BILL CROSBY IS DECLARED AS
A DANGEROUS PREDATOR
Bill Crosby was born in 1937, four years after my own birth. He
began his career as a stand-up comic San Francisco during the 1960s. He then
landed a starring role in the television show I Spy, followed by his own
sitcom The Bill Cosby Show, which ran for two seasons from 1969
to 1971. In 1972, using the Fat Albert character developed during
his stand-up routines, Cosby created, produced, and hosted the animated comedy
television series Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids which
ran until 1985, centering on a group of young friends growing up in an urban
area. Throughout the 1970s, Cosby starred in about a half-dozen films, and
occasionally returned to film later in his career. He attended Temple University in the 1960s and received
his bachelor's degree in 1971. In 1973, he
received a master's degree from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and he earned his Doctor of Education degree in 1976, also from
UMass. His dissertation discussed the use of Fat Albert and the Cosby
Kids as a teaching tool in elementary schools. Beginning in the 1980s,
Cosby produced and starred in the television sitcom The Cosby
Show, which aired from 1984 to 1992 and was rated as the number
one show in America for 1984 through 1989. The sitcom highlighted the
experiences and growth of an affluent African-American family. Cosby produced the
spin-off sitcom A Different
World, which aired from 1987 to 1993. He also starred in The Cosby Mysteries from 1994 to 1995
and in the sitcom Cosby from 1996 to 2000, and hosted Kids Say the Darndest Things from
1998 to 2000
in the past, Cosby was a very popular and highly respected television
star. But as we all know, the true character in all of us is hidden from
everyone else. What was hidden from everyone other than the victims of his
sexual attacks. To them and now to the
rest of us, hh was and is still regarded as a dangerous sexual predator.
Cosby's career and image were
seriously damaged in the mid-2010s by the public disclosure of existence of many sexual
assault accusations, the earliest of which date back decades. Many additional
claims were made after that date. The dates of the alleged incidents span from
1965 to 2008 across ten U.S. states and one Canadian province’
More than 60 women accused him
of rape, drug-facilitated
sexual assault, sexual battery, child sexual abuse, and sexual misconduct. WOW! That will surly
destroy the previous image he had.
Due to a delay ny the victims in
reporting the crimes in the United States, most of the alleged acts fell
outside the statutes
of limitations for criminal
prosecution. Fortunately for him, the
Statute of Limitations expired in almost all those crimes in the United States
with the exception of three of them. It was for those three that he was put on
trial.
Further, numerous civil lawsuits had been brought against
him. As of November 2015, eight related civil suits were active against Cosby.
Cosby has repeatedly denied the
allegations and maintained his innocence. In November 2014, he responded to a
question about the allegations and said: "I don't talk about it.” In
past interviews that were made public, Cosby declined to discuss the
accusations. However,
he told Florida Today, "People shouldn't have
to go through that and shouldn't answer to innuendos.” In May 2015 he
said, "I have been in this business 52 years and I've never seen anything
like this. Reality is a situation and I can't speak. The reality was something
60 women actually spoke about.
In the wake of the allegations,
numerous organizations had severed ties with Cosby, and honors and titles that
were previously awarded to him have been revoked. Reruns of The Cosby
Show and other shows featuring Cosby have also been pulled from
syndication by many organizations. Twenty-five colleges and universities have
rescinded his honorary degrees.[ In an attempt to explain the
backlash against Crosby. CAdweek reporter Jason Lynch noted that the
"media landscape has changed considerablyand has now been joined by the
far-less-forgiving social media arena. In all likelihood, his
Hollywood star award that is placed on the Hollywood Walk of Fame sidewalk will
probably also be removed. Back in 2014, someone scratched the word, RAPIST on
the plaque.
High-profile attorney Gloria Allred is representing 33 of the
alleged victims. In July 2015, some of the court records from Andrea Constand's 2005 civil suit against Cosby were
unsealed and released to the public. The full transcript of his deposition was
also released to the media by a court reporting service. In his testimony,
Cosby admitted to casual sex, involving the recreational use
of the sedative methaqualone (Quaaludes), with a series
of young women, and acknowledged that his dispensing the prescription drug was
illegal.
This drug is a depressant of the quinazolinone class that acts as a sedative
and has a semi-hypnotic effect on the person who ingests it. By giving this
drug to his victims, their concerns about what Crosby was doing to them was
lessened and that was why he surreptitiously
gave them the drug which was probably in the drinks he gave them. You
could say it is a rape drug.
Much
has changed in the past few years for women who allege rape than in all the
decades since the women’s movement began. Consider the evidence of October
2014, when a magazine reporter at a Hannibal Buress show 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 Show
reruns. Dude’s image, for the most part, it’s fucking public Teflon
image. I’ve done this bit onstage and people think I’m making it up That shit
is upsetting.” The bit of the show went viral swiftly, with irreversible,
calamitous consequences for Cosby’s reputation.
Perhaps
the most shocking thing wasn’t that Buress had called Cosby a rapist; it was
that the world had actually heard him call Crosby a rapist. 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 (with a finger) 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 Constand’s case. Several of them eventually made their
names public. But they were met, mostly, with skepticism, threats, and attacks
on their character.
In Cosby’s
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 I’m 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 public’s 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 didn’t. The National Enquirer had planned to run a big
story detailing one of the women’s 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 piece in which
some of the Jane Does told their stories under their own names, bolstering
Constand’s account, but Cosby’s 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 didn’t register as such, even for the women experiencing it.
A
few of Cosby’s 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?
But
among younger women, and particularly online, there is a strong sense now that
speaking up is the only thing to do, that a woman claiming her own victimhood
is more powerful than any other weapon in the fight against rape. Emma
Sulkowicz, carrying her mattress around Columbiain a performance-art
protest of her alleged rape, is an extreme practitioner of this idea. This is a
generation that’s been radicalized, in just the past few years, by horrific
examples of rape and reactions to rape such as the 2012 Steubenville
incident, in which high-school football players brutally violated a
passed-out teenage girl at a party and photographed and braggingly circulated
the evidence. That same year, when a 14-year-old Missouri
cheerleader accused a popular older boy at her school of sexual
assault, her classmates shamed her on social media and the family’s house was
burned down. The whole world watched online. How could this kind of thing still be
happening? These cases felt unignorable, unforgettable, Old Testament biblical.
Would anyone have believed the girls, or cared, had the evidence not been
digitizable? And: How could you be a young woman and not care deeply about
trying to fix this?
Facebook
and Twitter, the forums that helped circulate the Buress clip, were full of
rage at Cosby’s perceived cruelty. Barbara Bowman, who’d come forward during
the Constand case, wrote an
op-ed in the Washington Post about her frustration
that no one had believed her for all those years. Three days after Bowman’s
op-ed, another woman, Joan Tarshis, came forward to say Cosby had drugged and
raped her in 1969. By the end of November, 16 more women had come
forward.
Cosby
resigned from Temple’s board of trustees and sought monetary
damages from one of his accusers. He
also told Page Six
that he wanted “the black media to uphold the standards of excellence in
journalism and go in with a neutral mind.” Cosby, through representatives, has
consistently denied any wrongdoing, and hasn’t been charged with any crimes.
Emails to four of his lawyers and press reps went unanswered, although his team
has begun a media tour to deny that his admission of offering Quaaludes to
women was tantamount to admitting he’d raped anyone.
By February, there were another 12
accusers. Tina Fey and
Amy Poehler joked about it at the Golden Globes: “Sleeping Beauty just thought she was
getting coffee with Bill Cosby.” Attorney Gloria Allred got involved,
representing more than a dozen of the women. Even President
Obama said it was clear to him: “If you give a woman — or a man, for
that matter — without his or her knowledge a drug, and then have sex with that
person without consent, that’s rape.”
There
were then 46 women who had come forward publicly to accuse Cosby of rape or
sexual assault; the 35 women here were the accusers who were willing to be
photographed and interviewed by New
York. The group, ranges then in age from early 20s to 80 and included
supermodels Beverly Johnson and Janice Dickinson alongside waitresses and
Playboy bunnies and journalists and a host of women who formerly worked in show
business. Many of the women say they know of others still out there who’ve
chosen to remain silent.
That
project began, when the members started contacting the then 30 women who had
publicly claimed Cosby assaulted them, and it snowballed in the same way that
the initial accusations did. First two women signed on, then others heard about
it and joined in, and so on. Just a few days before the story was published, the
members photographed the final two women, bringing our total to 35. “I’m no
longer afraid,” said Chelan Lasha, who came forward late last year to say that
Cosby had drugged her when she was 17. “I feel more powerful than him.”
Accompanying
that photo essay is a compilation of the interviews with these women, a record
of trauma and survival. The memories that remained of the decades-old
incidents. All 35 were interviewed separately, and yet their stories have
remarkable similarities, in everything from their descriptions of the incidents
to the way they felt in the aftermath. Each story is awful in its own right.
But the horror is multiplied by the sheer volume of seeing them together,
reading them together, considering their shared experience. The women have
found solace in their number by discovering that they hadn’t been alone, that
there were others out there who believed them implicitly, with whom they didn’t
need to be afraid of sharing the darkest details of their lives. They are
scattered all over the country in ten different states were represented and most of them had no contact with their
fellow accusers until recently. But since reading about each other’s stories in
the news, or finding one another on social media, or meeting in person at the
photo shoots arranged by New York, many of the women have
forged a bond. It is, as Tarshis calls it, “a sorrowful sisterhood.
Surely
you have noticed that in the hearings with respect to the appointment of
Frump’s choice in who is to be the next member of the US Supreme Court that
once Professor Ford stated that she had been sexually assaulted by the man
Trump choose to be the next member of the Supreme Court, another woman publicly
claimed that she also had been sexually assaulted by Trump’s nominee.
Here
is what some of the accusers said about Crosby’s assaults against them.
“My
agent said we’ve been contacted by a really, really big person in the
entertainment industry who’s interested in mentoring promising young talent. I
found out it’s Bill Cosby. I had the understanding I was going to be receiving
private acting coaching from him. This was the opportunity of a lifetime. A
driver would pick me up, my agent was paying for it. That made it all very,
very professional. The door opens, and there stands Cosby. He’s in his sweats
and very casual, very friendly. I had a monologue prepared. He seemed
unimpressed. He said, ‘Let’s try a cold read,’
so he pulls out a script. The scene was set in a bar; the character was someone
who was inebriated. He poured a glass of white wine. And
he said, use this as a prop — now, that means you’re going to have to sip on
it, of course. I really don’t remember much, except waking up in his bedroom.
He was naked, and he was forcing himself into my mouth.” —Heidi Thomas
“My
agent said we’ve been contacted by a really, really big person in the
entertainment industry who’s interested in mentoring promising young talent. I
find out it’s Bill Cosby. I had the understanding I was going to be receiving
private acting coaching from him. This was the opportunity of a lifetime. A
driver would pick me up, my agent was paying for it. That made it all very,
very professional. The door opens, and there stands Cosby. He’s in his sweats
and very casual, very friendly. I had a monologue prepared. He seemed
unimpressed. He said, ‘Let’s try a cold read,’ so he pulls out a script. The scene was
set in a bar; the character was someone who was inebriated. He poured a glass
of white wine. And he said, use this as a prop — now, that
means you’re going to have to sip on it, of course. I really don’t remember
much, except waking up in his bedroom. He was naked, and he was forcing himself
into my mouth.” —Heidi
Thomas
That last statement she said was in effect saying that Crosby had tried
to insert his penis into her mouth.
“I
was introduced to Bill Cosby through my modeling agent. She said that Cosby
wanted to see me. Which I thought was obviously for the show. I was told there
was going to be a dinner, and when I got there, no one ever arrived. He asked
me if I wanted a glass of wine; I took a few sips. It had a horrible taste.
And I started not feeling well. He
helped me up by my underarms with both hands. He walked me into the next room,
where there was a mirror on the wall, and he told me to look at myself.
Something was wrong with me. And then he took my right hand, and he
put it behind my back. I remember seeing semen on the floor. And I felt some
liquid on my hand. That was when I knew something sexual was going on.” —Jewel
Allison
“He
took my roommate and me out to dinner. It was this new hip steak restaurant on
the strip near the Whiskey a Go Go called Sneaky Pete’s. He was chatting her up
and trying to charm her. And he reached across and put a pill next to my
wineglass and said, ‘Here, this will make you feel better,’ and he gave her
one. I wasn’t really thinking. My son had recently died. I thought, Great,
me feel better? You bet. So I took the pill and washed it down with
some red wine. And then he reached across and put another pill in my mouth and
gave her one. Just after I took the second pill, my face was, like,
face-in-plate syndrome, and I just said, ‘I wanna go home.’ He said he would
drive us home. We went up this elevator. I sat down, and lay my head back, just
fighting nausea. I looked around and he was sitting next to my roommate on the love seat
with this very predatory look on his face. She was completely unconscious. I
could hear the words in my head, but I couldn’t form words with my mouth,
because I was so drugged out. He got up and came over, and he sat down and
unzipped his fly. He had me give him oral sex, and then he stood me up, turned
me over, did me doggy style, and walked out. Just as he got to the door, I
said, ‘How do we get out of here, how do we get home?’ And he said, ‘Call a
cab.’ ” —Victoria Valentino
“At
17, my agent introduced me to Bill Cosby, who was going to mentor me and take
me to the next level of my career. Over the course of the next year, I was
drugged half the time when I was with him and would come out of a delusional
experience going, ‘Whoa, what was that?’ He would say, ‘Well, I needed to
undress you and wash your clothes because you got drunk and made a fool of
yourself.’ Do you remember the Jaycee Dugard story? She pretty much could have
climbed over the fence any time she wanted to but was just so broken down and
couldn’t think straight. I felt like a prisoner; I felt I
was kidnapped and hiding in plain sight. I could have walked down any street of
Manhattan at any time and said, ‘I’m being raped and drugged by Bill Cosby,’
but who the hell would have believed me? Nobody, nobody. I was invited down to Atlantic City
to see his show and had a very confusing night where I was completely drugged
and my luggage was missing. When I called the concierge to find out where my
luggage was, Cosby went ballistic. He slammed the phone down and said, ‘What
the hell are you doing, letting the whole hotel know I have a 19-year-old girl
in my hotel suite?’ The next morning, he summoned me down to his room and
yelled at me that I needed to have discretion. He threw me down on the bed and
he put his forearm under my throat. He straddled me, and he took his belt
buckle off. The clanking of the belt buckle, I’ll never forget.” —Barbara Bowman
“I
had a terrible headache, and I said, ‘Bill, do you have some Tylenol? I have a
headache.’ And he said to me, ‘I have something stronger.’ And I said, ‘You know I don’t do drugs.’ He said, ‘You’re one of my best
friends. Would I hurt you?’ And I believed him. All I
remember is taking the pill; I don’t remember going to bed. But I do remember
waking up in a fog and opening my eyes, and I had no clothes on, and there was
Bill’s friend totally naked in bed with me. He started to laugh and smile, and
he said, ‘Oh, did you have a good time?’ I said, ‘What the fuck happened? Do
you always eff a dead person?’ I got my clothes on and I walked out. And Bill
said, ‘Where are you going?’ I said, ‘What the eff did you give me?’ He said,
‘Oh, you had a bad headache, you were in so much pain. I gave you a Quaalude.’
I was hurt with Bill more than angry at his friend. Bill let him take advantage
of me. That kills me. That’s why I know the stories of what he did to the other
women are true, because if he didn’t have the respect for me, who was really a
close friend, then he could do that to anybody he didn’t know very well.” —Joyce
Emmons
“I
didn’t realize that I had been raped. Back then, rape
was done in an alleyway with somebody holding a knife to your throat who you
didn’t know. There was no date rape back then. I just knew that something
horrible had happened. But I couldn’t put a name to it.
The difference between this and that rape in the dark alley is that his face
would be before me every week on TV. People would mention a joke that he said:
‘Wasn’t that funny?’ And all the while, my stomach would just be
churning.” —Joan Tarshis
“I saw that there were a lot of
negative responses being posted against Barbara Bowman and Joan Tarshis and
Tamara Green and Andrea Constand, grouping them in a historical
reference to claims that “white women” have made in the past, that weren’t
truthful, about being raped by a black man. But unfortunately with this case, I
knew that there was a very strong possibility that these women were telling the
truth, because I had had my own negative experience with Bill Cosby. And so I
just felt like, No, this can’t go in that direction.”—Jewel
The aforementioned statements are just some of the sixty women who have claimed that they were also
sexual victims of Bill Crosby.
What follows is a timeline of events involving Crosby and women he
sexually abused in the year, 2005 and 2006.
March
8, 2005
Constand files a civil complaint against Cosby. The five-count lawsuit charges Cosby with battery and assault, and asks for at least $150,000 in damages. Thirteen women who allege similar experiences as Constand and Green are mentioned in court papers as Jane Doe witnesses.
May
2005
In Constand’s civil lawsuit, she alleges the comedian gave her three blue pills, which he said was herbal medication. Cosby’s lawyers, however, issue a court filing and attempt to clarify that the comedian merely gave Constand one and a half tablets of Benadryl.
June
2005
Jane Doe 5 goes public. Beth Ferrier claims she was in a relationship with Cosby in the mid-1980s, one that ended when he allegedly drugged her coffee and Ferrier woke in a car. “My clothes were a mess. My bra was undone. My top was untucked. And I'm sitting there going, 'Oh my God. Where am I?' What's going on? I was so out of it. It was just awful."
February
2005
While in the midst of her civil suit, Constand sues one of Cosby’s lawyers — and the National Enquirer — for defamation. Cosby had spoken to the tabloid the year before, and Constand claimed the interview defamed her as it “ intended to or knowing it would injure” her.
June
2006
Philadelphia magazine interviews another witness in Constand’s lawsuit, Barbara Bowman. “Cosby threw me on the bed and braced his forearm against my neck and attempted to disrobe me and himself,” she said in another Philadelphia interview later that year. “I can still remember him messing with his belt. And I was screaming and crying and yelling and begging him to stop.”
November
2006
Cosby settles with Constand. Terms are not disclosed, and none of the 13 other women testify.
December
200
The following month, People magazine published Bowman's account of several assaults: "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.”
February
2014
Katie Baker of Newsweek, Whitaker’s former employer. interviewed both Green and Bowman about the alleged assaults. Bowman told Baker that she was disappointed in the settlement, and Green recounted running into and accosting Cosby in Las Vegas, yelling, “Rapist! Liar! Asshole!” While Cosby didn’t issue a statement regarding Bowman’s claims, his publicist responded to Green, “This is a 10-year-old, discredited accusation that proved to be nothing at the time, and is still nothing.”
October
16, 2014
Comedian Hannibal Buress does an extended bit about the rape charges in Cosby's home town of Philadelphia. "Bill Cosby has the fucking smuggest old black man public persona that I hate," Buress says. "Pull your pants up, black people. I was on TV in the ’80s. I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom. Yeah, but you raped women, Bill Cosby. So, brings you down a couple notches." A clip of the set went viral after being posted in Philadelphia magazine.
November
13, 2014
Inspired by the reactions to Buress's bit, Bowman pens an op-ed in the Washington Post, titled "Bill Cosby raped me. Why did it take 30 years for people to believe my story?" She notes that "only after a man called Bill Cosby a rapist in a comedy act last month did the public outcry begin in earnest."
November
15, 2014
Cosby is asked about the various charges on NPR's "Weekend Edition" but stays silent. His lawyer later posted a statement saying Cosby "won't dignify these allegations with any response."
November
16, 2014
A new accuser, Joan Tarshis, alleged that Cosby drugged and assaulted her on two occasions in 1969. "As more and more of his rape victims have come forward, all telling similar stories," Tarshis says, "the time is right to join them."
November
17, 2014
Linda Joy Traitz, a former waitress at Cosby's Café Figaro, wrote a lengthy Facebook post accusing the actor of trying to drug her in the early '70s. She says the incident occurred when Cosby drove her home one night. "He drove out to the beach and opened a briefcase filled with assorted drugs and kept offering me pills 'to relax,' which I declined. He began to get sexually aggressive and wouldn’t take ‘No’ for an answer. I freaked out and demanded to be taken home."
November
18, 2014
On Entertainment Tonight, supermodel Janice Dickinson became the next woman to accuse Cosby of sexual abuse by saying that the comedian drugged and raped her in 1982. She recalls Cosby giving her wine and a pill, which he told her were for menstrual cramps: "Before I woke up in the morning, the last thing I remember was Bill Cosby in a patchwork robe, dropping his robe and getting on top of me. And I remember a lot of pain. The next morning I remember waking up with my pajamas off and there was semen in between my legs." Dickinson alluded to the event in her 2002 memoir, and later told Howard Stern that she was asked to change the text to show Cosby in a better light.
Netflix
indefinitely shelved the Bill Cosby stand-up special that was
set to air Thanksgiving week.
November 19, 2014
Nearly all remnants of Cosby vanish from the airwaves as TV Land pulls all Cosby Show reruns from its schedule and NBC scraps the sitcom it was developing with him.
Three
additional women accused Cosby of sexual assault: Carla Ferrigno,
wife and manager of Incredible Hulk actor Lou
Ferrigno, says Cosby "attacked" her when she was a teenager, grabbing
and kissing her at a 1967 party; Love, American Style actress
Louisa Moritz tells TMZ that Cosby forced her to perform
oral sex on him in a Tonight Show green-room in 1971;
and nurse Theresa Serignese claims Cosby drugged and raped her in
1976. Serignese was one of 13 Jane Does in the 2005 court case, while
Ferrigno and Moritz provided new allegations.
In
another statement, Cosby's lawyer condemned the
"media-driven feeding frenzy" and calls the latest round of
allegations "utter nonsense." As he wrote, "People
are trying to come up with these wild stories in order to justify why they have
waited 40 to 50 years to disclose these ridiculous accusations."
November
21, 2014
Three more accusers step forward. All tell similar stories: Kristina Ruehli says Cosby spiked her bourbon and tried to force her to perform oral sex in 1965; Picture Pages actress Renita Chaney Hill alleged that Cosby drugged and assaulted her multiple times when she was a teenager; and model Angela Leslie contends that Cosby invited her to his Las Vegas hotel room in 1992, got naked, then forced her to masturbate him.
Multiple
theaters canceled upcoming appearances by Cosby, including the Treasure Island Hotel and Casino in
Las Vegas and the Virginia Theater in Illinois.
November 22, 2014
The Washington Post published the results of a long investigation into the allegations, including an interview with a new accuser who was a former Playmate, Victoria Valentino, who said that Cosby drugged and assaulted her and a friend in 1970. "He came over to me and sat down on the love seat and opened his fly and grabbed my head and pushed my head down," Valentino tells the Post. "And then he turned me over. It was like a waking nightmare."
November 23, 2014
Former Cosby Show employee, Frank Scotti says he was in charge of delivering payoffs to eight different women. In his words, "It was a coverup." Scotti also claimed that he stood guard outside Cosby's dressing room while the comedian conducted "interviews" with young models, all supplied by an agency he had an "arrangement" with.
November 24, 2014
Model Jewel Allison accused Cosby of drugging and assaulting her in the late '80s. She recalls accepting a dinner invitation to Cosby's home, where he poured her a glass of wine. Allison says now she thinks the wine was drugged. "I looked at myself in the mirror and I didn't look good," she told the New York Daily News. "My eyes were all over the place." She remembers Cosby placing her hand on his penis, kissing her, then calling a cab. "There's no such thing as Cliff Huxtable," she says. "There's just a man named Bill Cosby. He's a very sick sociopath."
Mark
Whitaker, author of the recent Cosby biography apologize on
Twitter for not including the many sexual assault allegations in his book.
November 26, 2014
Another Jane Doe comes forward, as former waitress Donna Motsinger accused Cosby of sexually assaulting her in the 1970s. Motsinger was working as a waitress in the Bay Area when, she said that Cosby asked her to attend one of his shows with him. They shared a drink in a limousine on the way there, after which, she claimed, "I didn't feel right." Motsinger said that she woke up in her bed the next morning wearing only her underwear and knew immediately that she'd been assaulted.
December
1, 2014
Cosby resigned from his position on Temple's board of trustees.
December 2, 2014
Judy Huth accused Cosby of assaulting her when she was 15. Huth claimed that she and a friend met Cosby when they wandered onto a movie set in 1974. A week later, she says, the comedian took them to a party at the Playboy Mansion. There, Huth claims Cosby told her to lie about her age; then, when the two were alone, Cosby stuck his hand down her pants and forced her to masturbate him. Huth is the first accuser in nearly a decade to get the legal system involved She decided to sue Cosby for damages based on the "psychological damage and mental anguish" she says she received. Huth could not file criminal charges against the star, as the alleged incident took place before 1988.
On
Twitter, Cosby thanked the celebrities like Whoopi Goldberg and Jill Scott for standing by him. Do
they still support that man?
December 3, 2014
At a
press conference called by Gloria Allred, Beth Ferrier joins two new
accusers: Helen Hayes says Cosby stalked her "like a
predator" in 1973 before coming up behind her and grabbing her breast; a
woman known only as "Chelan" claimed that Cosby drugged and assaulted
her in a hotel room in 1986. Allred called for Cosby to either waive the
statute of limitations for the allegations against him, or else donate $100
million to fund settlements for the accusers. He did neither.
December 4, 2014
Cosby filed his own lawsuit against Huth, saying she used the threat of a sexual-assault claim to try to extort him. The lawsuit called Huth's accusations "meritless and unsupported," and claimed she went public only "after Mr. Cosby rejected the plaintiff’s outrageous demand for money." Cosby and his lawyer also said that Huth broke the law by naming him in her lawsuit. They were seeking $33,000 in damages. I don’t know if they were successful.
Meanwhile,
a New York theater canceled two upcoming Cosby
performances and the Navy striped Cosby of his honorary chief petty officer
designation. As a young man, he served in the navy. In Los Angeles, an unknown
vandal scrawls "rapist" on Cosby's star on the
Hollywood Walk of Fame.
December 10, 2014
Tamara Green files a defamation lawsuit against Cosby, saying the comedian impugned her reputation when he let his lawyer say she was lying about being sexually assaulted.
December 11, 2014
Model Beverly Johnson accused Cosby of drugging her in the mid-'80s. Johnson tells Vanity Fair the comedian insisted she try a cappuccino from his home espresso machine; after two sips, she knew it was drugged. Before passing out, she remembers calling Cosby "a motherfucker," which annoyed him so much he dragged her out of his house and hailed her a cab.
December 13, 2014
In his most direct response to the accusations yet, Cosby told "Page Six" he expected "the black media to uphold the standards of excellence in journalism [and] go in with a neutral mind.”
I won’t
bother writing what might have occurred in the next four years and rather go to Crosby’s trial in 2018.
The Trial
Bill
Cosby was in a Pittsburgh court for the first day of his trial on charges of
sexually assaulting a woman in 2004—the only criminal case to emerge from the
dozens of similar allegations against the legendary comedian and actor. according
to The Washington Post. His attitude at
that moment showed that he didn’t take the charges seriously. Cosby has said that
he would not testify, and the highlight of the trial, which was expected to
last two weeks, was to be the testimony
of Constand, who first met Cosby while she worked at Temple University, Cosby’s
alma mater.
Constand’s
accusations centered on a night in 2004 that she spent at Cosby’s home. At the
time, Constand was the director of the university’s basketball program, and
Cosby had taken an interest in her. Neither of the two denied the meeting, nor
that Cosby gave Constand several pills and a glass of wine. But aside from that
their accounts differ drastically, and the jury’s interpretation of what
happened that night would ultimately decide if Cosby was guilty of sexual
assault or not.
Much
of Cosby’s accounting of that night came from four days of sworn testimony he
gave to lawyers in the earlier proceedings that took place when she sued him. According
to Cosby’s account, he gave Constand the pills to help her relax because she
was stressed from her job. They were three blue pills, which he said was
Benadryl. He said they talked for a while about her job, then moved to a sofa,
where the two began to kiss. Cosby says the sex was consensual, and that
afterward he let Constand sleep at his home, on the couch, for a couple hours.
Then he made her tea and gave her a muffin, he said, and she didn’t mentioned
anything negative about what they’d done, according to his testimony.
The investigation into Cosby was
reopened in July 2015 after a federal judge, acting on a request from The Associated Press, unsealed portions
of Cosby's deposition testimony from a civil lawsuit he settled with Constand
in 2006 for $3.4 million US
In the deposition, Cosby, who has been married since 1964, talked glibly and boastfully of having sex with a 19-year-old fan.
Bill Cosby was confronted in court with his own lurid
descriptions of "petting," penetration and the alleged orgasm his
accuser Andrea Constand had after he admittedly gave her Benadryl pills. His
oddly graphic prior testimony was introduced at his sex assault trial as two
law enforcement officials testified for prosecutors.
The Pennsylvania jurors
appeared riveted as Montgomery County Detective James Reape took the stand and
combed through Cosby's firsthand descriptions of his sexual contact with
Constand, including the January 2004 night he gave her pills at his suburban
Philadelphia mansion.
"I don't hear her say
anything. And I don't feel her say anything. And so I continue, and I go into
the area that is somewhere between permission and rejection," I go slowly. I don't want to go to the orifice yet."
Cosby said in one passage that Reape confirmed was from the comic's
depositions generated in the civil lawsuit he settled with Constand. He claimed that Constand rubbed his penis during one
encounter and "may have moaned."
In describing the night at the center of his felony trial,
Cosby claimed that the interaction was consensual.If it is not consenual, the act is then illegal.
He also
said, "I go inside of her pants. She then took her hand and
put in on top of my hand to push it in further," he claimed. "She
makes a sound which I feel was an orgasm and she was wet. She was wet when I
went in.”
The jurors convicted Bill Cosby
at his sexual assault retrial of aggravated indecent assault. The jury
issued a statement saying its decision was not influenced in any way by factors
other than what was seen and heard in the courtroom. They said race and the
#MeToo movement were never discussed, according to the statement, obtained by
NBC's Today show Juror Harrison Synyder said that the comedian's
own words in his deposition is what sealed Crosby’s fate.
Snyder also said in an
interview aired September 24, 2018 on ABC's Good Morning America that
Cosby's deposition in which he admitted giving women drugs to have sex with
them was the evidence that made the
jurors believe he was guilty.
He said, "I think it was his
deposition, really. Mr. Cosby admitted to giving these quaaludes to women,
young women, in order to have sex with them," Snyder said that part of
Cosby’s deposition that was part of a
civil case brought by the complainant Andrea Constand was damming evidence
against Cosby.
Five other women testified at the
retrial that Cosby had drugged and molested them as well, but Snyder said they
weren't a factor in his decision. The judge said, "I don't think it really
necessarily mattered that these other five women were here giving evidence because
he said it himself that he used drugs for other women."
Having
sex with women is not a crime unless the women are drugged. Crosby stupidly
admitted to drugging women in his deposition. That was all the jury needed to
convict Crosby of raping Andrea Constand.
The sentence
Bill Cosby was sentenced om September 25, 2018 to three-to-ten years in a state correctional
institution, after being found guilty on three counts of aggravated
indecent assault in April, which stemmed from the accusation of former
Temple University employee Andrea Constand, who said that the comedian drugged
and molested her at his Pennsylvania home in 2004.
“Evidence is overwhelming that it was planned
predation,” said Judge Steven O’Neill in making his ruling. “This is a serious
sexual assault.”
O’Neill also ruled that Cosby fits the definition
of a “sexually violent predator.” That classification means that Cosby must
undergo lifetime counseling and report quarterly each year to authorities. His
name will also appear on a sex-offender registry sent to neighbors, schools and
his victims
As you
can see form the above allegations, Bill Crosby was a serial rapist and for
this reason, he was also a danger to society as a sociopath.
As a discretionary parole state, a judge imposes a minimum and maximum sentence date at the time of sentencing. Inmates who have served their minimum sentence are eligible for parole consideration. Parole is not guaranteed since it is a privilege, not a right. If he seeks psychiatric help, he may get out of prison after serving the minimum sentence of three years in prison.
As to
what part in the state prison he will serve his sentence, there are only three
possibilities. The first one is in the general population section in the
prison. It his highly unlikely that he will
be sent to that section of the prison. Rapists are always at risk in that
section of the prison. If he was sent there, you can be sure that some inmates would
extort money from him with a guarantee that he will be protect from the other
inmates who would want to treat him as their bitch.
The
next possibility is that he would be placed in the protection custody section
where rapists and child molesters and snitches are placed for their own protection.
The
third option for the Pennsylvania Correctional Department is to place him in
the medical ward of the prison. Considering that he is 81 years of age and
almost blind, it is conceivable that he will serve his time there.
The disgraced TV star spent millions in a frenzied bid just to stay out of prison. Cosby's insurance company shelled out $2 million in one 15-month period for Cosby's legal bills in one case alone. Some lawyers are also going after him for unpaid fees.
He is a
broken man. Do I have sympathy for him? Does a bear have sympathy for the
salmon it grabs out of a river?
No comments:
Post a Comment