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

  But she made an impression. Both Farrell and Cosby gushed that she was destined for big things in the business and advised that she move to New York, where she could hone her craft. Cosby also brought her to the New York set of “The Cosby Show.”

  “That was the bait: the promise of an audition, being seen and adored by a big name,” Bowman said. “And he enjoyed knowing that people knew he was the one who was discovering hot new talent.

  She said she was “terrified” of Cosby and Farrell. “They isolated me and made me totally dependent on them,” she said.

  At the time, Cosby was in the process of becoming the biggest television star in the world. “The Cosby Show” had debuted the year before, introducing viewers to his career-defining role as Cliff Huxtable.

  “At a time when the situation comedy was supposed to be moribund on television, ‘The Cosby Show’ has leapt to No. 1 in a single season,” New York Times critic John J. Connor wrote in May 1985. “At a time when blacks were once again being considered ratings liabilities by benighted television executives, the middle-class Huxtables have become the most popular family in the United States. And at a time when so many comedians are toppling into a kind of smutty permissiveness, Mr. Cosby is making the nation laugh by paring ordinary life to its extraordinary essentials. It is indeed a truly nice development.”

  Bowman said she saw an entirely different persona from the one Cosby played on television. Once, while at his brownstone in New York City, she said she blacked out after one glass of wine and awoke to find herself wearing nothing but her underpants and a man’s T-shirt.

  In another alleged incident in Atlantic City, she said Cosby pinned her down on a hotel bed while she screamed for help and he struggled to pull down his pants.

  “I furiously tried to wrestle from his grasp until he eventually gave up,” she said in an interview with The Post.

  Cosby called her “a baby,” Bowman said, then he told her to go home to Denver.

  At first, Bowman said she was in denial that the alleged assaults had taken place. She then convinced herself that she did what she needed to do to make it in the entertainment business. She said she also became financially dependent on Cosby and her agent.

  “They were subsidizing me in New York until I started booking jobs,” she said.

  When asked why she did not come forward sooner, Bowman said she did not think anyone would believe her.

  Cosby’s attorneys had previously called her claims “absolutely untrue.”

  In the years after the alleged assault of Bowman, Cosby rose to heights that were almost unimaginable. In 1987, “The Cosby Show” went into syndication, and within five years it had pulled in $1 billion in syndication fees, with hundreds of millions reportedly going to Cosby.

  By 1992, Camille had earned a doctorate in education. She would go on to produce an award-winning play and co-found a project to preserve African American history. Still, her professional interests melded with her husband’s. Much of Camille’s work stems from research for her dissertation, which focused on the impact negative images of black people on television have on the self-perception of young blacks.

  The rest of the decade would produce some of the most painful moments for Cosby and his family. In 1997, he endured the revelation of his long-secret affair with Berkes, whose name was then Shawn Upshaw. But his world was shaken by the murder of his 28-year-old son, Ennis Cosby, during an attempted robbery on a Los Angeles freeway in January 1997.

  Camille Cosby paired those two signal moments in a poignant and sometimes biting editorial published by USA Today in 1997.

  Less than a month after her son’s death, she wrote, “Ennis William Cosby did not have a mother. I was a nonentity, an un-person. Yet, when my husband made his more than famous confession to the public about a brief 1970s liaison, my name was printed everywhere. Suddenly, I became well known; not as an intelligent person, but for reasons obviously undesirable.”

  Of her marriage, she wrote: “Bill and I were very young when we married; he was 26, I was 19. We had to mature, we had to learn the definition of unselfish love, and we did. When we committed to each other wholeheartedly years ago, our marriage became healthy and solid. Also, we blossomed as individuals. Our marriage encompasses mutual love, respect, trust and communication. Sound relationships must have positive reciprocity; they can’t be one-sided and strong.”

  The lawsuit

  Andrea Constand was stressed. She held down a big job at Temple University as operations director of the women’s basketball team. But she wanted career advice, according to court documents in a 2005 civil suit that Constand filed against Cosby. She decided to confide in a man who had not only become her close friend but was also Temple royalty.

  Cosby had attended Temple before dropping out in the early 1960s to pursue his comedy career, but he had remained in close contact with his hometown university, serving on the board of trustees since the early 1980s.

  Constand became friends with Cosby a year after her arrival on the Philadelphia campus in 2001. They sometimes dined alone together, according to court records.

  In January 2004, the records state, Cosby invited her to his home in suburban Philadelphia. Constand alleges that Cosby offered her three blue pills. He said they were an herbal medication and would relax her, according to her court filing; she hesitated but finally took his advice.

  Within a short period of time, her “knees began to shake, her limbs felt immobile, she felt dizzy and weak, and she began to feel only barely conscious,” Constand’s attorneys wrote.

  Constand accused Cosby of leading her to a sofa, then touching “her breasts and vaginal area.” She said he “rubbed his penis against her hand, and digitally penetrated her,” the court records state.

  All the while, she “remained in a semi-conscious state,” her attorneys wrote.

  Constand said she lost consciousness afterward until 4 a.m., when she awoke “feeling raw in and around her vaginal area,” the court records state. Also, “her clothes and undergarments were in disarray,” according to the records.

  When she awoke, there was Cosby, she said. He was in his bathrobe, the court records state. She said she left.

  According to court records, Cosby said he and Constand spent time together, but his attorneys denied the claims that he drugged and assaulted her. He said he had merely given her 11/2 tablets of Benadryl, an over-the-counter antihistamine.

  In Cosby’s account of his evening with Constand during the court case, he denied appearing in only his bathrobe and he said he gave her a “homemade blueberry muffin and a cup of hot tea,” according to court records.

  Constand, now 41, went on to leave her job at Temple, moving back to her native Canada. One year later, in January 2005, she filed a complaint against Cosby with a police department in Ontario.

  That complaint was followed by a criminal inquiry in Montgomery County, Pa. Law enforcement officials interviewed Constand and Cosby.

  “I thought, in my gut, that she was telling the truth,” Bruce L. Castor Jr., the Montgomery County district attorney at the time, said in a recent interview with The Post. “I was absolutely certain that she believed that Cosby had taken advantage of her, but there were not enough details.”

  Castor lacked physical evidence, and he thought any possible case would be hampered by the long delay in filing a complaint. In February 2005, he announced that he would not be prosecuting Cosby.

  After the 2005 criminal case was resolved, Cosby resumed a tough-love tour he had put on hold when news of Constand’s allegations broke. The national tour consisted of free speeches where large audiences gathered to hear Cosby speak about the failures of black parents and black youths. He had been ridiculing African American politicians, accusing them of too often blaming “systematic racism” for his community’s problems.

  But the next month, Cosby’s own actions were again scrutinized. And this time, it would not be just one woman pointing a finger at him. Constand’s civil
lawsuit, filed in March 2005, would eventually include 13 Jane Does who agreed to testify against Cosby. The women came from points across the country: Ventura, Calif.; Monument, Colo.; Spring Hill, Fla.

  Green, the onetime model who had said Cosby had drugged her in the early 1970s, had offered to testify without maintaining anonymity. All told, Green said she has spoken with 20 accusers; all of them, she said, asserted that they had been drugged by the comedian.

  Constand’s attorneys were spotting patterns, too. In their court filings, they asserted that a common theme among the Jane Does was that “they were victimized after being conned by the Cosby image.”

  In court documents, Cosby’s attorneys said their client “vigorously denies” her allegations that he “drugged her and sexually assaulted her” and “adamantly denies engaging in sexual misconduct.”

  In November 2006, Constand and Cosby reached an undisclosed settlement. Constand and her attorney declined to be interviewed for this article.

  Constand’s settlement largely made the Cosby story go away. There would be isolated reports, but the image of Cosby as an accused sex offender seemed destined to be relegated to a historical footnote until the jokes by Buress — a popular but hardly A-list 31-year-old comedian — went viral this month.

  Since then, the names of nine more accusers have surfaced, including the model Janice Dickinson, who told “Entertainment Tonight” that Cosby drugged and raped her in Lake Tahoe in 1982. To back up her accusation, she produced Polaroids of Cosby in a checkered robe.

  Cosby’s attorneys rushed to keep pace with the allegations, repeatedly saying they had no merit. “Janice Dickinson’s story accusing Bill Cosby of rape is a complete lie,” Singer said in a statement.

  Three of the women who spoke to The Post — Traitz, Tarshis and Valentino — also made their first widely distributed public statements about the allegations this month.

  At the two university campuses most associated with Cosby, there was a pinched terseness from administrators. Temple would say only that Cosby remained on its board. Two weeks after Buress’s comedy routine reignited the sex-allegations controversy, a Temple student, Grace Holleran, published an editorial in the school newspaper calling on university officials to stop supporting Cosby. The university “seems to be banking on Cosby’s star power, remembering him for his colorful sweaters and Pudding Pops as it fails to acknowledge his muddy backstory,” Holleran wrote.

  At Spelman College — where Cosby made history in 1988 with a $20 million donation, the largest by an African American to a historically black college — the president’s office would not say whether the endowed professorship named for Cosby and his wife would continue.

  The educator who holds that endowed chair at Spelman predicted in an interview that the sexual-assault allegations ultimately would not define Cosby.

  “I’m not worried about being the Cosby chair,” said Aku Kadogo, Spelman’s Cosby Endowed Professor in the Arts. “It’s not a worry to me. It’s a difficult time for him. But it ain’t the end of the world. If Hillary can run for president — she went through all that rigmarole. People forget easily.”

  But, in the universe of Bill Cosby, it has become clear that not everyone forgets.

  Amy Argetsinger, Alice Crites, Simone Sebastian, Peggy McGlone, Krissah Thompson, Magda Jean-Louis and Adam Kushner in Washington, Karen Heller in Philadelphia and Geoff Edgers in Melbourne, Fla., contributed to this report.

  Bill Cosby raped me. Why did it take 30 years for people to believe my story?

  Only when a male comedian called Cosby a rapist did the accusation take hold.

  By Barbara Bowman

  November 13, 2014

  In 2004, when Andrea Constand filed a lawsuit against Bill Cosby for sexual assault, her lawyers asked me to testify. Cosby had drugged and raped me, too, I told them. The lawyers said I could testify anonymously as a Jane Doe, but I ardently rejected that idea. My name is not Jane Doe. My name is Barbara Bowman, and I wanted to tell my story in court. In the end, I didn’t have the opportunity to do that, because Cosby settled the suitfor an undisclosed amount of money.

  Over the years, I’ve struggled to get people to take my story seriously. So last month, when reporter Lycia Naff contacted me for an interview for the Daily Mail, I gave her a detailed account. I told her how Cosby won my trust as a 17-year-old aspiring actress in 1985, brainwashed me into viewing him as a father figure, and then assaulted me multiple times. In one case, I blacked out after having dinner and one glass of wine at his New York City brownstone, where he had offered to mentor me and discuss the entertainment industry. When I came to, I was in my panties and a man’s t-shirt, and Cosby was looming over me. I’m certain now that he drugged and raped me. But as a teenager, I tried to convince myself I had imagined it. I even tried to rationalize it: Bill Cosby was going to make me a star and this was part of the deal. The final incident was in Atlantic City, where we had traveled for an industry event. I was staying in a separate bedroom of Cosby’s hotel suite, but he pinned me down in his own bed while I screamed for help. I’ll never forget the clinking of his belt buckle as he struggled to pull his pants off. I furiously tried to wrestle from his grasp until he eventually gave up, angrily called me “a baby” and sent me home to Denver.

  (UPDATE: Cosby responded with silence when an NPR reporter asked him about these allegations on Saturday. In a statement released on Sunday, Cosby’s attorney said Cosby “does not intend to dignify these allegations with any comment.“)

  Back then, the incident was so horrifying that I had trouble admitting it to myself, let alone to others. But I first told my agent, who did nothing. (Cosby sometimes came to her office to interview people for “The Cosby Show” and other acting jobs.) A girlfriend took me to a lawyer, but he accused me of making the story up. Their dismissive responses crushed any hope I had of getting help; I was convinced no one would listen to me. That feeling of futility is what ultimately kept me from going to the police. I told friends what had happened, and although they sympathized with me, they were just as helpless to do anything about it. I was a teenager from Denver acting in McDonald’s commercials. He was Bill Cosby: consummate American dad Cliff Huxtable and the Jell-O spokesman. Eventually, I had to move on with my life and my career.

  I didn’t stay entirely quiet, though: I’ve been telling my story publicly for nearly 10 years. When Constand brought her lawsuit, I found renewed confidence. I was determined to not be silent any more. In 2006, I was interviewed by Robert Huber for Philadelphia Magazine, and Alycia Lane for KYW-TV news in Philadelphia. A reporter wrote about my experience in the December 2006 issue of People Magazine. And last February, Katie Baker interviewed me for Newsweek. Bloggers and columnists wrote about that story for several months after it was published. Still, my complaint didn’t seem to take hold.

  Only after a man, Hannibal Buress, called Bill Cosby a rapist in a comedy act last month did the public outcry begin in earnest. The original video of Buress’s performance went viral. This week, Twitter turned against him, too, with a meme that emblazoned rape scenarios across pictures of his face.

  While I am grateful for the new attention to Cosby’s crimes, I must ask my own questions: Why wasn’t I believed? Why didn’t I get the same reaction of shock and revulsion when I originally reported it? Why was I, a victim of sexual assault, further wronged by victim blaming when I came forward? The women victimized by Bill Cosby have been talking about his crimes for more than a decade. Why didn’t our stories go viral?

  Unfortunately, our experience isn’t unique. The entertainment world is rife with famous men who use their power to victimize and then silence young women who look up to them. Even when their victims speak out, the industry and the public turn blind eyes; these men’s celebrity, careers, and public adulation continue to thrive. Even now, Cosby has a new comedy special coming out on Netflix and NBC is set to give him a new sitcom.

  Fixing this problem demands more than public shaming. For Cosb
y to commit these assaults against multiple victims over several years, there had to be a network of willfully blind wallflowers at best, or people willing to aid him in committing these sexual crimes at worst. As I told the Daily Mail, when I was a teenager, his assistants transported me to hotels and events to meet him. When I blacked out at Cosby’s home, there were several staffers with us. My agent, who introduced me to Cosby, had me take a pregnancy test when I returned from my last trip with him. Talent agents, hotel staff, personal assistants and others who knowingly made arrangements for Cosby’s criminal acts or overlooked them should be held equally accountable.

  I have never received any money from Bill Cosby and have not asked for it. I have nothing to gain by continuing to speak out. He can no longer be charged for his crimes against me because the statute of limitations is long past. That is also wrong. There should be no time limits on reporting these crimes, and one of my goals is to call for legislation to that end. Famous and wealthy perpetrators use their power to shame and silence their victims. It often takes years for young women to overcome those feeling and gain the confidence to come forward (by which point physical evidence is long gone). Our legal system shouldn’t silence them a second time.

  Last week, I became a volunteer ambassador for PAVE (Promoting Awareness, Victim Empowerment), a national victim advocacy group that seeks to shatter the silence around sexual violence through targeted social, educational and legislative tactics. I will be writing and traveling the country talking to media, students and other interested groups about the importance of speaking out against sexual assault. I’ll largely focus on young models and actors who are especially vulnerable to the influences of the rich and powerful. They, like other sexual assault victims, deserve our support. It’s the perpetrators who should be facing public humiliation – not the victims.