The women who accuse Bill Cosby
Magazine details stories of anger, frustration
• For years Bill Cosby, America’s favourite father figure, headed off allegations of sexual assaults with lawyers, cash and a wall of silence.
For years no-one believed the accusers.
Now, in the latest sign that the world is listening, 35 of the women have been photographed and interviewed by New York magazine for a striking cover story that describes their frustration and anger as they sought justice.
They include women aged from their 20s to 80, supermodels such as Beverly Johnson and Janice Dickinson, as well as journalists and waitresses.
Barbara Bowman told the magazine, “I felt like a prisoner; I felt like I was kidnapped and hiding in plain sight.
“I could have walked down any street in Manhattan at any time and said: ‘I’m being raped and drugged by Bill Cosby,’ but who the hell would have believed me? Nobody, nobody.”
Lili Bernard, an actress who appeared in The Cosby Show, told the magazine, “In the early 1990s, in my mid20s, Bill Cosby mentored me. He gained my total trust and then he drugged me without my knowledge.
“He raped me. I wouldn’t call him crazy … I felt that he was very much in control of his behaviour.”
Another alleged victim, Tamara Green, said, “In 2005, Bill Cosby still had control of the media. In 2015, we have social media.
“We can’t be disappeared. It’s online and can never go away.”
Cosby has always denied the allegations and has not been charged with any crime.
In the past year the accusations have taken on a new momentum ever since a comedian, Hannibal Buress, described the 78-year-old comedian as a rapist.
Cosby, whose role as Cliff Huxtable in the 1980s show earned him the nickname “America’s Dad,” has seen his reputation shredded.
NBC and Netflix cancelled planned shows, several venues pulled out of his tour and celebrities, including Jerry Seinfeld and Billy Crystal, reportedly asked their endorsements be removed from a recently published biography.
Meanwhile, the accusers have grown to number 40, all describing being given drugs without their consent, then being sexually assaulted.
The arresting magazine cover features the 35 women each s e at e d and photographed in black and white. An empty chair represents those unable to tell their story.
The magazine said it showed how attitudes to rape — once thought of as something committed only by a violent stranger — had changed and how women were using their victimhood as a powerful weapon.
“The group of women Cosby allegedly assaulted functions almost as a longitudinal study both for how an individual woman, on her own, deals with such trauma over the decades and for how the culture at large has grappled with rape over the same time period,” it wrote.
The magazine’s website was inaccessible Monday morning, apparently the result of an attack by a New York-hating hacker, rather than an attempt to silence the women.
Court documents released this month reveal how Cosby admitted giving sedatives to a 19-year-old before intercourse. Speaking under oath during a civil case in 2005, he confirmed he gave Quaaludes, a powerful sedative now banned in the United States, to the woman before they had sex in Las Vegas in the 1970s.
The latest revelations prompted Atlanta’s Spelman College to scrap a chair funded by Cosby with a US$20-million donation in the 1980s. At the weekend, it said it would return the money.
Even Whoopi Goldberg, one of his most high-profile supporters, last week changed her stance to say public information pointed toward guilt.
Most of the allegations date to the 1970s and 1980s, beyond the statute of limitations in many U.S. states.
In recent months, Cosby’s legal team has launched a more vocal defence of their client in the court of public opinion. They say he has only admitted to using Quaaludes during consensual sex, like many other Americans at the time.
I felt like a prisoner ... like I was kidnapped and hiding in plain sight