Before the public knew Jian Ghomeshi the alleged sex offender, they knew Jian Ghomeshi the radio personality.

As the first week of Ghomeshi’s sexual assault trial wraps up, endless reporting and thousands of tweets have documented the case, closely following every statement made and each piece of evidence brought forward. The cutthroat cross-examination of defence lawyer Marie Henein attempted to shred the credibility of witnesses—women who were strong enough to come forward, only to now be broken down.

I’m following the trial religiously—I can’t look away for fear of missing a detail, a detail I would likely dismiss in normal everyday life, like whether or not I wore hair extensions on a particular day over a decade ago. Before Ghomeshi was charged with four counts of sexual assault and one count of overcoming resistance by choking, I listened to him on CBC’s Q. And even though I found his smooth-talking tone to be annoying, I greatly admired his work as a journalist.

When those we idolize—or at the very least appreciate—are accused of immoral acts, we become perplexed. How do we make sense of someone who is capable of making art for the world to enjoy while also being capable of destroying lives? If you believe art is an extension of oneself, it becomes hard to enjoy the art created by a sexual predator.

Appreciating the art while disliking the artist isn’t clear-cut. After the passing of David Bowie, Stacey May Fowles wrote a thought-provoking piece for Hazlitt about coming to terms with the fact that one of her role models had a history of sexual abuse.

Fowles shared how she, a survivor of sexual abuse, found herself initially trying to explain Bowie’s actions. She wrote, “In the moment I was actively trying to excuse his horrifying behaviour to justify my own admiration for him, becoming the very apologist I criticized out of the fear of complicating my own experience of loss.”After coming to the realization that idols can also be monsters, her perspective changed: “…knowing how harrowing it is for victims to see perpetrators celebrated in the media, I have a personal responsibility to examine and acknowledge the idea that he was potentially involved in someone else’s trauma.”

Fowles’s analysis made me think: who decides what celebrities receive a get-out-of-jail-free card? Bowie’s alleged rape certainly didn’t affect his legendary status. Tupac, who passed in 1996, was found guilty of sexually assaulting a woman and served time in prison for the charge. Yet the masses of fans that still mourn his death rarely remember this dark fact. R. Kelly’s alleged penchant for exploiting and abusing young women hasn’t ended his career, either—he released an album in 2013 and was featured on a hit Lady Gaga track that same year.

Perhaps it’s because celebrities like these also contribute to society in ways we enjoy. We don’t want to think about accusations that Woody Allen molested his adopted daughter because it makes it harder to like Annie Hall. Buying an R. Kelly album feels wrong if we think about the possibility he urinated into a young woman’s mouth.

But the truth is, even if we choose to forget what these men have done, the victims of their crimes don’t. Enjoying, celebrating and supporting sexual abusers is wrong—morally and ethically. If we turn a blind eye or justify unacceptable behaviour, we are creating a society that condones it. We are telling women that their abuse isn’t as important as the man who is responsible for it. We’re allowing art—albeit often good art—to bear more significance than our respect for human decency.

Despite the horrible circumstances, I find it reassuring to read outraged tweets and comments about the reality of the women involved in the Ghomeshi trial. People are starting to discuss how the legal system is set up to fail victims of sexual assault and how few convictions are actually made. Many Canadian journalists are also expressing their thoughts on the case and its portrayal of women. Ashley Csanady of the National Post tweeted: “What’s so chilling about Lucy’s testimony in #Ghomeshi is I don’t know a single woman who hasn’t done something she regrets just to be nice.” Alyshah Hasham, court reporter at the Toronto Star, wrote: “In case it’s somehow not crystal clear through the tweets this looks like a lead-up to accusing the complainant of lying. #ghomeshi.”

Despite Ghomeshi’s lack of emotion in court and Henein’s ruthless questioning, we are starting to talk about women and how they’re treated. The Star even put together a piece featuring different women’s tweets about the case.

Even if Ghomeshi is found not guilty—because that’s the way the system works—hopefully, his career is toast. When the trial wraps up, and the media frenzy dies down, I hope we forget about Ghomeshi, but not the women. The women who found the courage to stand up for themselves in an attempt to have their voices heard, despite the odds being stacked against them. Because hearing the voices of survivors of sexual abuse on the radio would be a pleasant change from hearing Ghomeshi’s.

February 5, 2016: The original version of this story has been corrected to ensure accuracy.

A woman stood before court on Monday to give testimony regarding the alleged sexual assault she survived 13 years ago. She faced an infamous lawyer ready to tear her words apart; unprecedented amounts of media attention, both in and out of the courtroom; and Jian Ghomeshi, the man she accused of punching her in the head and throwing her out “like trash.”

This, no doubt, must have been a daunting day for the woman, regardless of how much she, or her lawyer, prepared herself. Nevertheless, Toronto Star columnist Rosie DiManno felt the need to critique this woman as if she were an actor reading from a script, instead of a complainant sharing a traumatic experience with the world.

The problems started before the article did, with the disturbing headline, “First Ghomeshi witness suffers self-inflicted cuts.” DiManno begins her column by calling the woman “burnt toast,” claiming her credibility has gone up in flames. Later in the article, she points out that the woman only came forward with her story after the Star published its report on the sexual assault accusations, and that she went to the Star first instead of the police. DiManno ends by noting that the woman turned down a publicist’s request to represent her, and then says, “Doing just fine on her own, she was. Not so fine now.”

The implications in this article are very clear: it’s her fault. She isn’t credible and just wanted attention. These implications are obvious not only because of how blatantly DiManno’s writing transgresses any sense of decency (she seems to find a perverse sense of pleasure in the woman’s difficulties on the stand), but also because they are common. Far too common, in fact, as they seem to come up every time a powerful man is accused of a sexual crime.

But the trend extends beyond the Ghomeshis of the world, as 78 percent of sexual assaults in Canada aren’t reported to the police. The reasons vary, but they tend to focus on the survivor thinking no one will believe them, that they will be blown off or that they will be blamed for what they suffered. This is called re-victimization, and DiManno has been angered by it in the past, according to her column.

In the present, however, DiManno avoids the reality survivors face when she sneers at the fact that it took the woman 13 years to come forward. DiManno ignores the difficulties police present to survivors when she acts surprised the woman didn’t go to them first. And, when DiManno says she has “fumed over the re-victimization of victims” in the past, she ignores how journalists often lead the charge.

Why did it take the woman 13 years to come forward? I wonder.

CBC Montreal reporter Tanya Birkbeck was operating her own camera and interviewing a jersey-clad football fan in front of the Percival Molson Memorial Stadium in downtown Montreal. What happened next would leave her feeling violated. A young bearded man wearing a baseball cap, sunglasses and black hoodie approached, stared straight into the lens and yelled, “Fuck her right in the pussy!”

Five seconds later, another man, also dressed in black, jumped into the frame and repeated the vulgarity. That crisp day in November 2014 was the first time this had happened to her, but before long, being the target of the phrase—known as FHRITP and based on a YouTube video of a prank—became an all-too-common experience for Birkbeck and many other reporters. “It felt personal,” Birkbeck wrote in a cbc.ca op-ed. “Not just a catchphrase, but more of a taunt suggesting that the men around me, instead of talking to me, should be, you know, raping me.”

Many reporters, male and female, have also spoken out about how it feels to be subjected to FHRITP. “When you invade my space, grab my mike and yell that, you’re not just disrespecting my space as a working journalist,” the Calgary Herald’s Erika M. Stark wrote in an April 2015 Storify post. “You’re disrespecting and harming me as an individual. And, in this case, you’re disrespecting someone who has survived sexual assault.”

People have always shouted and waved in front of television cameras—it’s impossible to make sure live hits are never interrupted. But menacing, sexually-charged intrusions can be particularly distracting and upsetting for TV reporters, not to mention offensive to viewers. CBC has responded by providing a list of recommendations for how its reporters should handle sexual harassment in the field. These guidelines are a good first step, but nothing newsrooms can do will be enough to control outsiders’ behaviour and prevent verbal sexual assault. The only way it will stop is to educate people—especially young men—about why demeaning women is not okay, but one of the recommendations may actually get in the way of that.

In spring 2015, Brenda Murray, a senior producer at CBC in Toronto, was worried about how often FHRITP would happen during the summer, when live hits in the middle of crowds are more frequent because of the warmer weather and greater number of outdoor events. “I wanted to see that the corporation showed that we were engaged,” she says, “and any sort of armour that we could prepare the reporters with, the better.”

She forged that armour as part of a 12-person committee—unofficially called the National Safety in the Field Committee—of reporters, editors, executives and HR staff that met to decide how to protect reporters from FHRITP and other forms of harassment. Some members, including Birkbeck in Montreal, joined in through a conference call with the Toronto-based staff. The committee gathered information and ideas from journalists, lawyers, police officers and security professionals. In June, it released recommendations for dealing with field harassment. Training for reporters is in the works, though no start date has been announced.

The strategies, which have been shared with CTV, City and Global, include asking event security to stand nearby, documenting all incidents and not confronting a harasser. “We don’t want to escalate the situation,” the memo sent to CBC staff reads. “Your safety is paramount, and it’s hard to predict how individuals might react to words or gestures which could be seen as provocative.” Greg Reaume, managing editor of CBC news coverage, says choosing how to react in the moment is an individual decision. But this controversial part of the memo pushes reporters in a more passive direction.

That’s a problem because when reporters do say something, either to the harasser or over social media, the incident often sparks a wider conversation about FHRITP and sexual harassment. The most prominent example happened last May, when Shauna Hunt of CityNews overheard a group of men planning to interrupt an interview with FHRITP. She confronted them and challenged them to explain why they thought it was so funny. The resulting conversation about FHRITP—and the sexual harassment of female reporters—reached a fever pitch in the news and on social media. One of the men lost his job at Hydro One as a result of the controversy.

Julie Lalonde, an Ottawa-based women’s rights advocate, says that while she sympathizes with broadcasters trying to keep their employees safe, instructing people to ignore harassers every time is misguided. “Their directive in that memo is, ‘Don’t feed the trolls,’” she says, but that approach means missing the opportunity to hold people accountable for their actions. Lalonde argues that Hunt was in a safe situation: the middle of a crowd in daylight and accompanied by a cameraman. That is the ideal position to directly confront a harasser and encourage a societal shift away from accepting such behaviour.

There are signs that the trend might be dying out—Reaume says there has been a decrease in the number of incidents being reported, and Birkbeck says it hasn’t happened to her since before the summer—but sexual harassment is not new, and it lives well beyond the lifespan of a singular phrase. That’s why it’s important to continue talking about how unsafe journalism can be for women, because the only way to prevent such incidents is to make them socially unacceptable.

That will finally be the case when what happened to Birkbeck’s colleague Morgan Dunlop becomes the norm. She was interviewing music fans at Montreal’s Osheaga Music and Arts Festival this summer when a young man interrupted them by saying FHRITP. But Dunlop didn’t need to decide whether to confront him. The fan she was interviewing, a young 20-something man, did it for her: “Hey man, that’s not cool.”

Update: The man who lost his job at Hydro One after defending FHRITP on camera to Shauna Hunt was back at work on November 2, but Hydro One did not confirm that today was his first day back. Hunt tweeted that the company had let her know in advance. Hydro One said in a statement that it resolved the issue through an arbitration process and that it would it would not comment any further.

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