The civil verdict against Bill Cosby, finding him liable for a sexual assault more than 50 years after it occurred and awarding nearly $60 million in damages, lands in a very particular way when you have spent a career sitting across from survivors. I have. I know what it takes to come forward decades later.
I know the hesitation, the calculation, the fear of not being believed because too much time has passed. This jury rejected that thinking. They understood something the law has been slow to accept: trauma does not move in straight lines, and delay is often evidence of its depth, not its absence.
What gives me real hope in this decision is not just the outcome, but what it reflects about where we are going. While this is a US case, the same shift is happening here in Canada.
I have watched this area of law evolve from one that barely existed into one where survivors are, increasingly, being heard on their own terms—without being shut out by arbitrary limitation periods or outdated assumptions about how trauma “should” look.
The civil system is not perfect, but it is becoming a place where accountability is still possible even when other avenues have closed.
For those still deciding whether to speak, this case says something I have long believed and now see more clearly than ever: it is not too late, and the law is starting, finally, to meet survivors where they are.