Bill Cosby’s reputation continues to take a beating as one of his alleged rape victims penned an article asking how come nobody cared until a male spoke (comedian Hannibal Buress) spoke up? Bill Cosby’s alleged rape victim, Barbara Bowman, said he repeatedly raped her in the late 1980s and is demanding to know why did the “public outcry” begin only after a male criticized Cosby for his actions.
Buress said: “It’s even worse because Bill Cosby has the f*cking smuggest old black man persona that I hate. He gets on TV, ‘Pull your pants up black people, I was on TV in the 80s! I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom!’ Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby, so turn the crazy down a couple notches.”
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 suit for 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 that he drugged and raped me. The final incident was in Atlantic City, where we had traveled for 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. Source: Washington Post
Brown’s article comes on the heels of Cosby’s disastrous Twitter experiment (#CosbyMeme ) in which he asked users to “meme” him. Well, let’s just say it added more fuel to the fire. It’s shocking to think that Bill Cosby, who has done so much for the arts and education, could be mired in such a scandal in the twilight of his life. What’s troubling is that if you have money, lots of money, you can make any problem go away or force them into dormancy.
This was cross-posted from The Hinterland Gazette.