He robbed me of my health and vitality, my open nature, and my trust in myself and others.”
Writing the memoir was meant to be an act of closure – a long-delayed one.
“I did not want to lose any memories to time and believe that reflection is a necessary final step towards true healing,” she said in an interview with her publisher, according to CBC Books. “By sharing stories, we can begin to help those whose lives have been impacted by sexual violence.”
Neither Ms Constand nor a representative for Viking Canada responded to requests for comment about the status of the book.
In an excerpt published last month in Elle, she describes the moment in 2005 when she learnt that Mr Bruce Castor, who was then the district attorney in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, had decided not to move forward with her case.
“It was yet another sharp blow in what had already been, without a doubt, the most difficult year of my life,” she wrote.
It was a decision that would have unanticipated ramifications this year.
Mr Castor – who earlier this year was one of the attorneys representing former United States president Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial – announced in a news release at the time that his investigation had found “insufficient” evidence to proceed with the case.
He has since said he assured Cosby he would not be prosecuted to pave the way for Cosby to testify in Ms Constand’s civil case. In depositions for the civil case, Cosby acknowledged giving quaaludes to women he was pursuing for sex.
When the civil case was settled in 2006 for US$3.38 million (S$4.6 million), Ms Constand later said, she believed that “this awful chapter in my life was over at last”.
But when a new district attorney decided to pursue the charges Mr Castor had not, Ms Constand agreed to once again put herself on the stand, though she was shamed and exhausted by the process, she has said.
It ended with Cosby’s conviction in 2018, a moment that was hailed at the time as a sign that in the #MeToo era, the accounts of women would be given more credence.
Though her story now has an unwelcome coda, Ms Constand appears unbowed.
Last Thursday, she retweeted a message from Hope, Healing and Transformation, a foundation she started last year to offer guidance and support to survivors, which will receive a portion of the proceeds from her memoir. “Your story and voice matter right now more than ever. Silence is not an option. Bill Cosby is not innocent.”
