pennsylvania and co-founder of "a long walk home," a non-profit that works towards ending violence towards women. and joy reed, msnbc national correspondent. nice to have you both with me. were you surprised by the verdict? >> well, no, because i did think that the case, by the time it got to the prosecution and i thought there was enough "evidence," there's enough repetition of this act and the women had come forward. so the issue is sometimes it gets to the -- what it takes to actually even get to the prosecut prosecutor's desk and for the prosecutor to end up having a guilty verdict there are so many steps to get there. but while the verdict is unprecedented, this act of repeated violence and the repetition of picking on vulnerable women, extremely vulnerable women, black women who are working class, sometimes some may have been using substances illegally, or not. women who are -- there are all these ways in which we talk about these women. yet that i think is very common.