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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums‘I’m No Longer Afraid’: 35 Women Tell Their Stories About Being Assaulted by Bill Cosby
Im No Longer Afraid: 35 Women Tell Their Stories About Being Assaulted by Bill Cosby, and the Culture That Wouldnt ListenMore has changed in the past few years for women who allege rape than in all the decades since the womens movement began. Consider the evidence of October 2014, when an audience member at a Hannibal Buress show in Philadelphia uploaded a clip of the comedian talking about Bill Cosby: He gets on TV, Pull your pants up, black people I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom. Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby, so turn the crazy down a couple notches I guess I want to just at least make it weird for you to watch Cosby Showreruns. Dudes image, for the most part, its fucking public Teflon image. Ive done this bit onstage and people think Im making it up That shit is upsetting. The bit went viral swiftly, with irreversible, calamitous consequences for Cosbys reputation.
Perhaps the most shocking thing wasnt that Buress had called Cosby a rapist; it was that the world had actually heard him. A decade earlier, 14 women had accused Cosby of rape. In 2005, a former basketball star named Andrea Constand, who met Cosby when she was working in the athletic department at Temple University, where he served on the board of trustees, alleged to authorities that he had drugged her to a state of semi-consciousness and then groped and digitally penetrated her. After her allegations were made public, a California lawyer named Tamara Green appeared on the Today show and said that, 30 years earlier, Cosby had drugged and assaulted her as well. Eventually, 12 Jane Does signed up to tell their own stories of being assaulted by Cosby in support of Constands case. Several of them eventually made their names public. But they were met, mostly, with skepticism, threats, and attacks on their character.
In Cosbys deposition for the Constand case, revealed to the public just last week, the comedian admitted pursuing sex with young women with the aid of Quaaludes, which can render a person functionally immobile. I used them, he said, the same as a person would say, Have a drink. He asked a modeling agent to connect him with young women who were new in town and financially not doing well. In the deposition, Cosby seemed confident that his behavior did not constitute rape; he apparently saw little difference between buying someone dinner in pursuit of sex and drugging them to reach the same goal. As for consent, he said, I think that Im a pretty decent reader of people and their emotions in these romantic sexual things. If these women agreed to meet up, his deposition suggested, he felt that he had a right to them. And part of what took the accusations against Cosby so long to surface is that this belief extended to many of the women themselves (as well as the staff and lawyers and friends and others who helped keep the incidents secret).
Months after his depositions, Cosby settled the case with Constand. The accusations quickly faded from the publics memory, if they registered at all. No one wanted to believe the TV dad in a cardigan was capable of such things, and so they didnt. The National Enquirer had planned to run a big story detailing one of the womens accounts, but the magazine pulled it when Cosby agreed to give them a two-page exclusive telling his side (essentially that these were instances that had been misinterpreted).People ran a story alleging that several of the women had taken money in exchange for their silence, implying that this was nothing more than an elaborate shakedown. Cosbys career rolled on: In 2014 alone, there was a stand-up special, plans for a new family comedy on NBC, and a high-profile biography by Mark Whitaker that glossed over the accusations.
The group of women Cosby allegedly assaulted functions almost as a longitudinal study both for how an individual woman, on her own, deals with such trauma over the decades and for how the culture at large has grappled with rape over the same time period. In the 60s, when the first alleged assault by Cosby occurred, rape was considered to be something violent committed by a stranger; acquaintance rape didnt register as such, even for the women experiencing it. A few of Cosbys accusers claim that he molested or raped them multiple times; one remained in his orbit, in and out of a drugged state, for years. In the 70s and 80s, campus movements like Take Back the Night and No Means No helped raise awareness of the reality that 80 to 90 percent of victims know their attacker. Still, the culture of silence and shame lingered, especially when the men accused had any kind of status. The first assumption was that women who accused famous men were after money or attention. As Cosby allegedly told some of his victims: No one would believe you. So why speak up?
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‘I’m No Longer Afraid’: 35 Women Tell Their Stories About Being Assaulted by Bill Cosby (Original Post)
Jesus Malverde
Jul 2015
OP
jberryhill
(62,444 posts)1. It's often a good idea to trim down the subject line of article in order to avoid having words accid
Jesus Malverde
(10,274 posts)2. updated
jberryhill
(62,444 posts)3. Well, now I'm left with my comment making no sense since your edit has made my comment to be moo