The Case Against Cosby: Sex-Assault Allegations Recast Star’s Legacy Read online

  The Case Against Cosby

  Sex-Assault Allegations Recast Star’s Legacy

  The Washington Post

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  Diversion Books

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  Copyright © 2015 by The Washington Post

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  First Diversion Books edition January 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-728-9

  Introduction

  Bill Cosby was always the good guy on TV, building his career on a family friendly comic persona. His landmark TV sitcom, “The Cosby Show,” further established him as a kind of sweater-wearing America’s “dad.”

  So the steady stream of sexual assault allegations against him – which came to a crescendo in the waning weeks of 2014 – is hard for many Americans to reconcile with the character they know from the airwaves.

  The accusations represent a stunning reshaping of his lifelong legacy in an extraordinarily short amount of time. Very few former colleagues have spoken up in his defense, and many of the people and institutions that he has been associated with during his long career have denounced him outright, or distanced themselves from him, expressing utter disbelief.

  His latest comeback has effectively been canceled. “The Cosby Show” has disappeared from cable, and new sitcom plans have been shelved.

  At least 23 women have now accused the comedian of sexual misconduct ranging from groping to rape. Twelve women say he drugged them first and another said he tried to drug her.

  Yet Cosby has yet to be charged with any crime. Cosby's attorney, Martin Singer, has called the accusations against the comedian "ridiculous." His wife has defended him wholeheartedly, and Cosby himself has dismissed the charges as rumor and innuendo.

  So what is the truth behind the allegations? What is the case against Cosby?

  The Washington Post has interviewed five of the women who accused Cosby of assaulting them, including a former Playboy Playmate who had never spoken publicly about her allegations. The women agreed to speak on the record and to have their identities revealed. The Post also has reviewed court records that shed light on the accusations of a former director of women’s basketball operations at Temple University who assembled 13 “Jane Doe” accusers in 2005 to testify on her behalf about their allegations against Cosby.

  For the first time, the accusers’ stories have been gathered in an ebook. Bill Cosby’s defense of himself, and his wife’s, are collected here as well, so that readers can judge for themselves whether or not this American icon is forever fallen.

  Bill Cosby’s legacy, recast: Accusers speak in detail about sexual-assault allegations

  By Manuel Roig-Franzia, Scott Higham, Paul Farhi and Mary Pat Flaherty

  November 22, 2014

  They didn’t see a comedian. They saw the “king of the world.”

  Long before there was a Dr. Cliff Huxtable, before rumpled sweaters and a collective anointing as America’s dad, Bill Cosby was magnified a hundredfold in the eyes of the young models and actresses he pulled into his orbit. For them, he embodied the hippest of the 1960s and ’70s Hollywood scene, a mega-star with the power to make somebodies out of nobodies.

  He partied with Hugh Hefner and was a regular at the magazine mogul’s Playboy Mansion bacchanals. He co-owned a restaurant and hit the hottest clubs. He sizzled.

  Those wild, largely forgotten days clash with the avuncular image that has been Cosby’s most enduring impression on American culture. And they have been jarringly cast in a wholly different light as a torrent of women have told — and in some cases retold — graphic, highly detailed stories of alleged abuse by Cosby.

  Sixteen women have publicly stated that Cosby, now 77, sexually assaulted them, with 12 saying he drugged them first and another saying he tried to drug her. The Washington Post has interviewed five of those women, including a former Playboy Playmate who has never spoken publicly about her allegations. The women agreed to speak on the record and to have their identities revealed. The Post also has reviewed court records that shed light on the accusations of a former director of women’s basketball operations at Temple University who assembled 13 “Jane Doe” accusers in 2005 to testify on her behalf about their allegations against Cosby.

  The accusations, some of which Cosby has denied and others he has declined to discuss, span the arc of the comedy legend’s career, from his pioneering years as the first black star of a network television drama in 1965 to the mid-2000s, when Cosby was firmly entrenched as an elder statesman of the entertainment industry, a scolding public conscience of the African American community and a philanthropist. They also span a monumental generational shift in perceptions — from the sexually unrestrained ’60s to an era when the idea of date rape is well understood.

  The saga of the abuse allegations is set in locales that speak to Cosby’s wealth and fame: a Hollywood-studio bungalow, a chauffeured limousine, luxury hotels, a New York City brownstone. But it also stretches into unexpected places, such as an obscure Denver talent agency that referred two of Cosby’s future accusers to the star for mentoring.

  The allegations are strung together by perceptible patterns that appear and reappear with remarkable consistency: mostly young, white women without family nearby; drugs offered as palliatives; resistance and pursuit; accusers worrying that no one would believe them; lifelong trauma. There is also a pattern of intense response by Cosby’s team of attorneys and publicists, who have used the media and the courts to attack the credibility of his accusers.

  Martin Singer, an attorney for Cosby, issued a statement Friday defending his client and assailing the news media.

  “The new, never-before-heard claims from women who have come forward in the past two weeks with unsubstantiated, fantastical stories about things they say occurred 30, 40, or even 50 years ago have escalated far past the point of absurdity,” he said. “These brand new claims about alleged decades-old events are becoming increasingly ridiculous, and it is completely illogical that so many people would have said nothing, done nothing, and made no reports to law enforcement or asserted civil claims if they thought they had been assaulted over a span of so many years.

  “Lawsuits are filed against people in the public eye every day. There has never been a shortage of lawyers willing to represent people with claims against rich, powerful men, so it makes no sense that not one of these new women who just came forward for the first time now ever asserted a legal claim back at the time they allege they had been sexually assaulted.

  “This situation is an unprecedented example of the media’s breakneck rush to run stories without any corroboration or adherence to traditional journalistic standards. Over and over again, we have refuted these new unsubstantiated stories with documentary evidence, only to have a new uncorroborated story crop up out of the woodwork. When will it end? It is long past time for this media vilification of Mr. Cosby to stop.”

  During an interview on Friday with Florida Today, Cosby said: “I know people are tired of me not saying anything, but a guy doesn’t have to answer to innuendos. People should fact-check. People shouldn’t have to go through that and shouldn’t answer to innuendos.”

  If his accusers are to be believed, the earliest allegations against Cosby remained hidden for decades, private artifa
cts of an era when women were less likely to publicly accuse men they knew of sexual misdeeds and society was less likely to believe them. But they have flared periodically throughout the past nine years, both because of changing attitudes and, particularly over the past month, because of social media’s ability to transform a story into a viral phenomenon almost impossible to suppress or control.

  The allegations represent a stunning reshaping of Cosby’s legacy. Cosby built his fame on a family-friendly comedic persona. He has lectured black youths about proper behavior. He has been honored with a Presidential Medal of Freedom and been lauded for making the largest donation ever by an African American to a historically black college, Spelman College in Atlanta.

  But since the avalanche of accusations this month, there has been mostly thundering silence from his longtime allies. An exception is Weldon Latham, a prominent Washington attorney and Cosby friend. He noted in an interview with The Post that his friend has never been charged with a crime and wondered whether “some of the women coming out now, seem to be making it up.”

  “What you’re hearing is clearly not the entire truth, and how much of it is true, you have no idea,” Latham said.

  “I’m pained,” said Virginia Ali, owner of Ben’s Chili Bowl on U Street in Washington, which Cosby has frequented since he was 21. “He has been part of the family for many, many years. I’ve always found him a very kind, generous person. I like to say he shares his humanity.”

  The influential producers of “The Cosby Show,” the ’80s sitcom that made Cosby famous as a family man, issued a brief statement. “These recent news reports are beyond our knowledge or comprehension,” Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner said Thursday.

  Cosby was on the verge of what appeared to be a comeback this year, but projects scheduled for NBC and Netflix have been postponed or canceled in the fallout. Several of Cosby’s upcoming comedy shows have been canceled, but when he took the stage Friday in Melbourne, Fla., he received a standing ovation from the sold-out crowd.

  The writer

  Americans who sat in front of their television sets on Sept. 15, 1965, had never seen anything like Alexander Scott, the jet-setting international spy. Black stars had appeared on their screens before but never in a leading role, and this one happened to be a 28-year-old comic who just three years earlier had dropped out of Temple University.

  The reaction to Cosby’s breakthrough as a co-star appearing on equal footing with a white actor, Robert Culp, reflected a nation still haltingly emerging from its segregationist past. Some Southern television stations banned the program because of Cosby’s prominent role, but much of the nation embraced it, making “I Spy” a hit.

  “At Howard University, we used to go wild when we saw a soul brother with a gun allowed to shoot back,” Latham once said.

  The Hollywood establishment went wild, too, awarding lead-actor Emmys to Cosby in all three seasons that the program aired.

  Soon he would have his own program (“The Bill Cosby Show”) and all the trappings that went along with it, including his own Hollywood-studio bungalow. A teenage comedy writer named Joan Tarshis was more than thrilled to get an invite to that private hideaway in 1969.

  Tarshis was only 19, but she had already written monologues for Godfrey Cambridge, one of a handful of nationally prominent black comedians in the mid- and late-1960s, she said in an interview with The Post. But getting to hang out with Cosby was almost like taking an express elevator to the penthouse without stopping at the upper floors.

  Cosby was a familiar face on the party circuit, knocking around with Hefner, author Shel Silverstein and John Dante, the second-in-command at Playboy, according to “Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream,” by Steven Watts.

  “Hef and his three buddies loved to fly up to [Playboy’s resort on Wisconsin’s Lake Geneva], catch a show, and throw a party for the Bunnies and performers,” Watts wrote.

  Cosby was also hitting it big with comedy records, though in hindsight one of his riffs seems particularly insensitive. On his 1969 record, “It’s True! It’s True!,” Cosby joked about drugging women with Spanish Fly, a purported aphrodisiac. Cosby tells the story of a character who convinced him of its powers by recounting how he had slipped some into the drink of a woman named “Crazy Mary.” After that, Cosby said, he’d “go to a party, see five girls standing alone” and think, “Boy, if I had a whole jug of Spanish Fly I’d light that corner up over there.” The audience roars with laughter.

  At a lunch at Cosby’s bungalow, Tarshis recalled, he urged her to mix a beer with her bloody mary.

  “We call that a redeye,” she said he told her.

  Cosby invited her to the set of his new show, and then went back to his bungalow to work on some jokes about earthquakes, since Los Angeles had recently been hit by tremors.

  “I said, ‘Sure!’ ” recalled Tarshis, who first disclosed her accusations this month in a column for the Web site Hollywood Elsewhere. “I mean, I had written for Godfrey Cambridge and now I was going to write for Bill Cosby!”

  In the bungalow, Tarshis said, Cosby made her another redeye. “I don’t know what was in that drink, but it knocked me out. The next thing I remember after having that drink was waking up on his couch,” she said. “I was really foggy. He was trying to take my underwear off.”

  She tried to talk her way out of an unwanted sexual encounter, she said. She made up a story about having a genital infection.

  “‘If you have sex with me, your wife will know,’ ” she recalled telling him. “He didn’t miss a beat. He knew exactly how to respond. He made me give him oral sex. It was pretty horrible.”

  She told no one. Instead, she went home to Brooklyn.

  A few weeks later, Cosby called her house and spoke to her mother, who had no idea what had allegedly happened on that couch in the bungalow, Tarshis said. Cosby told Tarshis’s mother that he wanted to take her daughter to the Westbury Music Fair on Long Island to hear him deliver a monologue to which Tarshis had made a small writing contribution.

  “She was over the moon,” Tarshis said of her mother. “She was so excited.”

  Looking back through the prism of four decades, Tarshis, now 66, wonders why she went. “I didn’t know how to handle it,” she said. “I thought, ‘Okay, I’m going to be in a theater. It’s going to be safe.’ I didn’t see any way out.”

  A limousine picked her up at her mother’s and took her to Cosby’s New York hotel room at the Sherry-Netherland, Tarshis recalled. Tarshis — who has acknowledged having a drinking problem but says she has been sober since 1988 — remembered being “nervous and uncomfortable.” She had a drink with him to calm down because she was so uneasy about being in his presence after the first alleged assault, she said. By the time they got to the theater, she was feeling so unsteady that she had to leave, she said. She asked the limousine driver to take her back to the car. She lay down.

  “The next thing I know, I’m in his hotel room, in his bed, naked,” Tarshis said.

  She said she believed he had sexually assaulted her.

  “My first thought was, ‘How do I get out of here?’ ” she said. “Also, ‘How do I get out of here safely?’ I didn’t want to aggravate him. I didn’t know what he’d do.”

  John Milward, a freelance reporter and author, confirmed that Tarshis told him about her Cosby allegations in the early 1980s, though he never wrote about them. And, Tarshis said, she never contacted the police.

  “Who was going to believe me?” she said. “If he was a regular joe, I might have done something.”

  One of Cosby’s attorneys, John Schmitt, issued a statement this past week saying that repeating old allegations “does not make them true.”

  The waitress

  She wanted an adventure. With high school graduation behind her, Linda Traitz and a group of friends left Miami Beach in 1969 to see what it would be like to live in California.

  She took a job as a waitress. It wasn’t about the job; it was ab
out the place, a place filled with stars, a place that glittered.

  Traitz worked at Cafe Figaro, a West Hollywood spot that was notable, in part, because of Cosby, who co-owned it and made it his hangout for business meetings.

  “I was young and star-struck,” Traitz, now 63, recalled in an interview with The Post.

  Traitz’s year of ad­ven­ture coincided with Cosby’s emergence as a solo phenomenon. He was no longer Culp’s co-star or merely a clever comic; he was showing he could do it all: conceive, write and act. NBC debuted an animated TV movie version of his brainchild, “Fat Albert.” His situation comedy, “The Bill Cosby Show,” launched, and he was about to win his fourth Emmy for a television special he headlined. He even did a Crest toothpaste ad. Everything he touched glistened.

  In the midst of all that, Traitz said, Cosby chatted her up one day at his restaurant and offered a ride home. She could not have imagined saying anything but yes.

  The minutiae of that day are carved into her mind. She even remembers what she was wearing: a long “hippie days” peasant skirt. She climbed into Cosby’s Rolls Royce and he suggested they drive out to the beach, Traitz recalled. Once they parked at the beach, he opened a briefcase, she said.

  “It had assorted sections in it, with pills and tablets in it, different colors arranged and assorted into compartments,” she recalled. “He offered me pills and said it would help me to relax, and I kept refusing but he kept offering.”

  Cosby “lunged” at her, she said, “grabbed my chest, grabbed me in the front all over.”

  “I was crying and horrified,” she said. She broke free, she said, and tumbled out of the car. She ran down the beach with Cosby in pursuit, but she tripped on that long peasant skirt and fell onto the sand, she said.

  Cosby agreed to take her home. Her skirt was torn. Walking back to the car, they passed a block filled with shops. Cosby bought her a new skirt, she said.