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Under his…wing

Another pop culture lacuna – I didn’t know Bill Cosby had been accused of rape by multiple women. Apparently lots of people don’t know that, or, worse, know it and don’t care.

In 2004, Andrea Constand brought a civil lawsuit against Cosby that grew to include 13 other women, all of whom reported being drugged and raped by one of America’s most beloved entertainers. Cosby settled under undisclosed terms in 2006.

Notably, two other women — who presumably had nothing to gain financially, as the statute of limitations had run out on their cases — also shared their stories with major media outlets. Their accounts included  similar details: Cosby took them under his wing and, on multiple occasions, fed them alcohol laced with drugs and assaulted them.

It’s almost as if there’s a pattern…

The newly popular status » « Which nerds?

Comments

  1. screechymonkey says

    Yeah, it’s pretty sad. Some of my first encounters with comedy were listening to my parents’ Cosby records.

    These days Cosby makes the news mostly for being a scold: telling young comedians that they shouldn’t “work blue,” or telling black people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and stop wearing the baggy pants and listening to that hippity-hop and get themselves some pudding endorsements instead.

    At least one young black comic has had enough of it.

  2. Kevin Kehres says

    I remember the settlement was announced. Of course, no criminal charges were ever filed … so according to the brave heroes, nothing actually happened.

  5. Al Dente says

    Like Kevin Kehres @2, I had heard about the settlement. At the time I realized another icon turned out to be a bad guy.

  7. says

    Lemme go dig up my copy of “Cosby, Himself” (b/c if that is Cosby, himself) I am going to throw it in my dumpster with some nasty smelly crap from the cat box.

  8. Blanche Quizno says

    Back in the late 1990s, it came out that Cosby had an illegitimate daughter with a woman he’d stepped out on his wife with. A few interesting quotes (in light of the above) from this article about the situation becoming public: http://articles.latimes.com/1997/jul/16/news/mn-13121

    Cosby said he had a brief affair with [the girl’s mother] in Las Vegas in the early 1970s, and over the years, he gave her a total of $100,000.

    “Who instituted the affair?” Cosby was asked.

    “I did,” he replied.

    Cosby said he sometimes gave [his daughter] pep talks over the phone, encouraging her to stay in school and better herself, but he never told her she could call him father.

    “It was rah, rah, rah, sis boom bah,” Cosby said. “I tried not to make it rough and hard. I would say call me. I said one day, ‘I am not your father. I will be for you a father figure.’ ”

    Cosby said he once backed out of a paternity blood test he proposed conducting with [the daughter] and her mother in Chicago, fearing a “bounty hunter” would leak the news of the test to the tabloids.

    As the perfect world of television’s Huxtable family and the far-from-perfect world of [the daughter] and her co-defendants clashed in federal court, [the daughter]’s lawyer concluded his cross-examination with a question.

    Robert Baum asked Cosby if he recalled saying in his best-selling book “Fatherhood” that the commitment of having children can’t be part time.

    “Yes,” Cosby replied.

    Cosby testified he met [the mother] in the early 1970s at a hotel in Los Angeles, asked her to dance and asked for her telephone number. He said he subsequently called her and invited her to Las Vegas.

    Cosby said he was married when the tryst occurred, and he told his wife, Camille, about it 17 years ago.

    He said he met [the mother] again sometime later in the living room of a hotel in Las Vegas, and she showed him a picture of a child.

    “This is your daughter, [her name],” he said Upshaw told him.

    “I said, ‘That’s not my daughter,’ and that was it,” Cosby added.

    The actor said [the mother] told him at the time that she had no intention of wanting to embarrass Cosby’s wife, but she later began asking to borrow money.

    “And then would come the part about [the daughter] being my daughter, and that she hadn’t told anyone,” Cosby said.

    He estimated over the years he had paid [the mother] about $100,000 out of concern “she would go public with the fact that I had sex with her.”

    “She never paid me back,” Cosby added.

    Nobody expects child support to be paid back, dumbass.

    Now *nice* to be so rich and powerful – and male – that all it takes to prove she’s not your child is your say-so.

    The comedian–America’s beloved TV dad–said the payments were disguised by having employees use their own names on cashier’s checks or traveler’s checks after he supplied the funds.

    Cosby said he never put his name on a check out of fear that it could be used against him, but he promised to pay for the college education of all of [the mother]’s children.

    Clevar ruse to avoid attracting any unwanted attention to that one daughter, eh? Such a schemer, that puddin’man! See? You CAN buy your way out of consequences!

    Payments to [his daughter] were made not through Cosby’s foundation, which over the years has provided scholarships to 300 youngsters. They were sent through his lawyer, the comedian said.

    “She was special because of the situation with her mother,” he said.

    Cosby said he did not want the board of the foundation to find out who [the mother] was and have her calling the board asking for money.

    When [his daughter] was 16 or 17, she came to New York with her grandmother and visited Cosby on the set of his program.

    “I introduced her to all the kids on the show,” Cosby said. “I talked to her about an education. I talked to her about conditions at home, not in a negatory way.”

    “Stop being poor, stop having a single mom, stop being black.”

    “I asked why she used my last name? She said, ‘I really didn’t say anything about us. I was just saying I knew you,’ ” Cosby testified. “I said, ‘Don’t tell people. Don’t tell anyone.’ “

    He paid [his daughter] $3,000 living expenses after she said she was homeless, but the calls to Cosby’s law firm escalated during the month and into January.

    He said at one point he phoned [his daughter] in California.

    “I was upset. I said to her, ‘I’m tired of you. I’m tired of your mother. You and your mother have never given me a happy moment for what I’ve given you.’ ”

    The actor said he told Jackson she could have $200 a week to attend film classes at UCLA–take it or leave it.

    What a guy. What was that about parenthood being a full time commitment again?? As it turned out, the young woman in question was convicted of extortion and sentenced to a dozen years or so in prison. The paternity test everyone was talking about never happened. Yeah, if you’re rich and powerful enough, you get whatever outcome you want. What was that bit about Dylan Farrow again???

  9. Pierce R. Butler says

    Bill Cosby’s major role in whitewashing the CIA during the war on Vietnam gave me a permanent bad taste in my mouth as soon as I connected those dots.

    I s’poze Cosby couldn’t have won his degree of popularity without expressing some public piety – but if he hasn’t signed up for Bigfoot “documentaries” or endorsed an acupuncture clinic, he probably qualifies as a TAM keynote-speaker candidate.

  10. Phillip Hallam-Baker says

    When we get to accusations against specific people it is always difficult to know which party to believe. The idea that we automatically believe the accuser leads to bad outcomes as well. And especially when we don’t have direct access to the accuser. The Orkney child abuse scandal in the UK is a good example of what can go wrong.

    It is especially difficult where celebrities are concerned. There are Web pages that accuse every past UK Prime Minister of being a pedophile. And virtually all of them are complete nonsense. Then there is the fact that Thatcher’s PPS has just been exposed as a pedophile after being named in the house of commons and with it a 20 year long history of cover ups.

    One of the common factors in the Saville, Harris, Hall, etc. pedophile enquiries is that in each case the celebrity used the fact that people would be skeptical of accusers as a shield to continue their activities.

    What is rather striking about the emerging Elm Guest House scandal is just how long it took the authorities to realize that children’s homes might be a magnet for pedophiles. It is also rather clear that some of the people at the center of the scandal knew what was going on but had noticed what had happened to the people who had tried to raise the alarm and were concentrating on trying to keep the kids safe.

    In the late 1980s, the UK civil service developed a sudden enthusiasm for ISO 9000 long before it was fashionable. And rather curiously one of the first areas they applied it to was the running of children’s homes. The running of the homes was reduced to a series of processes and every process had to be described in extreme detail. Now it might be that HMG had suddenly developed an urgent concern to make sure that the inmates were assured of a clean lavatory. But one byproduct of the ISO 9000 was making it much harder for staff to step out of line without notice being taken.

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