Bill Cosby’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad summer just got worse. Two weeks after the release of a deposition in which he admitted giving prescription Quaaludes to his sexual partners, the latest edition of New York magazine rolled off the presses with one of the most moving covers ever seen on an American magazine. It depicts 35 of the 48 women who have come forward to accuse Cosby of assaulting them over the years.
The accompanying article is no less moving. Writer Noreen Malone spent most of the first half of 2015 reaching out to Cosby’s accusers. Apparently word got out about this project, because over the next six months several women who hadn’t told their stories before let it be known they wanted to speak out. It is accompanied by interviews with the women, featuring individual pictures of them dressed in white. The final two women were interviewed and photographed just days before this week’s edition went to press.
Among them are two of the most high-profile accusers, Janice Dickinson and Beverly Johnson. The others are a mixed bag of waitresses, actresses, journalists, and Playboy Bunnies. They range in age from their 20s to 80, and depict an apparent pattern of debauched behavior dating from the 1960s to 1996. Joan Tarshis, who claims Cosby assaulted her in 1969, describes them as the “sorrowful sisterhood.” They’re almost certain that there are more who haven’t spoken out yet. Photographer Amanda Demme represented those who are still afraid to speak out with an empty chair–a moving gesture in and of itself.
Malone was struck by how similar the accusers’ stories were, even though they were all interviewed separately. All but a few involve the women being drugged, or narrowly avoiding being drugged. That alone should blow apart the inevitable response from Cosby’s PR machine–that they’re making it up. You mean to tell me that 35 women who had been assaulted over a period of three decades somehow got together and cobbled together stories that are near carbon copies of each other in order to smear Cosby? If you believe that, there’s a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.
Cosby was first accused of being a serial rapist in 2005, but most of the accusers were smeared as opportunists. The difference between those accusations and today’s appears to be the rise of social media. A number of younger women feel that speaking out is the strongest weapon against the rape culture, and have decided to use Facebook and Twitter as their soapboxes. The younger women have given Cosby’s older accusers a model on how to tell their stories.
I have to admit, until today I thought that Cosby was most likely a depraved and debauched jerk at most. That’s the only way you can describe someone who thought it was even remotely okay to joke about spiking a woman’s drink. But in the absence of something I haven’t heard or seen, it looks like that someone who I and a number of other black men of my generation considered a role model is indeed a serial rapist. And even if he manages to escape being hauled into court for this, it’s clear beyond any doubt that the Supreme Judge has already rendered his verdict.
