Daily Beast: I warned you about cos 7 years ago

[Doctor_J]

Story's getting more grim

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/11/20/i-warned-you-about-bill-cosby-in-2007.html

In 2007—seven years before she publicly came forward—I spoke with Joan Tarshis, a former Hollywood publicist who claimed that Bill Cosby raped her. After our talk—and, of course, much more research—I filed a version of the following story on my website Hollywood, Interrupted. It identified a number of women who claimed that Bill Cosby had raped them. (The story has been updated slightly to reflect the allegations of the past few weeks, including Tarshis’s choice to drop the pseudonym she had elected to use in prior years.) In my interviews with several of the women back then, I found the tale they told disturbingly similar: All were young and impressionable, beautiful, and talented. Cosby had taken a keen interest in their careers, and had offered to mentor them or otherwise open the fabled doors to the glistening kingdom of show business, for which he was a principal emissary. All were given spiked drinks—or drugs misrepresented as medicine—and became incapacitated, the women charged. And all allegedly awoke with the unshakable sense that something wrong had occurred. People magazine even ran an article on the lawsuits that were settled with several of the women, but never followed up on it. And from my own experience, I can confirm that the story shook people to the core: Even more than Woody Allen, Bill Cosby was a beloved figure and civil-rights pioneer; hardened editors were horrified at the prospect of taking him down. I might as well have pitched a story about Martin Luther King, Jr. philandering with white women. The story went nowhere.

But with the recent onslaught of similar allegations—many from women on whose charges the statute of limitations has long since passed, so they have no financial incentive or clear reason to cloud their reputations well into middle age—it’s important to track the history of this story, and the media complicity that has enabled it to remain untold for so long.

[merrily]

1. No words.

[Warpy]

2. America needed black heroes very badly, especially male heroes.

during and after the Civil Rights struggles. Hollywood gave us Sidney Poitier and comedy and TV gave us Cosby. Both seemed perfect, Poitier a wonderful actor despite his "the man who never shits" roles and Cosby, a self made man with a graduate degree.

Cosby, it turns out, was too good to be true.

Poitier still has the shine on his halo, knighted in 1997 for his remarkable achievements.

I have to wonder if the reason all this terrible stuff about Cosby is coming out because of how preachy and condemnatory of urban black kids he's been lately.

When a great man's feet of clay are exposed, it's always a little sad, most of us would love to have heroes. Unfortunately, our heroes are still human beings and most of them foul things up in real life. Most of them have mistresses and extra kids hanging about, but they're not rapists. That's what makes it so sad about Cosby. We expected so much better of him.

Maybe that's part of the problem.

[Nitram]

3. This is coming out because these women are angry, and there is comfort in numbers.

Knowing they are not alone in bringing these charges to light is very important.

[Warpy]

4. Well, nobody wants to listen to a single rape victim

but show up with a whole bunch of them and they're pretty much forced to.

I'll bet the anger has been building ever since he took on that new job of preacher and general arbiter of black morality.

[Doctor_J]

6. Meh

There were scads of women lined up against Slappy Thomas. Still no one listened.

[Doctor_J]

5. kick