I don’t want to hear sorry. I need to hear guilty.

God, we’re sorry, they said, the sympathetic well-wishers on Twitter and beyond. Yes, his conviction was overturned, but we still know. We heard those nigh-on sixty women, and we believe them. This, they suggested, was if not enough, then something. It doesn’t matter, not really, they said, when that stain is now — whatever else he does — permanent. But still, we’re so sorry.

Bill Cosby’s conviction — in September 2018 on three counts of aggravated indecent assault — wasn’t overturned today because new evidence suggested his innocence; because old evidence proved false. But because the evidence, from Cosby’s own mouth, was used in a trial against him after a prosecutor deal pledged it wouldn’t be. He admitted, on the record (the one now at the heart of this epic shit show) that he gave Quaaludes to women he intended to have ‘sex’ with. Let’s be clear: his conviction was tipped over on a technicality. He was, is, a serial predator.

I wouldn’t, won’t, attempt to speak for the women who were victimised by Bill Cosby. To try and articulate the fresh devastation I can only assume they feel. To have justice — miraculous, seemingly-impossible, increasingly-rare justice — given and then so brutally taken away. A brand-new yet centuries-old cruelty from a criminal justice system that regularly, usually, fails to deliver any justice for women at all.

But to me, as a number of the one in five women who have experienced rape, sexual assault or attempted sexual assault, it matters. The verdict matters, the conviction matters, the sentence matters. The reversal matters. It all really, really fucking matters. And I don’t want to hear sorry: I need to hear guilty.

The man who abused me — when I was just 5 — was sentenced to two years in prison. Two years. A length of time that almost (almost) makes me laugh. It seems like a frankly absurd amount of time for sexually abusing another human being, a child. For breaching and breaking my body, my mind, my very being in the most vile and violent of ways.

But still, I clung.

I clung to those two years.

I clung to his new home, prison.

I clung to my official court-declared position as a victim. Not your more-palatably-named survivor. I wasn’t there yet, I was a victim.

I clung to the knowledge that everyone was aware of what he’d done.

I clung to the fact that he was guilty.

I clung to these things when I hated myself; when I turned my pain and disgust inwards and used them to skewer myself in any number of ways.

I clung to them when I blamed myself; the spectre of shame and guilt suggesting that I must have done something to compel this man to pare me wide open.

I clung to them when others blamed me; looked at me with suspicion and suggestion.

I clung to them when the world doubted me; wondered if I had been right, or honest, or truthful all along. When the word “liar” sat on their tongue, as it does for all of us in the one in five.

I clung to them when my mind splintered and snapped and drifted so far away from me that I feared it was forever lost.

I clung to them when I took tools to my skin, trying to gut the memories from the muscle.

I clung to them when that didn’t work and I tried to obliterate them — me — with booze and pills and suicide.

And they were ultimately, eventually, my buoy. The bobbing hope that held me up as I inched towards becoming a survivor, towards rejecting every bit of shame and blame and self-hate.

I cling to them still.

You ask us why we don’t tell, don’t report, don’t submit to the specific machinations of a policing system and a criminal system and a justice system that is not set up to work for women. How can it be, when charges, never mind convictions, are the exception.

You want us to risk it all: our privacy, our dignity, our relationships, the scrap of residual self-respect, our right not to be called slags and whores, to be declared mad. You ask us instead to step into the light, under which we’ll be poked and prodded and turned over like a side of beef. We risk far more than we ever, will ever, gain. And to what end? Oh yes, justice!

We don’t expect perfect justice (if such a thing exists). We’ve lived in the world too long for that. We’ll take messy, incomplete, imperfect justice at this point. But too often, as in the case of Cosby, we have to take no justice at all.

How can there be healing? How can you begin to contemplate forgiveness (if that’s what you want) or strain to even forget when the burning injustice of it sits like a hairball in your throat?

There can’t be. You can’t.

So yeah: two years. I could laugh, but I won’t. Those two years matter. I was one of the lucky ones, I got to hear guilty. So I don’t need you to be sorry.