5 years on, key #MeToo voices take stock of the movement

Once again, disgraced mogul Harvey Weinstein sits in a courtroom, on trial in Los Angeles while the reckoning the accusations against him launched marks a significant milestone this month: It’s been five years since a brief hashtag — #MeToo — galvanized a broad social movement.

The Associated Press went back to Louisette Geiss and Andrea Constand, accusers in two of the #MeToo era’s most momentous cases — Weinstein, already convicted in a New York case, and Bill Cosby, once convicted and now free — to learn how their lives have changed, whether they have any regrets, and how hopeful they feel after a decidedly mixed bag of legal results.

LOUISETTE GEISS: A LAWSUIT AND A MUSICAL

All in all, Louisette Geiss considers herself one of the luckier ones: When she tried to run out of a hotel room to escape Harvey Weinstein’s alleged advances, the door opened. She was able to flee.

Geiss, a former actress and screenwriter who, in 2017, accused Weinstein of attempting to force her to watch him masturbate in a hotel bathroom in 2008, was the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit against his former studio.

But fighting through the justice system — an experience that has deeply frustrated her — was not the only means by which Geiss has attempted to cope. She’s also written a musical.

“The Right Girl” was waylaid by the pandemic but will be produced live onstage sometime in 2023. The show, with a high-profile production team that includes songwriter Diane Warren, tells the story of three women at various levels of power in a workplace plagued by a serial sexual predator.

“In the end, you see that the judicial system is still not in the right place to take him down,” Geiss said. “It’s really society that takes him down.”

It’s a reflection of Geiss’ view that the latter has moved faster than the former to absorb the lessons of #MeToo, albeit still imperfectly.

“I think the MeToo movement definitely gave predators pause to act on their inclinations,” she said. “I think that they have been warned. And so they are less likely to do it, but I do think they’re still doing it.”

At times, yes, she had regrets about coming forward. She worried about the effects on her children, now 7 and 5 — her youngest was only weeks old when the case exploded. But it was also her children that made her realize she had to fight.

“In the end, to make a bigger change for women and for children — for your child, and for my children — it was important that I step up and do it,” she said.

ANDREA CONSTAND: ‘IT WAS THE RIGHT THING TO DO’

For Andrea Constand, the chief accuser in Cosby’s criminal case, the past five years have been turbulent, to say nothing of the preceding decade.

Cosby’s lawyers loudly derided her as a “con artist” during the first celebrity trial of the #MeToo era, in 2018. Yet the jury nonetheless convicted the aging comedian of drugging and sexually assaulting her in 2005 and a judge sent him to prison. Then, a Pennsylvania appeals court freed Cosby last year.

Constand had gone to police a year after the encounter with Cosby, which he called consensual. A prosecutor declined to press charges, later saying he had secretly promised Cosby he’d never be charged — a hotly debated claim that ultimately undid the conviction. And the first jury to hear her case, in 2017, couldn’t reach a verdict.

Through the yearslong storm, Constand has remained serene. She believes these are just early days for the movement.

“A lot of trauma was released,” she added. “Keeping secrets can really can make you sick.”