Meanwhile, a mistrial was declared in the Cosby trial. The jury deadlocked on charges that he drugged and sexually assaulted Andrea Constand. Mr. Cosby can’t be guilty unless the jury finds him so. But the accusations over the last few years made by her and dozens of other women leave you in a precarious place in terms of how to respond. Not so much to his work — that hasn’t been vital for a couple of decades — but to his place in our own personal histories and the country’s.

JENNA WORTHAM I made the rookie mistake of looking at Twitter immediately after the decision. Reading the tweets of men celebrating Mr. Cosby’s “win” and the notion that he had somehow “beat” the system, made me wonder what fault lines were missed in this case. Clearly there were many: racial, economic, psychological. That Ms. Constand was a white woman barely registered to me, but that certainly was a factor, as was Mr. Cosby’s largess in the broader cultural context. The question that I keep coming back to is: Was this ambiguous outcome a surprise? If not, why do I feel so dejected and disappointed?

MORRIS Oh, feelings. They obviously had a role to play in this case and yet aren’t the usual basis for a legal strategy. So little of this trial was concrete. Mr. Cosby didn’t take the stand in his defense, which meant the case, in some sense, came down to Ms. Constand’s recollection versus his legacy.

WORTHAM As soon as the push notification announcing the outcome of the trial arrived on my iPhone, I began obsessing over what part of the trial cast enough doubt to some of those 12 people. The answer is important, because it reveals so much about our culture’s relationship to women and how they are supposed to function within systems of power. What about Ms. Constand gave the jury pause? Her sexual identity? Her decision to trust Mr. Cosby? Her inability to recall the exact details of being drugged? Her initial reluctance to take legal action against someone she considered to be a friend, with the only thing compelling her to speak out being the deep knot in her gut that something happened that night that was not right? To me, she seemed to be trying to make the best decision possible at every moment, and abiding by a simple trust: that each of us lives according to a moral code that keeps us from harming one another unnecessarily.