The Case Against Cosby: Absorbing Doc Surveys Survivor Healing After Sexual Trauma

By Kim Hughes

Rating: B

Toronto director Karen Wookey’s documentary The Case Against Cosby — which chronicles a civil suit and two criminal trials brought against disgraced comedian Bill Cosby by Canadian basketball star Andrea Constand for a 2004 sexual assault — is uncomfortable viewing.

But the film, based in part on Constand’s 2021 memoir The Moment: Standing Up to Bill Cosby, Speaking Up for Women, is harrowing and hopeful in equal measure, telling Constand’s story and the stories of four other Cosby victims while following their healing journey from the lingering trauma of the assaults.

Constand’s case is well known, but worth revisiting. In January 2004, she was drugged and assaulted by Cosby in his home. Constand, a supremely gifted athlete, had been working for Temple University women's basketball team in Philadelphia. The University had a long-standing relationship with Cosby, a very high-profile former student, which put the pair in the same sphere.

A year after the assault, an emotionally wounded Constand filed a civil suit against Cosby that was settled though no criminal charges were filed. Those would come years later and play out over two trials, in 2017 — which ended in a mistrial — and again in 2018, during which Cosby was found guilty of three counts against Constand and subsequently sentenced to three-to-10 years in prison.

He was jailed, but briefly. In 2021, Cosby’s convictions and sentences were overturned by Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court due to violations of his due process rights, pertaining to a deal Cosby had struck with then-district attorney Bruce Castor during Constand’s 2005 civil suit.

Evidently, Castor had promised Cosby criminal immunity if he cooperated with a deposition, ergo the violation of his due process after the criminal conviction. Cosby was freed but his reputation and legacy were appropriately ruined.

To date, Constand remains the only woman to receive a criminal conviction against Cosby despite the accusations of more than 60 women dating back decades, not to mention civil settlements as recently as last year, when Judith Huth was awarded $500,000 over an assault dating back to 1975.

In The Case Against Cosby, director Wookey talks to Constand, her family, other victims and those involved in the criminal trials to paint a picture of a serial predator and seriously flawed criminal justice system that continues to undermine and underserve victims of sexual assault.

Central to Wookey’s film is a west coast healing retreat undertaken by Constand and the four other Cosby victims profiled here — Stacey Pinkerton, Lise-Lotte Lublin, Dona Speir and Renita Chaney Hill — led by noted Canadian physician and author Gabor Maté who alternately comforts, confronts, and cajoles the women about the assaults and the broader impact that trauma has had on their lives.

Though clearly effective for the women, the retreat is at times a slog for viewers, mostly because Maté speaks in platitudes and new age-y aphorisms that, perhaps necessarily, often scan as clichés. Then again, it’s a reprieve from the horrors detailed by the women, some of whom, like Hill and Speir, were targeted, groomed, and abused by Cosby as teenagers.

That many of Cosby’s victims can’t even recall their assaults because they were drugged somehow makes the whole tawdry fiasco even grimmer. If they had a visual of their rapes, at least they could compartmentalize them. Not knowing precisely what happened ensures imaginations conjure the worst possible scenarios.

What emerges most forcefully from Wookey’s film is Constand’s (and Pinkerton’s and Lublin’s and Speir’s and Hill’s) fortitude and grace as well as that of Constand’s family, who speak with admirable candor about what was taken from their vibrant, dignified daughter and sister without her consent by an evil man powerful enough to evade the law. Almost.

The Case Againt Cosby. Directed by Karen Wookey. With Andrea Constand, Stacey Pinkerton, Lise-Lotte Lublin, Dona Speir, Renita Chaney Hill and Gabor Maté. Premieres January 8, 8pm ET on CBC, and screens on free streaming service CBC Gem thereafter.