Bill Cosby: Portrait of the Artist as a Rapist
By Bobbie Oliver
On Twitter @thebobbieoliver
I didn’t want to write this. Not because I don’t know who I believe or how I feel (spoiler: I think he did it). I didn’t want to write this because I am so perplexed by all the different reactions and the layers of complexity, I didn’t know where to begin. I’m not sure which is more perplexing: the knee-jerk reaction of our culture to immediately dismiss the rape victims’ word over that of the accused (regardless of how many victims come forward), the fact that this instinct to side with the perpetrator is increased exponentially depending on the level of fame, the inability for many people to reconcile the idea that someone who has put on one public face could have another private one, or the refusal for people to separate a man from his career, art, role.
We live in a rape culture. Rape is drastically under reported (the most under reported of all violent crime, in fact.) The statistic is that 1 in 5 American women have been sexually assaulted (statistics vary from 1 in 4 to 1 in 6); 3% of American men have been sexually assaulted. These stats are difficult to pinpoint because 68% of rapes are not reported (98% of rapists never go to jail. NINETY-EIGHT PER CENT OF RAPISTS NEVER GO TO JAIL). 2/3 of victims are raped by someone they know. Every 107 seconds, another American is being sexually assaulted. (RAINN.org) And that’s just America. I believe your reaction to those statistics says a lot about how you are prepared to conceptualize the Bill Cosby accusations.
I keep reading online that the American ideal to presume that someone is innocent until proven guilty is the reason to believe Cosby over the rape victims. If you are a juror on a trial, you should definitely review all the evidence before convicting someone. But Cosby isn’t on trial thanks to the statute of limitations. What we are talking about is the court of public opinion. Last time I checked, people are not holding this ideal of presumed innocence for just about any other crime or case in the US (nor do we tend to disregard our previous assumption even after the verdict). We have a definite ‘hang ‘em high” attitude toward most suspects who find their way into the media- OJ Simpson, Casey Anthony, George Zimmerman, in Ferguson, literally everyone held in Guantanamo and most average law abiding Muslims - we have all made decisions about guilt or innocence before seeing any evidence of a crime. Yet, we give rapists and wife beaters the benefit of the doubt all the time. Especially if they can throw a ball, be funny, sing or direct good movies. Whoopi Goldberg said Roman Polanski drugging and sodomizing a 13 year old girl wasn’t “rape rape.” Oh, I guess that’s what poor people do. If Woody Allen had not been an upper East side genius director comedy whiz kid, but had been a Southern Evangelical preacher who married the child he raised and who had another child publish accounts of him assaulting her, I think pubic opinion would have been a lot different and so many people wouldn’t be rallying behind Allen now. There is video of R Kelly having sex with underage girls, photos of Rihanna’s face after Chris Brown beat her and we have all seen the Ray Rice elevator scene in which he punches his then girlfriend so hard in the face, she is knocked unconscious. There is even video of England’s Ched Evans’ gang rape of a drunk girl with his friends. And we all know that the girl who accused Kobe of rape wouldn’t have gone back to his room if she didn’t want it amirite (unless she was your daughter). Poor Michael Vick. I guess ability to entertain the masses only counts when abusing women.
For the people saying they believe Cosby, what exactly do you believe? Cosby has never personally publicly denied anything, has shown himself to be very aggressive toward any media that even bothers to ask him about the rapes and has now gone so far as to make rape jokes about himself on stage. About 30 women have now publicly come forward to accuse Bill Cosby of drugging and raping them (or trying to). I read on social media that these women are just trying to get money or fame. They are gold diggers, liars, whores. Cosby himself has hired private investigators to try to dig up dirt on them because obviously if they aren’t all god-fearing virgins, he must be innocent! And if it’s true, why are they waiting till now?
They didn’t wait until now. Everyone over 20 has been hearing whispers of these rumors for years. A woman would come forward and accuse Bill Cosby of rape, you’d see or hear one little thing about it and then suddenly she would magically disappear with the story. No one was asking Cosby about the accusations and the women were silenced with money or disbelief or threats of career retribution or by their own fears of what would happen to them if they accused BILL COSBY -Dr Cliff Huxtable, Fat Albert, Beloved Comedian- of R.A.P.E. Various biographers have now said they knew of the accusations and never asked Cosby about them. His previous handlers have confessed to regularly paying off women for Cosby and keeping it quiet and individuals have reported that their friend/loved one told them years ago that they had been raped by Cosby. Women who never knew each other had almost identical stories of the experience of being drugged and raped by Cosby down to the details. Most never sought or got any financial gain, and even the ones that did have had their names dragged through the media now, their lives riffled through to use against them by private investigators, the hatred of people who call them gold diggers, liars, whores, the bitches who ruined our beloved Bill Cosby’s career - a conspiracy to take down a legacy, according to Phylicia Rashād. Sounds like there is no actual payoff to accusing an icon of rape. Not to even mention the fact that many of the women who accused Cosby are already successful in their careers and have their own money.
So why are we talking about it now? Why are we suddenly hearing from all of these women? Because of the very thing that was protecting Cosby from facing the consequences of his actions: Comedy. If Hannibal Buress had not made a joke on stage calling out Cosby as a serial rapist, we would not be talking about it now. It would still be a well kept Hollywood secret and all those women would still be silent. How did this one incident finally drag a shameful part of comedy history out into the light? I think it was the perfect storm. I believe a number of factors contributed to the world believing Hannibal when no one had believed all those women before. Hannibal Buress is a man, a member of the black community, a famous comedian, from a younger generation than Cosby. People have changed their attitudes toward sexual assault and consent. From Cosby’s joke about Spanish fly to Cheech having sex with a passed out woman in Nice Dreams to the football players in Steubenville to Ched Evans and his pals, people are starting to wake up about rape and victim blaming and the right personal autonomy. Pair all of that with advanced technology that allowed audience members to tape Hannibal’s joke and make it go viral and the instant gratification of public opportunity to comment and disseminate information that can not be controlled and called back and you have the perfect storm of this story FINALLY coming out.
A lot of people have trouble reconciling the public Bill Cosby with the one these women would have us believe exists. I mean, he doesn’t even cuss in his act! Surely if he were a secret serial rapist, he would cuss! Vinson Champ, Star Search comedian turned serial rapist turned jail bird also didn’t cuss in his act. I cuss in my act; I never raped anyone. Bill Cosby gave a lot of money to black colleges. He also gave a lot of arrogant unsolicited advice. I could pick apart the things he said and did here and there over the years and say why I think they point to a controlling aggressive personality, but that’s not the point. Even if he had never shown one sign of being anything other than a sweet loving perfect human, he could still have had a dark side. To deny that is to deny our true selves, to deny evidence to the contrary we have all seen throughout our lives. People show us who and what they want us to see. They show a little more to the people closest to them than the general public. Most people still have parts of themselves they never share with anyone. Do I believe that people can have a dark side because I have a dark side and because I know just how dark most comedians can be? Maybe. Do I believe it because I have been raped? Probably. Do I believe it because I was raped by someone I trusted? Definitely. We have all been betrayed, shocked, misled, lied to. We have all seen one side of someone and then, sometimes suddenly and drastically, another side we never knew existed. Now, I’m sorry to say, I believe we have seen another side of a beloved comedian. And now we have to figure how what to do with that information.
Fat Albert didn’t rape anyone. Dr. Cliff Huxtable did not drug women and attack them. The chocolate cake story or the dentist story will not magically turn into an episode of Law and Order SVU. The comedian who played these roles and told these stories is not the art itself. I understand people who don’t want to have America’s dad taken away from them whether it was Bill Cosby or Stephen Collins from 7th Heaven. I get why people still want to see Woody Allen movies or his new TV show or listen to Chris Brown. I don’t want to, but I get it. I took Woody Allen and Bill Cosby off the wall at Tao Comedy Studio and replaced them with Joan Rivers and Redd Foxx. I don’t want them to represent comedy for me. That was my personal choice.
It’s up to each person to decide how they want to continue to have a relationship with the body of work produced or the sport played by rapists, wife beaters, child abusers, animal abusers, murderers, whatever. I know that I would never want a penny of my money to go toward any one that has committed such heinous crimes and has never paid for it. But I can’t make that decision for every one. It’s not my place. Even if I wanted to, just watching a Woody Allen movie makes me feel sick. I relate very strongly to victims and I don’t want to have anything to do with anyone I believe to be a victimizer. And maybe that’s it. That’s why we don’t want to believe. Because when we do allow ourselves to think, even for a minute, that someone we hold in such high esteem would ever do something so horrible to another human being as to strip their very souls away from them and leave them a lifeless shell, with little chance of a future or the ability to ever trust or love again, we have to decide how we are going to respond to that as a society. We have to decide who we are going to support.
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