Rotunno framed her victim-blaming itself as a sort of perverse, personal-accountability feminism, claiming to be insulted at the implication that women had no agency of their own. Drawing on one’s own womanhood is a convenient way to credibly blur the lines between victim and perpetrator in a sexual-assault case, rallying real inequities in the justice system to defend those who already benefit most from the imbalance. During the Weinstein trial, she opined that her cross-examination would just look like two women talking. And it’s been very effective,” Rotunno said. “He may be an excellent lawyer, but if he goes at that woman with the same venom that I do, he looks like a bully. As women, attorneys like Rotunno and Becker are assumed to have more instinctive empathy for the accusers, giving their bad-faith, “Well, why didn’t you just leave?” attacks a veneer of objectivity. “I have the ability to get away with a lot more in a courtroom cross-examining a female than a male lawyer does,” she said in a pre-Weinstein Chicago Magazine interview. No high-profile sexual-assault defense attorney has been as straightforward about this devil’s bargain as Donna Rotunno, who defended Harvey Weinstein. As if presenting a bold insight, she predicted, “You will add her to the saying, ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.’” The subtext of this ocean of misogyny: “I’m a woman, so I can say it.” Becker and her ilk are bringing the outrage-mongering techniques perfected in the media by the likes of Ann Coulter and Candace Owens to the actual courtroom.īecker played all the hits in her opening statement at Kelly’s trial, starting with repeatedly referring to the accusers as “girls” and making vague references to forthcoming “drama.” “Groupie, we don’t usually like to use, but it is a word, is an understatement,” Becker said. Kelly? The kind of woman who has no compunction with weaponizing her gender for her own advantage, that’s who. Of course women have been throwing one another under the bus in the service of terrible men for time immemorial, but still, I am darkly fascinated by women who have made a career out of it. Kelly has Nicole Blank Becker, a Michigan-based attorney who has used her credentials as a former sex-crimes state prosecutor to build a personal brand specializing in sexual-assault defense. Harvey Weinstein had Donna Rotunno, Andrew Cuomo has Rita Glavin, and Bill Cosby had Jennifer Bonjean. If you are a hugely famous alleged rapist and sex pest with accusers in the double digits, there is an obvious optical advantage to having a woman as the public face of your legal team. Kelly’s long-awaited criminal trial got underway last week, I was unsurprised to see that the most public-facing of the four defense lawyers representing Kelly was also the lone woman among them.
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