Steele gathers dirty rust…
To those who lament the PA Supreme Court’s decision to free Mr. Cosby, I’ll paraphrase what someone said (I don’t remember who said it or which side they were on): The US does not have a justice system; it has a legal system. Mr. Steele should never have prosecuted Mr. Cosby, and that DA did a disservice to Ms. Constand by doing so. The previous DA had promised Mr. Cosby no prosecution, and that was legally binding, so he went ahead with a deposition in a civil trial, figuring he wouldn’t need to plead the fifth in a criminal one. Mr. Steele then used that deposition to prosecute him in the criminal trial! The Supreme Court’s decision was spot on.
Mr. Steele caused this mess. Two things are evidence for disbarring this lawyer, unless he’s already left the legal system. First, he was in a hurry. The statute of limitations meant that time was running out. But that leads to the second reason: He was also running for office and needed a high-profile case in a hurry to improve his branding in the marketing sense. Mr. Steele was the real culprit in this case.
The media has avoided this issue and shares some culpability for the fiasco. They ignore the facts when it’s convenient for them to focus on what they consider a better story, the outrage of the victims. They’re culpable too, no doubt about it.
This is a miscarriage of justice on Mr. Steele’s part as well as the media’s complicity in covering up his errors. But perhaps we should add one more ambitious lawyer to the mix? Ms. Allred has made a career of representing abused women. Her moral crime is giving them, including Ms. Constand, false hope. Or maybe Gloria is just naive? I repeat: We have a legal system, not a justice system. Both Steele and Allred are lawyers. They should know the difference.
Given that, women have become so frustrated now that #MeToo goes after their abusers in the court of public opinion where all the people they accuse are guilty until proven innocent. The media are their willing accomplices. That runs the risk of backfiring—public opinion is fickle and often starts to pity the accused. It reminds me when, decades ago, many people running childcare centers were accused of being pedophiles, guilty until proven innocent. I’m not saying some accusations aren’t justified, but there’s a bandwagon effect that so often accompanies those tactics, and people get turned off by them because some lives are unjustly ruined, not quite as badly as with a lynch mob, but near to it.
Mr. Cosby isn’t innocent in the moral sense. The court never claimed that. Too many women came forward, suffering psychological pain in the process. Perhaps Mr. Cosby lured them; or perhaps they were looking for him to shed some star power on themselves. Who knows? And it doesn’t matter. They felt abused. But there was a bandwagon, and it started to roll far too late.
Victims shouldn’t wait to come forward. Otherwise, they risk allowing their abusers to win the public’s pity and sympathy they don’t deserve. By waiting in Mr. Cosby’s case, they sent “America’s Dad,” an eighty-year-old man, to jail. And the Mr. Steele did that illegally.
The women involved were victims, victimized not only by Mr. Cosby, but also by Mr. Steele, Ms. Allred, and the media. Please, please, don’t wait to come forward if you want to punish your abuser. Otherwise, there will be opportunists with an agenda ready to abuse you even more, giving you false hope when our legal system can’t do so legally.
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Comments are always welcome.
Leonardo and the Quantum Code. Trouble again finds Esther Brookstone on her home turf. An old friend from her Oxford days is developing encoding and decoding algorithms that involve entangled quantum states and quantum computers, all motivated by some of Leonardo Da Vinci’s ideas found in a newly discovered notebook of the artist. His project is financed by MI5, but both the Americans and Russians want his results…and so does a mysterious stranger. Cloak-and-dagger suspense abound in this fifth novel of the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series. Soon available wherever quality ebooks are sold (but not on Amazon).
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
