Beyond marqee sexual assault cases that came back to life after long slumbers — against such defendants as Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Cosby and R. Kelly — the #MeToo movement has inspired deeper changes, especially among victims deciding whether to trust the criminal justice system, The New York Times reports. A culture shift has also occurred in police squad rooms, judges’ chambers, jury boxes and prosecutors’ offices around the country. Investigators are being taught, for example, how sexual trauma can affect memory. “The #MeToo movement has helped level the playing field” from past practices that tilted against victims, said Kristen Gibbons Feden, a former prosecutor who helped win the conviction of Bill Cosby in 2018.
Anne Milgram, a former New Jersey attorney general who earlier had prosecuted sex-trafficking crimes while working in the Justice Department, said cases with a single accuser and without a lot of corroboration or physical evidence have been considered tough to prove and sometimes not prosecuted. “In the ‘he said-she said,’ the ‘he’ often won,” Milgram said. “#MeToo has shifted that,” she added. “I think we’re seeing a willingness for people to push through on tough cases where they weren’t pursued initially.” One expert sounded a note of caution. “I think that it is something that we should notice and mark as progress, and yet be very careful about assuming this means that sexual violence survivors will now en masse see justice,” said Deborah Tuerkheimer, a law professor at Northwestern University who has studied sexual violence and formerly served as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan.