I want to tell you I loved Bill Cosby for a long time. I loved him because as a kid, I watched The Cosby Show and I saw a family that was similar to mine–middle class, loving, imperfect. When I watched A Different World I saw what college might look like for a girl like me. Bill Cosby was, I thought, the warm, funny man who wore ugly sweaters and always had something kind to say. He was the Jello Pudding Pop man. He was a champion of black colleges and black people and even when he was admonishing us, I believed he was a good man with good intentions.
And then I didn’t. I started hearing rumors years ago but I didn’t want to believe them. I could not (or perhaps, more accurately, was unwilling to) reconcile the Bill Cosby I loved with the predator many people knew him to be. But eventually, I had to. Over the years, we have learned more and more about the man behind the intricately crafted Cosby myth. We have learned he is a serial rapist. He is a pathological liar and manipulator. He is an extraordinary hypocrite. He has used fame and wealth to both commit and cover up his crimes. He has been enabled by his wife and everyone in his professional and personal circles.
(Let’s take a moment to throw some side eye at Camille Cosby who has either been profoundly brainwashed or is just as bad as her husband.)
The faith I once had in Cosby angers and shames me.
Whenever we learn about the misdeeds of a powerful artist or public figure, we worry over what befalls his legacy. We have intellectual debates about separating art from the artist. I have participated in these debates but I can’t do it anymore. As I write this I realize that by even considering Cosby’s legacy or what he meant to me or anyone else focuses the conversation on him and the possibility of redemption instead of where it belongs–the women he hurt, the hypocrisy, the culture that allowed his criminality to thrive. It doesn’t matter one little bit that I once loved Bill Cosby or his work. I have to let that go. Anything he created stands on a foundation of deceit, manipulation and the worst of human nature. His “legacy” is irrelevant in the face of the crimes he has committed. As I’ve written before, we must choose humanity over legacy and over art or accomplishment.
This week’s New York magazine features thirty-five of the women Cosby assaulted. (Here is an archived version if the New York site is still down.) These women are offering deeply personal testimony. They are willing to withstand the inevitable, unbearable public scrutiny that goes with discussing sexual assault as a victim. They are standing up for themselves, for other women and men who have been victimized, for the truth. They are demanding to he beard. It is a brave thing they are doing.
Cosby has more than forty known victims. He has, in a deposition, attested to how he manipulates and incapacitates the women he assaults. Still, there are doubters. Still, there are people who refuse to believe Bill Cosby is a rapist. Time and again we are reminded that even in the face of overwhelming, incontrovertible evidence, too many people prefer to disbelieve victims of rape and sexual assault.
What is most striking about the New York magazine cover, beyond the visual of thirty-five women who have been violated by the same man, is the empty chair where all the women who can’t come forward might sit.
I recently read Jon Krakauer’s Missoula, a book worthy of your time because we think we know about rape culture but Missoula shows just how powerful that culture is and how that culture thrives. It shows what it takes for a victim of sexual assault or rape to come forward. It shows how nearly impossible it is to get justice when you do report sexual assault and rape because our justice system is predicated on exerting as much energy as possible into doubting and discrediting victims who come forward while protecting the victimizers. It’s a harsh reality the book presents but one it is important to face. That empty chair stands for all the injustice Krakauer chronicles and much more.
It is so important for that empty chair to be there, so all of us who stay silent for whatever reason can know there is a place, waiting for us, if and when we are ready. I hope, above all else, that these thirty-five women sharing their stories will help more victims of rape and sexual assault feel ready to take their seat.
Tags: believe the women, Bill Cosby is trash, empty chair, rape culture, sexual violence, sexual violence must end, the butter
actual chills. Roxane always nails it.
There’s a lot of courage on display there.
The legacy of this story will continue, and it will remain relevant long after we wish it to go away. I write from central PA, where the whole land continues to grapple with the legacy of Joe Paterno/Jerry Sandusky. Somehow a personal betrayal makes us more likely to listen to the victims, as if our empathy is a trap that needs to be triggered. But it takes a critical mass of victims to activate this trigger. I wonder if this is done out of selfishness or self-preservation? I ask myself, how can I do better? How can I ask better questions in conversations about these topics? Your own self-reflection is a helpful guide.
I’m only 17, and my college friends and I are shocked and ashamed of the horror that this is. If you give someone drugs without them knowing for ANY reason, that is objectively wrong. When you take advantage of them, that is horrific and evil. I loved what one of the women said in the article about Bill Cosby being like OJ. I didn’t even know OJ Simpson was a football player until last year, and it saddens me that future generations might not know what Bill Cosby did.
I have such complicated feelings about Camille Cosby. I cannot decide if I should hate her, pity her, or both, and if both then at what ratio of hate/pity.
I also had to have a ‘funeral’ for the impact that Bill Cosby had on my life– his name was the first place I ever saw the letters Ed.D., and when I researched what that meant, and realized that I too, could pursue an education based on the concept of Education, I was forever changed. Like Roxane, “A Different World” showed me College Life and all of the joys and trials and mundane stuff that happens there. And when I was a single woman, I fancied myself as a “Camille looking for her Bill”. Some of these memories were actual, true inspirations– others (Camille looking for a Cliff) were merely based on the facade that Cosby and his enablers carefully created. But as a woman who has feared for her safety in a sexual situation, I had to let go of all of it. In the end, there was/is nothing, no adulation, no credentials, no reverence, no groundbreaking portrayals of Black home life, college life, or anything else that can excuse what this person (and those in his circle who helped to cover it up) has admittedly done to his victims.
I like your phrasing: a funeral for the Cosby influence in your past.
About that Ed.D.: I thought it was an honorary degree. Anyone have better info on that?
The Ed.D. is from UMass Amherst. Cosby also has multiple honorary degrees.
Cosby’s Ed.D. is an honorary degree, but the degree itself is real– I’m in the dissertation phase for mine now, because UMass Amherst did not award one to me for Television Fathering and Real-Life Rapery, as I committed neither one. Also, no offense to UMass, I’m guessing no one there knew what was really going on with Bill Cosby at the time.
As always, thank you Roxane. Such a good reminder not to focus on him.
The photograph is so powerful. I’m crying right now.
I loved the Cosby show, I used to always watch the reruns, and I used to love listening to his standup when he talked about his wife and their family. Now I can’t bear to look at him, and I can’t even think about Camille. I know we shouldn’t judge and we don’t know what it would be like unless were in that situation, but I just can’t imagine how she can defend him. I just can’t.
The ugliness of it all is really overwhelming when taken alongside what his legacy could and should have been. The Cosby Show was big when I was in high school, a poor only child living in the woods, and offered such a window into professional middle-class life–I didn’t pay any attention to the adults and was always craning my neck to look in the kids’ rooms. When it resurfaced on Nick at Night and I was an adult I saw that half the humor was about how spoiled and oblivious the kids were to their parents’ hard work, and that was a lesson for me as well. Now that’s all consigned to a flaming crater thanks to his monstrous behavior.
Thanks for this, i needed to hear this as I'm debating with myself if i should go ahead and report my assault that happened last yaer.
Spiking some ones drink with qualudes and alcohol can kill . Particularly if you are a thin woman weighing 50kgs or less. I wonder if Cosby left a corpse behind…After all he called one actress” dead meat ” after he raped her. He is a sociopath.
Hearing you give the thumbs up to Missoula is very very exciting to me bc I loved Into Thin Air but had now idea what his book about rape culture would be like. It’s going in the to-read pile for sure now.
I found it very light-shedding about the actual logistics of reporting & prosecuting campus rape and dealing with the criminal justice system even when supposedly ‘good’ systems are in place. (And it was light-shedding about jock rape culture, entitlement, the protective shield of coaches/administrations for their stars and their campus reputations, and so on, too. But I pretty much knew that stuff. I think in general there will be a lot in it that won’t surprise you, but will be clearly laid out in a way that makes you want to press the book into the hands of people who don’t choose to be aware of these issues, in hopes that since Jon Krakauer is talking about it, they’ll listen.)
He’s not mansplainy, though of course I can’t help being disgruntled that his voice can be heard in this realm when so many female voices haven’t been. That’s not his fault, and I credit him for the work he put into Missoula, but I now understand how I imagine environmental scientists must have felt about Al Gore when An Inconvenient Truth came out.
I’m old enough that my introduction to Cosby was his comedy albums from the 60s – and “I Spy.” My parents had a bunch of the LPs and my brothers and I spent hours of our childhood listening to them, howling. I still have whole routines embedded in my aural memory, like pop songs or TV commercial soundtracks. Older people always sour on the world (because they see entropy happening before their eyes?), but I have to say that society seems to becoming more corrupt at a much greater rate than I expected, and I wish it would slow down a little, because I still have a few decades left.
My parents had a couple of the albums on vinyl too. My mother (who would say she is very old) remembers when he started to get big, it was a time when people could actually say things like, “he’s a colored man, but he’s nice and he’s very funny!” I have always wondered how starting his career in that context, as a black comedian with a “clean” enough set that he could go mainstream, affected his professional and personal choices in later life. But I don’t think racism makes people into sociopathic rapists, so perhaps it’s not important anymore. Like most of the other commenters, I am bitterly disappointed by how utterly he failed to live up to his public image. This has been awful to hear about.
“we must choose humanity over legacy and over art or accomplishment.” << Yes.
"we must choose humanity over legacy and over art or accomplishment." << Yes.
" As I’ve written before, we must choose humanity over legacy and over art or accomplishment."
I know people have already commented on this, but, this line. This Line.
“The Cosby Show” was practically the only thing my parents let my sister and me watch on prime-time TV in the 80s … because “Cheers” had too much sexual innuendo, “Knight Rider” was too violent, and so on. It sickens me to know now that the supposedly wholesome guy behind the “good, clean, family-oriented” TV show was in reality a violent sexual predator. Kudos to the women who bravely came forward to tell what Cosby had done to them; I’m glad his brutal behavior is finally widely known.