Tint or taint of Bill Cosby’s stardom

Is his celebrity in his sexual assault trial proving a curse or a blessing with jurors?

NORRISTOWN, Pa. — Celebrity is a funny animal. Harnessing its power, total strangers can make us buy a movie ticket, stream a TV show, suffer a vicarious heartbreak or embark on a late-night shopping binge for GMO-free bath soaps.

But it can also, in certain cases, be turned against itself — can be what might be described as a self-cannibalizing force. Covering the sexual assault trial of Bill Cosby at this suburban Philadelphia courthouse over the last weeks, I’ve been regularly treated to how celebrity can be unleashed in this manner.

I don’t just mean how Cosby allegedly leveraged his public persona to win women’s trust, though that’s the version you get from trial accounts of accusers Kelly Johnson and Andrea Constand. As Patrice Sewell, Johnson’s mother, testified on why her daughter lowered her guard to Cosby, “Our family all watched ‘The Cosby Show.’ It kind of reminded us of our own family.” It was an easy leap, she said, for Johnson to think Cosby had her interests at heart.

No, I’m referring to the subtle ways a person’s past celebrity can shade how we take in new information about them. The allegations made about Cosby would be morally serious no matter whom they were made against. But the fact that they were leveled against an icon means they’re also being leveled against his former self — leveled against someone who we, collectively and implicitly, had previously embraced. And that throws them into more troubling relief. By making us doubt him, they make us doubt ourselves.

That former self was in evidence last week. Many of the wire-service photos of Cosby you’ve seen from the courthouse here have been of a hobbled 79-year-old man with a walking stick and hunched shoulders.

But inside the courtroom images of a past Cosby have glimmered through.

A selfie of him with Constand’s mother, Gianna, projected on the courtroom