I think Cosby simply doesn’t have many friends in the entertainment industry. Even with black comics - regardless whether they’re in stand-up, monologists, sketch, sitcom or movies - he doesn’t have anything remoting approaching the status of Pryor, Chappelle, Rock, or even Red Foxx for crying out loud. That tells me he’s really not been someone who’s reached out or been available to help. So, the only elements within the entire industry of comedy entertainment who are showing any sort of support for him in this are a very very few (at most; Ms Rashad may be alone in this.) whose entire careers are at least arguably owed to Cosby’s choosing them as regulars for his own show.
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To be fair, that door swings both ways: unless you were there or know for fact that these assaults DID happen, it’s best to shut up about it.
All we have, and all we apparently will ever have, is he-said-she-said.
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Not sure what you’re talking about there. Setting all of this other shit aside, “Bill Cosby Himself” is, without argument, still one of the greatest stand-up routines ever accomplished by a comic of any color.
Smartest, fairest comment so far. Thanks, Sniffit! I agree with you.
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Wow. She should be embarrassed. No comment or generic support for Cosby might be appropriate, but to attack the women–lots and lots of accusing women–is tone deaf. Even friends are only entitled to so much defense.
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Culture, my ass. Thats about the lamest excuse I can think of. She’s not the brightest bulb.
Oh, and she’s a conspiracy theorist, apparently…
Too bad you’re not his type.
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The Ax murderer’s neighbors always comes out and say that he was such a nice quiet guy…
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This is just one unholy mess. Period.
But I think I can understand why she feels the need to defend him, monetary reasons aside. This is not the man she knows, that she worked with and has known all these many years. That said, it doesn’t mean he’s not that man, the man that’s being accused of multiple rapes and assaults. Some of these women made these claims from way back in the day to little to no avail. But for Ms. Rashad to say “forget these women” is inexcusable. Period. It’s a dismissive and morally corrupt way to refer to a group of people that believe they have been harmed.
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Good point.
I don’t know about all we will ever have, but there is an awful lot of she said and it all fits a particular pattern. Phylicia attributes that to conspiracy, that seems pretty far fetched but it could be. A trial of some sort might help us to sort it all out, eh?
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The fact that you say “charges made today of events allegedly occurring decades ago” means you are not familiar with the allegations. The allegations began decades ago and have been successfully hushed up. Therefore you’re talking out of your hat.
Rashad is ALSO ignoring the pattern of accusations over the years and acting as if this is all recent news. That’s what the Cosby camp would like everyone to think.
I never wanted any of this to be true, I’ll say again. I know why Rashad doesn’t want it to be true. But I’ve read the allegations - looked the accusers in the eye as much as I can. Since her opinion carries so much weight, she needs to hear Beverly Johnson, for one, out, look her in the eye, and THEN make a statement.
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You distill two extreme scenarios in order to demonstrate the futility of attempting to place the Cosby accusations into some kind of meaningful context, but you completely fail to assess the real conditions that inform them.
Your first scenario describes a relatively loosely knit group of women, apparently only related by their common association with the entertainment industry (if you exclude Cosby), who aligned for unknown reasons to destroy a well-known and powerful celebrity by virtue of a common narrative. But how would they have aligned if they didn’t have some kind of shared experience? How would they have individually known that such a group even existed? How could the first one or two have had any expectation their stories would have or could have been corroborated by repetition? And did the later arrivals simply pile on because they thought making false assault allegations was somehow worth avenging some other long-since-passed insult or perceived injury?
Your second scenario ignores the historic power of an industry that practically invented the modern version of PR, was until very recently run virtually exclusively by men, and whose organizational principles were based as entirely on gross receipts as is corporately possible. Hollywood imposes a structural and institutional reward for hiding behavior that is potentially harmful to its bottom line. And its proclivity for doing so since just about forever is well documented, as are many well-known cover-ups of illicit behavior that I won’t bother enumerating. There’s a reason most of us can’t name the people who bucked the system. And when we do learn about them, we find things like destroyed careers by way of acknowledged industry-wide blacklist conspiracies for things as relatively benign as alleged ties to communists.
So in examining your conclusion that it’s impossible to form a reasonable objective opinion, if not a solid conclusion, I have to disagree on the same grounds that inform my opinions about such things as whether Steve Scalise knew to whom he was speaking in 2002.
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You mean when one was asked in a CNN interview why she didn’t bite Cosby’s penis?
[quote=“Sniffit, post:15, topic:15066”]
and yet not one of them, not a single one of them, not even in
accordance with the statistical likelihood of sexual abuse being
reported, ever decided to report it and have him prosecuted within the
time for that to take place? He got sued and there is a secret
settlement of some sort involved in that one case[/quote]
You asked and answered your own question. He did get caught, women did complain and they were not believed, over and over. No one was able to prosecute, but we know at least one woman with enough money and credibility sued. And she was able to find 15 other women who said this was Cosby’s pattern. So he paid her off.
He picked a certain type of woman, one who wasn’t likely to be believed, one who was known to have multiple sexual partners, one he could have probably gotten to say “yes”. (This is another excuse offered for why he can’t possibly be guilty, they would have said yes.) And the pattern is that he didn’t wait around for yes. He liked to drug them and have sex without getting consent. Rape is about POWER not sex. That’s a very common thread throughout the allegations. And there are allegations from women who fought him off as well, knew they were drugged and got out before anything happened. And they didn’t think anyone would believe them either.
So he’s not LUCKY. He worked the odds and when it comes to reporting rape and being believed, those odds, wow, they were really in his favor. Until he picked the wrong woman, finally. And until the last year or so, when the culture of being able to talk about rape and being believed finally changed. The game changed and he lost the power to control the story.
I don’t believe you’re being objective in regards to the weight of the allegations. If you’re as informed as you think you are, you wouldn’t believe the accusers have been treated with kid gloves. And you’d be aware of the incredibly good odds of anyone accused of rape not ever being prosecuted, let alone even questioned. These rumors swirled around Cosby for years and journalists knew about it - and they all cooperated in keeping it quiet. It wasn’t LUCK it was POWER, abuse of POWER.
Most complaining witnesses won’t even get past being questioned by the police TODAY let alone years ago. And in many places, these accusers would have to pay for the kit to submit the evidence of rape, so if you’re a poor cocktail waitress hoping to make it big in Hollywood and you’ve just been raped by a big name star, do you spend $80 to accuse him? If you won’t, well, the cops don’t think it happened. If you do, you’re a publicity seeker. So you just go on with your broken life. Forty years from now, when you’re in your 60s, a lot of other women who look a lot like you, with broken lives a lot like yours, start coming forward… so do you?
To you it’s a weird societal experiment and you’re bored and want to move on. So…you can. But I find a great deal of injustice here, and I don’t want this story to die. I believe he did it, and that he got away with it, and that another Cosby is probably out there getting away with this abuse of POWER over women - that’s the “weird societal experiment” that I want to see die.
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I agree. I saw Keisha Knight-Pullman (“Rudy”) being interviewed. Her response when questioned about Cosby was essentially “that’s not the man I know.”. She did not cast aspersions on the victims or question their motives. She simply spoke about what she knew personally of Cosby.
I think that is a good tact to take in this. Ms Rashad knows fuck about what Cosby did after the cameras stopped rolling on the show. She knew fuck about what happened prior to playing his wife - as I understand the rape accusations spanned many years. So she should stop trying to smear the ladies that are accusing Cosby because she really doesn’t know
Also her far out conspiracy theory of this being orchestrated to" take down a legacy" makes her seem like a kook.
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LULZ!!!
Way back in the day, when Ahmad Rashad was a sideline reporter for NBC college football, we, immature as we were, would jeer him with “Cosby fucks your wife!”
Maybe we were onto something…
Yes, you would have been horrified by it, so would I, if it were somebody we knew. But I think a lot of people would have been less horrified if somebody famous had done that back in those days than they would be today. That’s what I mean by cultural drift in the right direction: there’s a sense that nobody would get cut any slack anymore, even weird famous people (or football players–that case made a lot of people examine their ideas about this kind of activity.)
I do think that some of the people who are being a little noncomittal about Cosby are being so because of a sense that it happened a long time ago, when famous people did a lot of weird things. Not trying to defend it, just noting.
It’s pretty clear that’s true: that you do NOT follow what I wrote. Read it again: I’m not talking about relative abilities as entertainers, I’m talking about relationships, character and r.e.s.p.e.c.t. WITHIN the community of such entertainers.
You mean that time when the MSM took none of it at all seriously and asked stupid questions as a means of avoiding real ones? When they loved the salaciousness of the accusations more than the question of whether they are true or supportable or not? You call that “taking the gloves off” or attempting to get to the bottom of everything? I mean, let’s not forget that the example you chose was a question that was based on the premise, the acceptance as fact, that she was telling the truth and had the opportunity to do such a thing.
"He worked the odds and when it comes to reporting rape and being believed, those odds, wow, they were really in his favor. Until he picked the wrong woman, finally. And until the last year or so, when the culture of being able to talk about rape and being believed finally changed. "
Thanks for proving my point that anyone with an opinion differing from the public consensus conviction will be attacked as if they don’t know what they’re saying, as if they need a “schooling” and as if they’re nothing more than a sexist pig… no matter how objective or reasonable they’ve been. Here comes the deluge of platitudes and assumptions that are being made to justify the public opinion conviction, so I should’ve just been silent and accepted it? I’m not going to take the time to pick apart everything you just said and point out what is actual fact and what is merely your assumptions to fill in the gaps in both the facts and the stories being told, some being reasonable based on the data and statistics we have and others being nothing more than you inventing something to close the loops so it all fits the narrative in your head. You know very well where you’ve done it.
I don’t need your lessons in what rape is about, nor do I need your subtext of accusing me of being sexist when I am constantly at the forefront of pointing out and ridiculing sexist behavior, statements and attitudes. I also don’t need you to go into great detail about all reasons people choose to believe these women over Cosby and the narratives they use to do so. I’m perfectly well informed on the screed that would be spewed in my face for refusing to just go along with the crowd on this one. I could’ve written it for you. None of what you said, however, changes the fact that there is not enough to convict, that the time has passed for doing so, that there is not enough proof, not enough facts, that we’re still dealing with nothing more than he-said-she-said and that this IS an interesting study in just how our society and culture works with respect to this kind of accusation, both in terms of the impediments erected for the victims getting justice AND the instantaneous prove-yourself-innocent quagmire created for anyone accused.
As for “he worked the odds,” you can do better than that. If that’s true, they all “work the odds” and none of them would ever get caught…or they all would be caught…or something. Historical trends show that only 30%-32% of sexual assaults or rapes are reported, which is abysmal…but if that’s the case, then if you assault 15 people, you have a 0.7 to the 15th chance of it not being reported = 0.5%. In other words, at a hit rate of 30%, 15 incidences means the statistical probability of at least one hit occurring is 99.5%. You don’t get to talk about statistics and the reasonable assumptions that should be made based thereon unless you’re willing to do the math and accept the result it gives you. Your argument is “dude hit the lottery” by avoiding any reports of it for 40 or so years, and yet you want to rely on statistics as the basis for everything else you’re saying are reasonable assumptions to make regarding who these women were, etc., and that it all adds up to there being beyond any reasonable doubt whatsoever that Cosby’s a serial drug-rapist. Do predators learn how to reduce the odds of themselves getting caught by preying on the weak, etc.? Indeed. But you have to first understand that the statistics we’re using already include those situations, so it’s baked into the numbers. You don’t get to run around saying “this is the greater likelihood because this is what the data says”…which is what you’re saying in terms of the narrative you’ve written…but then not actually look at what the data would say about the situation.
You can be angry at me all you want. I honestly don’t give a fuck. I won’t be intimidated by subtext accusing me of being sexist or mischaracterizations of what I was saying or my level of information on the subject. As I’ve said: I’ve never said I believe he didn’t do it, nor have I sided with the people who are emphatically convinced there’s no doubt he did it to every single accuser just as they said it happened. But, apparently, saying “I don’t think we have enough information to say one way or the other and I don’t think there’s been an effort to get it,” is the same as saying “they’re all lying sluts” as far as people like yourself are concerned. If you don’t simply agree, then there shall be no differentiation between rational analysis and sexist meatheadery I guess.
“If you’re as informed as you think you are, you wouldn’t believe the accusers have been treated with kid gloves.”
Really? Why? Seems to me they’ve been believed without a single ounce of critical analysis because everything you just yelled at me gets yelled at anyone who shows even the slightest hint of skepticism in the face of such accusations. Moreover, seems to me there’s an element of them not even needing to be believed for the accusations to completely destroy him. He’s off limits, persona non grata, a toxic liability for no other reason than the existence of accusations…level of credibility, level of proof or doubt, level of investigation be damned. In that way, the accusation functions as its own conviction. If you don’t find that to be an interesting and deeply nuanced issue to be discussed openly and honestly about these situations, because everything is black and white on these situations for you and that those who dare to question need to be shut down, then that’s fine, but I’m not going to stop trying to discuss it just because I get accused of being a sexist neanderthal for even mentioning the existence of a side of the issue you want to pretend doesn’t exist.
Shitheads like George Will and other conservatives certainly don’t help the situation by saying all the wrong things and making all the wrong assumptions and giving everyone a group of idiots into which to indiscriminately lump anyone who wants more proof before the lynching…but that doesn’t excuse doing that to everyone.
As for weird societal experiments, yeah, go ahead and have your fun pretending I was claiming that rape itself and the problems faced by accusers is a “weird societal experiment.” It’s not at all what I was saying and you know it. You don’t know jack about me and I’m willing to bet you haven’t been here for all the years I’ve frequented TPM to contribute my own rants against the injustices women suffer at the hands of a society still deeply entrenched in systemic and institutionalized sexism towards them, supporting policies designed to ameliorate those problems and the people and candidates who promise to do so. But I suppose that doesn’t matter…it’s either all or nothing and never shalt thou question, eh?
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Well Phylicia, we have long ago forgotten about you. Why are so many women saying these things? Is it a giant conspiracy to bring Cosby down? I don’t think so.
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