1/Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years in prison today. He was convicted in New York City in late February for criminal sexual assault in the first degree and rape in the third degree. Jurors acquitted him on the more serious charges. nytimes.com/2020/03/11/nyr…
2/The conviction offered a measure of justice to some in the #MeToo movement. nytimes.com/2020/02/24/nyr…
3/It has also served as a powerful endnote to the reporting by the New York Times and the New Yorker that led to a public airing of the accusations against Weinstein that had long been silenced.
4/@rowena_chiu was one of those silenced women, forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement after she says she was attacked by Weinstein in a hotel room at the Venice Film Festival in 1998. She was 24 at the time. For decades, she didn’t tell her family or friends.
5/She says the NDA felt all-encompassing: It forbid her from talking to a therapist about what happened unless they, too, signed an NDA. She wasn’t even allowed to have a copy of her own NDA. She began speaking publicly about the incident late last year. nytimes.com/2019/10/05/opi…
6/I first spoke with Rowena about her experience, along with @jodikantor and @mega2e, last fall. I remain so moved by what Rowena said about the deep emotional impact that the attack -- and the forced silence -- has had on her life. cityarts.net/event/jodi-kan…
7/On Monday, I spoke with Rowena again to ask her about the Weinstein trial. She said she had been bracing for an acquittal in the New York case, and the conviction offered “an incredible sense of victory." She added: "Many of us thought that day would never come.”
8/But she notes that it took more than 100 women and some men over the course of 30 years to come forward for any of them were believed. Watching the trial in New York, she felt the women -- not Weinstein -- were on trial.
9/And many women like Rowena will never have the opportunity to pursue their cases in criminal court because of jurisdictional issues or statutes of limitations. All of it revealed, she said, that the legal system is “incredibly flawed and limited.”
10/Weinstein also faces criminal charges in Los Angeles, and Rowena has come to see these trials as a stand-in for the allegations she was never able to formally lodge against her former boss. “I tried pushing every door, and I can’t get my day in court,” she said.
11/Seeking justice through the criminal justice system is, of course, a difficult and tricky endeavor for victims of sexual assault.
12/To put the Weinstein case in perspective, very few reports of sexual assault go very far in the legal system. @profmorabito @ProfLWilliams and April Pattavina have found: Out of 100 reports ➡️ 19 arrests, 5 guilty pleas + 1 guilty verdict at trial wcwonline.org/2019/concernin…
13/Sexual assault cases can start falling out of the legal system soon after victims report sexual assault to the police. In some places, probable cause doesn’t always lead to arrest. propublica.org/article/when-i…
14/Researchers like @profmorabito say prosecutors can play a role in the fate of sexual assault cases: “A lot of times, detectives felt like they had really good, solid cases with enough evidence to make an arrest, but prosecutors declined to go forward”
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15/And some cases will never be known to the criminal justice system. I have met many janitors, nannies, farmworkers over the years who chose not to report. They didn’t think they’d be believed, or feared it would affect their jobs and immigration status thenewpress.com/books/days-work
16/These are the survivors that Rowena is now trying to help through activism and policy advocacy. “I felt so silenced for so long,” she said, “and I realized that there’s a whole contingent of people who are even more silenced.”
