52 MARCH 2020helped himself much. Grassroots activists told me that the stain
of doubt Russell’s charges put on Parker immediately rendered
his presence untenable at meetings and conferences, particu-
larly because they’re valued as “safe spaces” for people who are
regularly subject to ugly threats. These female activists, many of
them volunteers, many of them young, arguably keep the fight
for reproductive rights afloat. Who could risk alienating them?
Jodi Magee, the longtime president of Physicians for Reproduc-
tive Health, whose board Parker chaired, refused to disclose details
of confidential deliberations about him. But she did say that, in the
Trump-Pence era, with “state legislators coming after us every single
day,” her job is to keep the wheels on the bus, so to speak. I took
that to mean: Keep the organization above reproach, so that it can
stay on task and avoid throwing red meat to anti-abortion forces.
This past fall, when no one else had accused Parker of sexual
violence, Tanya Selvaratnam told me she felt compelled to revise
her post for Glamour. It weighed on her that the doctor had been
banished seemingly with no “due process.” She wrote: “I believe
in investigating allegations. If we don’t establish the veracity of the
allegations and the credibility of the accuser, if we don’t distinguish
between men behaving badly versus men committing horrific acts
against women and causing lifelong trauma, we do the #metoo
movement a great disservice.”
Such calls for due process, though, give rise to the question:
Due process administered by whom, exactly, and how? In June,
the leaders of some 30 abortion-rights organizations gathered
in Washington, D.C., to discuss, in part, how the movement
might handle complaints of sexual misconduct in the future.
Though the deliberations were off the record, Fatima Goss Graves,
the president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center,
which helped convene the meeting, told me that the overarching
goal wasn’t “due process,” a criminal-law standard established to
protect the accused, but “fair processes” for the accused and the
accuser, like those used in workplaces. What this means practi-
cally for a movement made up of interwoven but independent
groups is hard to fathom, but Goss Graves said it was unlikely
that a central entity might be formed to resolve complaints. All
she would say is that the first step is to make sure that every
organization, large or small, informs its employees and volunteersthat if they’re harassed—whether at the office or at a meeting or
an event—“we want to know about it.”There is no evidence that the conflict over Parker, or his
sidelining, seriously damaged the abortion-rights cause. But it
did open up one more rift in a movement that some see as already
full of them, at an extremely risky time for the future of abortion
access. At Planned Parenthood, Cecile Richards’s successor, Leana
Wen, was pushed out in July because, Wen has said, she wanted to
focus more on health-care delivery than politics; the organization
blames her “leadership and management style.” According to an
investigation published by The New York Times in December, amid
record-breaking fundraising stoked by states’ passage of stringent
anti-abortion bills, various factions in the movement are clashing
over issues such as how to allocate resources to ensure that poor
women get the services they need.
When Parker published his memoir in 2017, it was praised by
feminist luminaries from Gloria Steinem to Lena Dunham to bell
hooks. Richards, then still at the helm of Planned Parent hood,
called it “a beacon of hope” that would “change lives,” writing:
“At Planned Parenthood, our motto is ‘Care, no matter what’—
words that might as well have been written with Dr. Willie Parker
in mind.” In November, when I asked Richards to talk about
the fate of the man who for two and a half years was employed
as the medical director of Planned Parent hood of Metropolitan
Washington, D.C., she declined to comment.
That day in New York Parker told me, “I would prefer to
have been accused of murder, because there would have been
some effort at due process.” While Russell’s allies argue that
Parker emerged from the scandal relatively unscathed—he can
still practice medicine, after all—to him the loss of his advocacy
role has been crushing. That is what “allowed me to live my core
values,” he said, “to be a person of integrity.”
Russell, too, has lost the work she loved. In mid-October,
Yellow hammer released a statement that praised her work and
dedication but announced that she had resigned “to pursue
other interests outside of the reproductive rights and justice”
arena. Russell had predicted this outcome when we talked.
Because of the controversy around her, Russell believed that
Yellowhammer was being shut out of important conversations
in the movement. Leaving, she said, “will break my heart, but
at some point it’s going to be a choice I have to make.”
The same month Russell resigned, Parker flew to Los Angeles
to attend a reproductive- medicine conference he’d been invited
to by a fellow physician, a gathering at which he’d spoken several
times in the past. He hadn’t pre registered, and when he showed
up at the hotel where the event was taking place, he was told
to wait—someone would be down shortly to check him in. He
waited in the lobby for three and a half hours. Friends, pass-
ing through, expressed sympathy, but none took on the task of
fighting to get him in. Eventually, he gave up and returned to
his hotel room. The next morning, he flew home.Maggie Bullock is a freelance writer based in Amherst, Massachusetts.“I would prefer to have been
accused of murder,” Parker says,
“because there would have
been some effort at due process.”