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Wednesday, May 1, 2019

Forensic psychiatrist who testified at Bill Cosby's trial will be a prosecution witness at Harvey Weinstein's

Barbara Ziv was the prosecution's sexual assault expert last year in Bill Cosby's sexual assault trial, testifying as their first witness.
Ziv confirmed to CNN Tuesday she will be a witness for the prosecution in the Weinstein case as well.
The movie mogul, whose downfall sparked Hollywood's #MeToo movement, is accused of raping a woman in a New York hotel room in 2013 and forcibly performing oral sex on another woman at his Manhattan apartment in 2006.
Weinstein is facing five felony charges: two counts of predatory sexual assault, one count of criminal sexual act in the first degree, and one count each of first-degree rape and third-degree rape.
He faced a sixth felony charge which was dismissed in October after a New York police detective was found to have mishandled evidence.
He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Bill Cosby's defense says 'so-called victim' was after comedian's money
Cosby, the 81-year-old comedy icon, was sentenced in September to three to 10 years in a state prison for drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand at his home 14 years ago.
At Cosby's trial, Ziv, who is also a professor at Temple University, testified about how sexual assault victims behave, saying that "delayed reporting" to authorities is the norm, not the exception.
"Delayed reporting can go from days to weeks to months to years," she said then. "We blame victims for not being the kind of victim that we think they should be. It's part of the rape myth that victims report promptly and display a certain set of symptoms."
In her testimony, she said most victims don't immediately flee from the scene and that it was a myth that women fight back against unwanted advances.
"A woman's first impulse is to try and find a way to make it make sense, and the only way you can do that is by having contact with that individual again," she said.

On the state of sexual assault

Ziv, also a member of the Pennsylvania Sex Offender's Board for nearly 20 years, told CNN she believes that the general public needs to be better educated on what constitutes all aspects of sexual assault.
She said she's "frustrated by hearing people render opinions about a very complex topic that they don't know about."
"I think that it does a disservice to everybody. I think it does a disservice to victims, I think it does a disservice to individuals who have been accused, to be evaluated by individuals who don't know what they're looking at, who are relying on a hunch or an instinct with their best guess," Ziv said.
She added that women who are victims of sexual assault often don't come forward "because they are vilified and their character and appearance and everything about them comes under question just as a result of making an allegation, something that doesn't happen in any other crime."

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from CNN.com - RSS Channel https://cnn.it/2WkIVmo

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