48 MARCH 2020
Of course, defining that level of intoxication isn’t necessarily
straightforward, nor is proving that one person knew how drunk
another person was. “Some people act sloppy; some don’t,” Godsoe
says. “Someone could drink four martinis and be okay; someone
else would not.” The limits of the justice system are one reason the
writer Tanya Selvaratnam—who told The New Yorker in 2018 about
being domestically abused by then–New York Attorney General
Eric Schneiderman—last April wrote an op-ed for Glamour
backing Russell. For many victims of sexual assault and harass-
ment, Selvaratnam contended, “the court of public opinion”
is the best or only option available. (Schneiderman was never
criminally charged.)
Post-#MeToo, many people have become comfortable trust-
ing narratives that wouldn’t have been credited before. Christine
Blasey Ford recalled her alleged assault by Brett Kavanaugh with
great specificity and also with occasional imprecision, more than 30
years after the fact—and polls showed that 45 percent of Americans
believed her (versus 33 percent who believed Kavanaugh). Andrea
Constand recalled an assault during which she had been only half-
conscious, thanks to three little blue pills she’d been given by Bill
Cosby—and the comedian was convicted of aggravated indecent
assault. Russell’s drinking, her spotty memory, and her troubled
past make her exactly the kind of woman whose account of sexual
harassment or assault was for generations disregarded, dismissed
without a backwards glance. What is #believewomen, after all, if
you don’t believe this woman?
The mounting force of this duty to believe was apparent the
week after Russell posted her essay, when two elder stateswomen
of the reproductive- justice movement called for due process—and
were roundly ignored. In an op-ed, Toni Bond Leonard and Loretta
Ross exhorted the abortion-rights community not to rush to judg-
ment, lest they violate Parker’s human rights. “What is painfully
evident,” they wrote, “is that our lack of process is fracturing the
movement, often along racial and generational lines, through a dan-
gerous collision of #MeToo with reproductive justice.” Six months
later, not one activist I spoke with had been swayed by this senti-
ment: The generational divide Leonard and Ross had identified was
real, they all told me, and the elders were on the wrong side of it.
Ross helped coin the phrase reproductive justice, which empha-
sizes the needs of marginalized communities (the poor, people of
color) and has replaced pro-choice as the dominant framework for
abortion-rights activism. From 1979 to 1982, she was the direc-
tor of the first rape crisis center in the country, in Washington,
D.C. “I’m pre-#MeToo,” she told me last fall. No one who’s seen
what she has wants to undermine the credibility of survivors, Ross
continued, but by the same token, “no reasonable veteran of the
anti-rape movement is going to agree that every so-called survivor
is absolutely telling the truth. That’s just not true.”
At this time in history, in the circles in which Ross operates,
that is an extremely controversial statement, but she didn’t hedge.
“A lot of people tell stories through the lens of their trauma that are
as real as can be to them. That doesn’t make it the objective truth.
While you want to hold that story for that person, you have to be
very, very careful what you do with it. Because you have to have
other evidence—something to back it up, other than their feelings.”
Russell might never have gone public, based on her own
telling, were it not for the stories she says she heard about Parker
hitting on other drunk or vulnerable women—the “whispers [that]
had become so loud they were more like shouts.” Indeed, her essay
reads as an invitation to those who suffered similar harm to join her
in publicly naming Parker. That hasn’t happened: No one else has
come forward to say she has been sexually assaulted by the doctor.
One woman accused Parker of sexually harassing her: Yamani
Hernandez, the executive director of the National Network of
Abortion Funds, who happens to be Russell’s former boss. In a
series of tweets in August, Hernandez said that during a 2015
photo op, Parker leaned in and whispered in her ear that “he
would tell his boys back home I was one of his new honeys.” Later,
when those pictures were posted on the group’s Facebook page,
and someone joked that they looked like wedding shots, he com-
mented on the photo that he would “draw [Hernandez] a bath
with oil and flowers and rub [her] feet.” When Hernandez then
texted him to ask if he wanted to say something to her privately,
Parker replied (in communications he shared with me), “All just
jokes, if I was interested in you, you’d have known by now”—a
comment intended, she thought, to “knock me down a peg.”
(Parker wrote Hernandez in August to say that while he didn’t
remember their exchanges the same way she did, he was sorry for
“ever” offending her. She thanked him for the “important step
toward repair,” adding that she hoped he would “seek education.”)
Russell knew about Parker’s sexually tinged comments to Her-
nandez, and she says they’re one of the “whispers” that persuaded
her to write her essay. As for the other stories that influenced Rus-
sell, I followed up on each, and, among those I could trace, her
version had marked differences from the one offered by others.
The moment Russell said she was sure she “wasn’t alone” came
one evening when she was confiding in a female colleague about
Parker. The woman stopped her. “She said she could finish my
story, because it had happened to her best friend,” Russell told me.
Specifically, an activist younger than Parker had gotten drunk past
the point of consent and had sex with him. When I spoke with
this colleague, however, she said that while she believes Russell is
telling the truth about her own experience, she’d told Russell only
that she’d heard other “shady” things about Parker—and she’d been
alluding only to inappropriate remarks he’d made to a friend.
Russell collected another piece of damning information, she
said, at a 2017 conference called Let’s Talk About Sex, held a year
or so after her encounter with Parker. There, another higher-up in
the movement (who declined to be interviewed) said to her, “Oh,
you must be one of Willie’s girls.” To Russell, this suggested that
reproductive-rights power players knew that Parker took advantage
of young women and weren’t doing anything about it. How many
other victims are out there? she thought.
Cherisse Scott, the founder and CEO of a Memphis
reproductive- justice organization called SisterReach, told me she
made a “Willie’s girls”–like comment in front of Russell at that
conference, but her intention was close to the opposite of Rus-
sell’s interpretation. Watching Parker and Russell sitting together
at a table near the hotel bar—the pair’s only in-person meeting
after their encounter— Scott got the impression that Russell was