In the years\u00a0since women first said\u00a0Bill Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted them and the months since the media started paying attention, it\u2019s been difficult to keep track of the comedian\u2019s alleged victims.<\/p>\n
Many publications \u2014 including The Washington Post \u2014 have reported dozens of versions of the same story: A young woman, often an aspiring actress, is violated by a man who thinks himself a\u00a0mentor.<\/p>\n
After a few weeks, unfortunately, it became difficult to tell such stories apart. Was it P.J. Masten who said Cosby drugged and raped\u00a0her in a Chicago hotel, or was that\u00a0Lise-Lotte Lublin?<\/p>\n
New York magazine may have ended\u00a0the relative anonymity of many Cosby accusers\u00a0for good. For a cover story this week, New York interviewed and photographed 35 of Cosby\u2019s alleged victims, supplementing the story with video interviews with six.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe group of women Cosby allegedly assaulted functions almost as a longitudinal study \u2014 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,\u201d the magazine wrote. \u201cIn the \u201960s, when the first alleged assault by Cosby occurred, rape was considered to be something violent committed by a stranger \u2026\u00a0But among younger women, and particularly online, there is a strong sense now that speaking up is the only thing to do, that a woman claiming her own victimhood is more powerful than any other weapon in the fight against rape.\u201d<\/p>\n
The stories here aren\u2019t necessarily new.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the early 1990s, in my mid-20s, Bill Cosby mentored me,\u201d Lili Bernard, who went public in a press conference in May, said in a New York video. \u201cHe gained my total trust and then he drugged me without my knowledge. He raped me. I wouldn\u2019t call him crazy \u2026 I felt that he was very much in control of his behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n
The\u00a0images and videos, however, leave quite an impression.<\/p>\n
The New York story comes at the end of\u00a0a particularly bad month for Cosby. The comedian has denied all\u00a0sexual assault allegations and has not been charged with a crime, but\u00a0acknowledged in a 2005 court deposition made public three weeks ago that he intended to give quaaludes to young women with whom he wanted to have sex.<\/p>\n
In the deposition, Cosby\u00a0put himself forward as quite the Lothario.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m a pretty decent reader of people and their emotions in these romantic sexual things, whatever you want to call them,\u201d he testified.<\/p>\n
One notable absence from the pages of New York: Andrea Constand, the former college basketball player and Temple University administrator who claimed Cosby drugged and raped her in his Pennsylvania home. (Constand, who signed a confidentiality agreement, has since sought full release of Cosby\u2019s deposition.)<\/p>\n
Constand\u2019s\u00a0civil suit against the comedian led to the deposition \u2014 and testimony so damning that Spelman College, a historically black\u00a0women\u2019s school in Atlanta that\u00a0maintained its relationship with the comedian long after Temple cut ties with him, said goodbye.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe William and Camille Olivia Hanks Cosby Endowed Professorship at Spelman College has been discontinued,\u201d the school\u2019s communications office said in a brief statement Saturday, as CNN reported.<\/p>\n
The foundation was established by Cosby\u2019s wife, Camille, to honor her mother, as the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported; two of his daughters attended the school, where exteriors for \u201cA Different World,\u201d a \u201cCosby Show\u201d spin-off, were filmed.<\/p>\n
Worth noting: On the cover, New York left a 36th chair vacant \u2014 presumably for those who have yet to speak.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Source: Washington Post<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the years\u00a0since women first said\u00a0Bill Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted them and the months since the media started paying attention, it\u2019s been difficult to keep track of the comedian\u2019s alleged victims. Many publications \u2014 including The Washington Post \u2014 have reported dozens of versions of the same story: A young woman, often an aspiring […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":138035,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[32],"tags":[6],"yoast_head":"\n