Andrea Constand is the only survivor to find justice against Bill Cosby. In The Case Against Cosby, she tells her story alongside other four other women.CBC
The first time a man ground his erection into my derrière on a New York subway, I was 22. I whipped around to face him – not easy in a car packed tight as a box of toothpicks – and was astonished when he calmly met my eye and then glanced away, as riders do. “He looks so benign,” I thought. “I must be mistaken.” To understand the 63 women – 63 – who’ve accused Bill Cosby of drugging and sexually assaulting them across five decades, multiply that bewilderment by a million.
There are many takeaways from the incisive new documentary The Case Against Cosby, directed by Karen Wookey, which focuses on Andrea Constand, the only Cosby accuser who successfully had him convicted. (It airs Sunday on the CBC and CBC Gem.) The most important is this, from the psychologist and author Anna Salter: “Counterintuitive behaviour in victims is caused by counterintuitive behaviour in perpetrators.” Courts everywhere, take note: Victims are confused because their assailants are confusing, friendly to them before the assault, and after. And that’s with a typical perpetrator – imagine facing down a beloved groundbreaker who’d styled himself as America’s Dad.
Constand, 49, is tall and curly-haired, with a strong, open face. She was a high-school basketball star in her native Toronto, and later became director of operations for the women’s team at Temple University in Philadelphia, where Cosby was a prominent booster. He groomed her, befriended her family. In January, 2004, he invited her to his home, drugged her with three Benadryls and sexually assaulted her while she was semi-conscious. In April, 2004, still reeling, she quit the job she loved and moved back to Ontario. “I wanted to run away from Philly, even from basketball, and basketball was my life,” she said last week in a joint video interview with Wookey.
In January, 2005, Constand filed a criminal complaint. A month later, district attorney Bruce Castor deemed the evidence insufficient. A month after that, Constand filed a civil suit, for which Cosby was deposed. He settled out of court, paying her US$3.38-million. Over the next decade, dozens of women continued to accuse Cosby of the same pattern of drugging and assault. But each thought she was alone. “The women were like Whac-A-Mole,” Wookey says, referring to the carnival game. “He just paid them off, paid them off.”
Then, in October, 2014, a video of comedian Hannibal Buress calling Cosby a rapist went viral. “It was like an earthquake rattled under my feet,” Constand says. In July, 2015, 35 Cosby accusers appeared on the cover of New York magazine – a #MeToo movement before it had a hashtag.
So one week before her 12-year statute of limitations ran out in December, 2015, Constand filed new charges, backed by Cosby’s 2005 deposition, which a judge had unsealed. He was found guilty in 2018 and sentenced to three to 10 years in prison. In June, 2021, his conviction was overturned on a technicality – Castor had promised him freedom from prosecution in exchange for his deposition.
Those are the bones of the story, but The Case Against Cosby adds flesh and feeling. Though Constand admires W. Kamau Bell’s probing miniseries, We Need to Talk About Cosby (2022), she didn’t participate in it – it focuses on Cosby’s place in America’s consciousness. She and Wookey wanted to centre on her own experience, plus that of four other Cosby survivors.
“I wanted to have some closure,” Constand says, “and I want to let people know how traumatizing it is to go through this. We need to understand that one night can cause a lifetime of damage, can change the course of a life forever.”
Society is structured against prosecuting sexual violence – there’s an underlying feeling that a woman can “get over it” and a man’s life shouldn’t be “ruined” for it. But as Constand enumerates what one night cost her, her voice is so clear, her pain so evident, my eyes fill with tears.
“You lose your sense of innocence,” she says. “You lose your sense of trust. You lose your sense of purpose. You lose your sense of direction. Your wings get clipped. Abuse takes opportunities away. It causes trauma. It can send you into a deep spiral of depression and addiction. I lost friendships. My sense of being a free spirit was shattered.”
In the documentary, Constand and four other women discuss their experiences in a three-day retreat with physician and trauma specialist Gabor Maté.CBC
Her treatment inside the legal system made things worse. Every attorney she consulted told her she had a 2-per-cent chance of bringing Cosby to justice. She went ahead anyway. “I’m an athlete, a competitor at heart, but my motive was never about winning,” she says. “My motive was healing. It doesn’t matter to me that Cosby got out. He served almost the minimum sentence. What matters is that a jury believed me and convicted him.”
Healing, however, isn’t about putting a traumatic event behind you, Constand continues: “It’s about how you take it forward with you. I’ve forgiven so many things, but I’ll never forget.” In 2019, she launched the foundation Hope Healing Transformation, to provide survivors with free legal assistance, emotional support and strategies to help them withstand and then thrive after assault.
Wookey hopes her film will “trauma-inform” viewers, so we can better understand survivors’ mindsets and behaviours. She hired physician and trauma specialist Gabor Maté to lead her five subjects – two of whom had never spent a moment in therapy before – in a three-day retreat. “No one in that room, crew included, was not completely transformed,” Wookey says. “I knew if it affected us, it would affect an audience. But even as we were cutting the footage, people were saying, ‘This is uncomfortable, are viewers going to want to watch it?’ It has to be uncomfortable for things to shift.”
The director was especially mindful of the women who were assaulted when they were unconscious. “Being roofied or drugged happens to many women,” she says. “Don’t discount it as less traumatic. It affects you just as much.”
Constand sees progress in civil lawsuits where predators are made to pay victims, and look-back laws that allow suits to be filed years after assaults. “But in Canada we don’t even have a proper legal definition of consent,” she says. “Until our culture stops tolerating sexual assault, and the laws change, we won’t see meaningful change.”
A tattoo on her arm reads, #tellsomeone. If women take nothing else from her story, Constand hopes they learn this. From the first moment the police interviewed her, that was the question everyone asked: Who did you confide this in? “I told my mother,” she says. “You need to tell someone. Even if you’re not ready to report, tell a friend, tell a doctor, tell your family.”
Assault survivors tell her they may never know the person they could have been. But Constand knows who she is. It’s written on her body, and in it.