Micha Star Liberty

Liberty’s practice has always involved sexual abuse cases — in academia, politics, and elsewhere — but this year her work saw institutional and societal changes.

“People have become more comfortable with the reality that this happens. Folk are a little more likely to keep an open mind,” she said.

“One major shift is the fluency with which victims and survivors can discuss what happened to them. Before, there was this kind of lack of understanding that these things happened, and it was shrouded in shame. The intake process took longer, and developing the factual history was more difficult. Now there is a common language that everyone speaks about these kinds of issues and cases.”

But that fluency has yet to take hold everywhere, she said.

“Once you get into litigation I think it’s a harsh reality that there wasn’t as much community support as survivors thought there was going to be,” she said. “We are still seeing the instant response of ‘he never did that to me,’ ‘I never experienced that,’ ‘I believe victims but…’”

Liberty has been critical of how the California Legislature handled sexual harassment cases in the past. She sued the Senate and resigned Sen. Tony Mendoza on behalf of his former legislative director, Adriana Ruelas, who claims she was fired for reporting Mendoza’s harassment of a female intern. Ruelas v. California State Senate, 00230185 (Sacramento Super. Ct., filed April 3, 2018).

Progress is being made, she said. Advocates must be mindful of the relative infancy of the #MeToo movement. “We need to keep in mind where we are in this moment, in this revolution because the #MeToo movement isn’t even a year old. We’re still watching and observing how things are changing,” she said.

Some changes Liberty wants to see are less victim blaming, and refocusing litigation on the allegations themselves rather than the character of the victim.

“I would like to change from the victim defense or defense of the character of the victim to the actual issues. To refocus onto the actual facts of what the bad actors did and how the victims were harmed. We waste a lot of time in litigation defending slut-shaming, and we really have to do better than that.”

She recalled her proximal experiences working at the Clinton White House fresh out of college during the Anita Hill scandal as an example.

“We have to shift the dialogue and we need a balance between victims being allowed to speak their truth and the accused being able to defense themselves, but we’re not there yet and the tactics right now are unacceptable.”

— Andy Serbe