STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK
Caroline Heldman would have been outside the Kavanaugh hearing if she hadn’t been in Sun Valley Thursday.
If she had been in Washington, D.C., she said, she would have supported protestors outside the Capitol Building and possibly gotten arrested.
Instead, she addressed 150 attendees at the Alturas Institute’s third annual Conversations for Exceptional Women about her role in the Bill Cosby trial.
Then, when the conference had ended for the day, she excused herself to learn how Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had angrily and tearfully denied sexually assaulting Dr. Christine Blasey Ford so she could take part in an interview with NPR Radio an hour later.
Caroline Heldman is chair of the Politics Department at Occidental College in Los Angeles where she co-founded the Oxy Sexual Assault Coalition.
A former FOX News commentator, she was one of the early architects of the campus anti-rape movement and author of the new book “The New Campus Anti Rape Movement: Internet Activism and Social Justice.”
She has supported Bill Cosby’s accusers and worked with Harvey Weinstein’s accusers. And, when details about Bill O’Reilly’s sexual harassment scandal broke, she told her own stories of harassment at the hands of O’Reilly and FOX News host Eric Bolling—something that hurt her career with FOX.
On Thursday she told those attending the conference at Ketchum’s Community library how there was a push to address sexual assault on college campuses in the early 1990s but it and the #MeToo Movement didn’t gain momentum until women began telling their stories on social media.
“We’re in a new day in terms of women’s rage,” she said.
But, she added, there’s still a long way to go in a society where only 2 percent of those charged with rape are convicted, where societal attitudes and practices trivializes rape, where victims are still blamed, shamed and not believed.
“Is the way Dr. Ford is being treated inspiring you to come forward? People question why it took so long for the women to come forward, but the real question is what is it in our society that keeps people from coming forward?”
“The most positive thing you can say is, ‘I believe you,’ ” she added, “Because most people don’t.”
Heldman was at the first Cosby trial with a group of women who said he drugged and sexually assaulted them. She had met a couple of the women during a campaign to overturn the statue of limitations on rape in California—a campaign that was eventually taken nationwide.
Supporters were verbally attacked by groups of protestors, who Heldman believes were paid by Cosby. And a topless woman sporting the names of the accusers on her torso rushed Bill Cosby yelling “Women’s Lives Matter.”
The trial resulted in a mistrial.
Heldman was there again at the retrial, coaching the accusers about how to deal with the media and physically supporting them, as well.
“Survivors need someone to physically support them,” she said, describing how she literally held up one survivor as the woman suffered a dissociative episode.
Heldman said the Cosby’s sentence of three to 10 years in prison exceeded the women’s expectations. The case shows that the legal system might take women a little more seriously, but it also speaks to lithe limits of legal systems when the maximum Cosby could’ve gotten is 10 years.
Studies show that the odds of a false claim are between 2 percent and 8 percent if there’s one accuser. That dips to less than 1 percent if there are two.
“Once you get up to three—sorry, folks,” she said.
Rules and normal protocol have been suspended in the Kavanaugh hearing, Heldman said.
“My guess is that Kavanaugh will probably get confirmed. We will see a different treatment of survivors by politicians.”
With Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, Roe vs. Wade will be overturned, she predicted.
“I was raised Pentecostal Evangelical so I can say that,” she added.
As a teenager, Heldman said, she stood on the front lines of Operation Rescue harassing women going into abortion clinics. And she listened as strategists said that their days would come,
“That strategy is unfolding on Twitter,” she said.
Heldman said she changed her views after realizing that those she'd heard who were against abortion also were against birth control.
“I realized they were against women controlling their body. They were against women having sex.”
Despite the #MeToo movement, those who have experienced sexual harassment must still weigh whether speaking up is worth losing their career, said Heldman.
“You’ll be seen as a trouble maker and at the end of the day most of the time it’s not worth it,” she said. “ It’s never an easy choice.”