Bill Cosby, Britney, and a Tale of Two American Justice Systems

By Arwa Mahdawi, Guardian UK

04 July 21

Cosby becoming a free man on the same day Spears lost her latest battle to free herself from a man’s control is almost too on the nose

tale of two justice systems

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a good fortune and an expensive lawyer can get away with almost anything. See as exhibit one: Bill Cosby. On Wednesday, Pennsylvania’s highest court overturned the disgraced actor’s sexual assault conviction on a legal technicality. Cosby had served two years of a three to ten-year sentence for a 2004 encounter with accuser Andrea Constand; before Wednesday’s surprise reversal he had been expected to serve the maximum time after vowing he wasn’t going to show any remorse for a crime he says he didn’t commit.

It is highly unlikely that Cosby, 83, will ever see the inside of a prison cell again. While he has been accused of sexual misconduct by 60 women, the statute of limitations for all the accusers with enough evidence to bring a case had passed by the time they went public with the allegations. All except Constand. Now, according to Wednesday’s ruling, Cosby cannot be retried for Constand’s assault. In a statement the court said overturning the guilty verdict and blocking any further prosecution “is the only remedy that comports with society’s reasonable expectations of its elected prosecutors and our criminal justice system.”

You know what? That statement is spot on: Cosby walking free is exactly what I’d expect from the US criminal justice system. There is a reason why the dozens of women who accused Cosby of misconduct took years to come forward; there is a reason more than two out of three sexual assaults are estimated to go unreported. Sexual assault victims often don’t come forward because they don’t expect to be believed or taken seriously by the legal system. And these suspicions are well-founded: according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network out of 1,000 sexual assaults, 975 perpetrators go free. Some even go on glitzy careers. A third of the six men on the US supreme court have been accused of sexual misconduct.

If you want to know who the US legal system protects and who it doesn’t, you don’t need to look much further than the events that unfolded on Wednesday. On the same day that Cosby walked free, a judge in Los Angeles denied Britney Spears’s request to be set free from her father’s control. The 39-year-old’s father, Jamie Spears, will remain a co-conservator of her estate under an arrangement Spears has called “abusive” and will continue to make decisions about her life. Let’s just pause for a moment and try and imagine a situation where the sexes were reversed and a 39-year-old male celebrity was under the legal control of his mother. Let’s try and imagine a situation where a 39-year-old male celebrity was deemed fit enough to work, but not fit enough to make decisions about his reproductive choices . I can’t quite imagine that, can you? Indeed, as many people have pointed out, Kanye West has had a high-profile mental breakdown, just like Spears. Rather than being put under a conservatorship, he went on to run for president.

Cosby becoming a free man on the same day that Spears lost her latest battle to free herself from a man’s control is almost too on the nose, isn’t it? If it happened in a TV drama you’d think the writers were being rather too heavy-handed with the social commentary. Alas, this isn’t a TV drama, it’s just another day in the American legal system.