Sunday 9 February 2014

WHO WANTS TO REMEMBER BILL COSBY'S MULTIPLE SEX-ASSAULT ACCUSATIONS?

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Dylan Farrow has published an account of the sexual assault she experienced at the hands of her adoptive father Woody Allen on Nicholas… Read…
The thing about Dylan Farrow's open letter accusing her father, Woody Allen, of sexual abuse is: 
There was not much really new about it. It was new that Dylan Farrow herself was signing her name to the accusations, but Vanity Fair had covered the case, in grim detail, more than two decades ago.
So the current crisis over how people are supposed to feel about Woody Allen is on some level odd. Woody Allen's status as an accused child molester has been a matter of public record since before Manhattan Murder Mystery came out. Anyone who didn't think about it before now had chosen not to think about it.
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Not thinking about it is a popular and powerful choice. 
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Which brings up another beloved American funnyman, Bill Cosby. .\
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Who doesn't love Bill Cosby? 
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I grew up watching Fat Albert and eating Jell-O Pudding Pops, which is a cliché, but Bill Cosby is the creator of some of our most warming and affirming clichés. He is charming and iconic, one of the most culturally important and successful comedians ever, an elder statesman of the entertainment industry.
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He's also someone who has been accused by multiple women of drugging them and sexually assaulting them. Here is one of his accusers, describing an incident:
Well, there were a number of people at the table, friends of his, and he said to me, yes, you do seem ill, you're slightly feverish, would you like to have some Contact? You know, the cold medicine. And I thought, why not, can't hurt. So he went into some sort of office area at the back of the restaurant and he produced two capsules in his hand. I thought nothing of it and I took the capsules. In about, I don't know, 20 to 30 minutes I felt great and then about 10 minutes after that I was almost literally face down on the table of this restaurant...
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He said, "Oh my, you must be more ill then we believed. I totally lost motor control; I was almost unable to hold my head up. I was very, very, very stoned. He took me into my apartment and then very helpfully and nicely was prepared to take off my clothes and help me into bed and pet me, and that's how the actual assault began.
She recounted this in an on-camera interview, under her own name, with Matt Lauer of the Today show, on February 10, 2005. The assault had allegedly happened back in the 1970s, but she said she had decided to come forward because another woman had accused Cosby of committing a similar assault in January of 2004. 
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That woman, in a lawsuit, said that Cosby offered her three pills of what he claimed was "herbal medication, which would help her relax," and insisted she take all three:
When Plaintiff advised Defendant she did not feel well, Defendant led Plaintiff to a sofa, because she could not walk on her own, where he laid her down, under the guise of "helping" her.
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Subsequently, Defendant positioned himself behind Plaintiff on the sofa, touched her breasts and vaginal area, rubbed his penis against her hand, and digitally penetrated her.
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Plaintiff remained in a semi-conscious state throughout the time of this ordeal.
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At no time was Plaintiff capable of consent after the pills affected her, and at no time did she consent to Defendant's acts.
Lawyers for the woman filed a motion stating that they intended to call as witnesses the woman who'd given the Today show interview and nine separate Jane Does, from seven different states. Eventually the list grew to a reported 13 accusers. Two more of them put their names on the record, giving interviews to Philadelphia Magazine and later to People. Philadelphia summarized one of their stories:
They started an affair that lasted about six months. Cosby ended it without explanation. Then he called her one night in Denver, where she lived; they met backstage at a nightclub there, where he was performing. He said, "Here's your favorite coffee, something I made, to relax you." She drank it and soon began to feel woozy. Several hours later, she woke up in the backseat of her car, alone. She didn't know what had happened. Her clothes were a mess, her bra undone. Security guards came and said Cosby told them to get her home. She confronted him at his hotel. "You just had too much to drink," he told her.
The other accuser initially withheld the details of her story because of the pending lawsuit. Cosby ended up settling the suit, with the plaintiff agreeing not to discuss it further, after which the prospective witness went ahead and told her story to the magazines. Here's People's account, using her name, Barbara Bowman:
It was in a hotel in Reno, claims Bowman, that Cosby assaulted her one night in 1986. "He took my hand and his hand over it, and he masturbated with his hand over my hand," says Bowman, who, although terrified, kept quiet about the incident and continued as Cosby's protégé because, she says, "Who's gonna believe this? He was a powerful man. He was like the president." Before long she was alone with Cosby again in his Manhattan townhouse; she was given a glass of red wine, and "the next thing I know, I'm sick and I'm nauseous and I'm delusional and I'm limp and ... I can't think straight.... And I just came to, and I'm wearing a [men's] T-shirt that wasn't mine, and he was in a white robe." 
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A month or two later, she was in Atlantic City and says she was given another glass of red wine and felt "completely doped up again." Confused, Bowman somehow made it back to her room, but the next day Cosby summoned her to his suite. After she arrived, Bowman says, Cosby "threw me on the bed and braced his arm under my neck so I couldn't move my head, and he started trying to take his clothes off. I remember all the clinking of his belt buckle. And he was trying to take my pants down, and I was trying to keep them on." Bowman says that not long after she resisted the assault, Cosby cut off contact with her and had her escorted to the airport for a flight back to Denver.
TO REITERATE:
This was in People magazine, published nationwide in December 2006. Four women said publicly, in major media outlets, that Bill Cosby had drugged and sexually assaulted them. This coverage was more recent and possibly more prominent that the coverage of the abuse allegations against Woody Allen. 
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And? Basically nobody wanted to live in a world where Bill Cosby was a sexual predator. It was too much to handle. The original Philadelphia Magazine story set off his accusers' testimony in italicized interludes, between long sections about the more digestible controversies around Cosby's lecture tour denouncing black cultural pathology. The usually unflinching Ta-Nehisi Coates, in an otherwise comprehensive 2008 Atlantic essay on the context and politics of Cosby's performance as a public moral scold, dropped a sentence about the lawsuit settlement and its accompanying accusations into parentheses near the end. 
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Conceptually, it was the sensible way to deal with it. No one was talking about it anymore. The whole thing had been, and it remained, something walled off from our collective understanding of Bill Cosby.
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With shocking speed, it was effectively forgotten. When the subject came up today, more than half the Gawker staff had no memory of any sexual allegations against Bill Cosby. In 2009, Cosby was awarded the Mark Twain Prize for his distinguished achievements in humor. In 2010, he was honored with the Marian Anderson Award, for "critically acclaimed artists who have impacted society in a positive way, either through their work or their support for an important cause." In 2011, the Marian Anderson Award went to Mia Farrow. 
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[Photos via Getty]

3 comments:

  1. Until now I did not know about Cosby's abuse crimes, but it is no surprise. He has never had a "good man" appearance, but character is always suspect when wealth and fame are achieved. Entertainers are ones who must sell their souls to get to the top. Morals and ethics being tossed aside for tempting pleasures which are acceptable among peers in the same realm. (politicians, too) Since Cosby is a revered black icon, his crimes are probably being covered up by the MSM, just like Obama's are. Cosby may criticize black dysfunction, but he is still needed to keep black cohesiveness. Apparently, his wife plays that part, too. Woody Allen is no threat to TPTB because he is white , actually repulsive, and certainly has no leadership power to command a white following. He is only a short-term distraction. Cosby has the attention power for politically, emotionally controlled blacks. MSM can't afford to smear Cosby, or maybe Cosby has been coerced into Zio co-operation so as not to be taken down. Thus all the women accusers arise on cue? Cosby cornered by his own crimes becomes a zio-puppet, black power leader?

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  2. Dylan Farrow's NY Times letter has triggered my own memories from over three decades ago involving a famous singer/songwriter and his then five-year-old daughter. I was in his house when I first noticed she was behaving strangely, and seemed a little too aware of sex for a chid her age, and also borderline hysterical. Without my even formulating the conscious thought that he was molesting her, I felt a need to distance myself. He perceived my withdrawal as a silent accusation, and things escalated from there. I have to say, he went about it in an organized, secretive manner, in stages. Possibly he lay awake at night, strategizing, and weighing the innocence of the people around him versus the possibility of their knowing. Because I never brought it up -- incest is a taboo subject -- he devised little tests to see if I suspected what was going on between him and his daughter. He was concerned that she might have told me something -- she hadn't. She exhibited many of the classic behaviours of incest victims but I wasn't aware of those back then. By the time she was 14, he had convinced many people in his circle that I was a dangerous person, borderline psychotic -- the fact that showed no outward sign of psychosis was just more proof of how deceptive and twisted I really was. In the meantime, he continued to treat me one-on-one like a dear friend. In her teens, his daughter tried to alert friends of the family to what he was doing with her in secret, but apparently no one knew what to do about it. I learned of all this only years later. Her father frequently appeared in the media, and was seen as a kind of musical sage. At 19 she tried to kill herself with a heroin overdose -- he arrived to take her out of school and install her in his house where she remained for years.

    There was a disconnect between the public image -- which is a construct that evolves over time fed by many sources -- and private perversion festering under the surface. The singer may also have been programmed, and have distinct personalities that can fool the public and even close friends.

    At least Woody Allen got caught. Many supposedly rational people continue to believe in his innocence. Devoted fans -- like retarded children -- view their idols as infallible, no matter how much evidence surfaces to show they are monsters. Women in particular are punished for seeing the truth and trying to expose it. Mia Farrow was reviled as an evil. scheming, jealous bitch for trying to protect her children. It's astonishing that witchhunts still go on in public and private, with children often the secret victims.

    Probably our "abused inner child" is what draws people to these dark entertainers who in many cases are in bed with organized crime. .

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    Replies
    1. I have always loved Bill Cosby and this is the first I have heard of him being a rapist. Mr Cosby I would sincerely like to say I myself would never tell someone that I was molested or raped if it was not true. I was molested at the age of 9 to 18 by my step dad and he still tried after that at age 20. My daughter was molested At the age of 8 for a 1 1/2 the raped at the age of 10 by our neighbor man who had a son the same age as my son who was 2 At the time. The man we thought was a good man and neighbor had known for years that watched our children raped my daughter the day they moved to Kyle Texas but little did I know the neighbor on the other side of us his 9 year old son was stating to molest our son who just turned 3 and went to his sister(my 8 year old daughter and told her what the boy was doing to him and she came and told us but never not once told us she was being molested. We pushed the DA and took our son to counseling. Then 2days before my daughter turned 16 she had told me she had been raped and let me tell you Mr Cosby that was the most worse and still to this day the hardest news to hear from my daughter. My heart has never been the same and to know that his cousins started talking that he had done many things to them also and reported it to the police to which at the time the files were lost or they couldn't find them when I and my daughter went to the investigator to try and get something done he botched it all up and little did we know the sheriff was fired for having porn on his computer at work. To This day the man has never been punished and we could have sued him like you were but it will never change what he did and what he took away from her and I.
      I would hope that one day he would admit what he had done to all the girls but that in my honest opinion will never happen so I do and will leave it up to the upper power. Mr Cosby I honestly don't think that the women would make up all this if it wasn't true. Just for your money? I think not! Only you Mr Cosby must come to a point weather you can carry all of this around until the day you pass and I honestly think that this is your chance to come clean. With all due respect I think that this is from the higher up giving you a chance to step up and ask for forgiveness to all the women,and I truly believe that in your heart you will do the right and honest thing.

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