That’s why none of the accusations resulted in criminal charges. But Cosby still engaged in a long running pattern of sleazy, unethical conduct. He bought it all on himself.
Silly laws not being written to include definitions for non-legal discussion. Formally Michigan maintains a “sex offender” registry using that description in the law so I will say the noun is “sex offender.” The verb is probably something like “commit.”
They were convicted after committing CSC 2 and are now a registered sex offender.
Was just reading another article on Therese Serignese that appears gives yet a different reason for the $10,000 Cosby gave her, plus adds even more information intended to bolster her claims but in reality shows her to be anything but fearful of being raped again by Cosby. To wit:
Cite [bolding mine}
So over a period of around twenty years after leaving his penthouse this woman had occasional contact with Cosby, asked for and took money from him, and went alone to meet him in his hotel room where he encouraged her to continue her education, and never seems to be able to remember whether they sex (except for the initial rape of course). Then, ten years after having been cut off, she decides to come forward with her allegations.
If I didn’t know better I’d wonder why in the world the media was giving this woman any credence at all.
I’m no expert, but I think that just because someone rapes adult women, it doesn’t make them a pedophile. And vice versa.
Or maybe you’re trying to be funny and I just whooshed. Oh well.
One of the alleged victims claimed that when Cos tried to penetrate her, she claimed she had an STD, and so he instead forced her to give him oral sex. She was (IIRC) 19 years old at the time.
So that would not be rape, but would be sexual assault, right? I think rape is forcible vaginal or anal penetration. If not specified then it’s penetration by the penis; and to say someone raped another using (for example) a broomstick then it’s penetration with the broomstick and not the penis. In my book of definitions, anyway.
To counter all the doubters who scoff at complaints arising 20-30+ years after the alleged crimes, I’m surprised nobody has equated the women’s situations with the altar boys who were raped by Catholic priests. Do these same doubters also doubt those altar boys and their allegations so many years after the alleged crimes?
I’m kinda new around here, on this board, so I don’t think I was around if/when that topic was discussed or debated here.
Never heard of metaphor?
I’m gong to be honest with you here. I think Bill Cosby acted like most men who were womanizers in the 60s and 70s. It’s a different day and age now and things are much different, both in the way men and women act regarding sex. During the time Cosby is alleged to have committed most of these rapes, it was fairly common for men who fancied themselves to be virile womanizers to come on to women in a direct way that would be considered forceful today. It was also common in those days for women to acquiesce to sex simply by not objecting. Girls in those days weren’t nearly as free to express sexual interest or desire as they are today, and it was pretty much understood by both the women and men of that era that the woman called the shots as to what was allowed and what wasn’t when it came to sex, and they did that by allowing things to go as far as they were comfortable with but then become firm about putting a stop to it once they didn’t want it to go any further, and this firmness was often expressed either verbally or by physically pushing hands away, etc. to make it clear the make out session was over.
Oftentimes, if the woman didn’t put a stop to it the implication was that going ahead was okay. Almost every guy and girl I knew in my late teens and twenties experienced this scenario numerous times over the course of their dating lives.
I’m thinking that what Cosby did was make a habit of coming on to many of the young women he found attractive, and, if they didn’t attempt to put a stop to it (which some of them did, according to the resentment he is said to have shown on those occasions) then he proceeded on the assumption that their acquiescence was mutually agreeable. It also wasn’t unheard of for women on occasion to let a man have sex with her just to get it over with rather than continue to wrestle with the octopus they had on their hands, or because they didn’t want the guy to be unhappy with them. I’m thinking that for most of these women the sex occurred simply because they allowed it to happen, either because they didn’t want to disappoint Cosby, make him mad, or simply by virtue of having been overcome by his position and star power.
Then who knows? Times change and things that were once commonplace become verbotten, and perhaps as these women evolved in their thinking they came to believe that Cosby “raped” them simply because he had sex with them in a way that was aggressive and would be considered predatory and out of bounds today even though it was commonplace and understood by most members of both sexes back then. I seriously doubt that Cosby ever felt that he was raping any of the women he was having sex with.
Where I do think Cosby shows a serious moral failing in the face of his reputation is in cheating on his wife. But, big stars often do that even with the complicit agreement of their wives. Kirk Douglas was a huge womanizer all his life and his wife knew it, but she was the one he really loved and she knew it, and to her his affairs weren’t worth destroying the marriage over. Johnny Carson’s third wife was on record saying that Carson could bring as many whores to their house as he wanted but she was going to die as Mrs. Carson (though this didn’t happen). The Kennedy women are notorious for looking the other way while their men cheat with other women. Even Maria Shriver is said to have known for decades of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cheating ways and only decided to make an issue of it after she’d grown tired of the marriage and resentful of Arnold’s decision to go back into movies after his governorship ended.
So in a sense I agree with you. Cosby definitely engaged in unethical behavior for most of his life, and for that I think it’s perfectly fair to call him to account for that. What I don’t think is right is for the media and these various women who all seem to have benefitted or thought they’d benefit by letting Cosby have his way with them paint him as a rapist, which is a whole other order of wrong beyond cheating on your wife.
This is a stretch so far that it beats leaning over backwards (or some other metaphor). You don’t need politics to explain this, and frankly Cosby’s voice on these issues has not been resonating very loudly as far as I have been aware.
This is a big, fat, juicy scandal, and it will make lots of people lots of money just by keeping it up and running with it for as long as possible, whether or not any allegation ever turns out to be true. I would be willing to bet that none of the media even cares what’s true or false, as long as that air time keeps getting filled and those ads keep getting sold.
Having said that, here is my guess: Cosby was something of a lech, at least when he was younger, and when behavioral standards were different. He probably flirted and touched women more than would be acceptable now. Creepy and lecherous. Whether that extended to actual rape (i.e. non-consensual sexual acts) is a very hard thing to convict anyone of in the court of public opinion going only on old allegations.
And I wish some conscientious person would go through these accusations and weed out the very questionable ones so we could focus on and evaluate the ones remaining. It doesn’t really affect person A’s accusation if person M is an attention-whore, or person K was only kissed, or person H has a history with the “accused” that doesn’t make sense with the accusation. There’s also no point in saying there are 14 accusers if (say) 8 of them are flaky. After all, 6 solid accusations would be bad enough.
Interesting theory except that these accusations occurred in the 80s, 90s and 00s when such behavior was not considered acceptable. I also don’t think that having sex with a semiconscious woman was ever considered normal behavior.
The trouble is, how do we determine which of the accusations are solid? We’re getting nothing but distorted, inflammatory accounts from a news media out for blood.
And apart from your dismissal of my contention that politics may underlie much of this, at least in the beginning (and I’m far from the only person who’s suspected this. I’ve been reading it all over the net for several days but never really gave it credence until I began to think of Buress’ possible motivations and the ridiculous tabloid way the media is beginning to assail him for sexual assault when all he did was kiss or try to kiss a Playboy Bunny), and the difficulty determining which of the accusations, if any, are solid I actually agree with most of the rest of your post.
No, but I’ve heard of camphor. Which I think is what Dr. Cosby used to drug those women.
It’s quite possible that his attitudes failed to keep up with the times. It’s very common for people to stick with the attitudes they grow up with, and probably especially so with Cosby given his history with Playboy, the Bunnies and Playmates, etc.
And I know of at least two instances in the 60s where guys I knew had sex with girls they didn’t know and had just encountered who were drunk as skunks and I’m sure didn’t know what had happened to them the next morning. And I know of another instance where a guy I knew fairly well had sex with an extremely drunk girl who threw her head back and laughed about it when a girlfriend who was there told her about it the next day. (They also started dating once he found out about this and discovered she was happy about it.)
And you base this on what, inspector? Anything other than your own vivid imagination?
It’s alarming that I read some of the comments here and elsewhere and you can tell that some people dislike him to the point that they really, really want him to be guilty, evidence (or lack thereof) be damned.
It’s sickening, quite frankly.
Another good way is to see if they see evidence that really doesn’t exist.
“Lou Ferrigno’s wife, Carla, says Bill Cosby tried to rape her – she fought him off”
Looks like the New York Daily News has amped up Carla Ferrigno’s kiss or would-be kiss from yesterday’s “sexual assault” all the way to full blown “rape” now.
:rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
Cosby and his wife Camille had five children, but only four are living. His son, Ennis, was murdered in 1997.
Yes, it’s sickening. From every point of view.
I’m pretty new as well, but you make a decent point.
I’ll also repeat my igored point from earlier - people are enabled by the Internet, they can speak out, find others in a similar position, develop a profile and case.
Without wanting to judge this particular case - and we have seen plenty in the UK, some proven in court, others not - back in the day who cared about another 19-year old chick getting banged by a star. Literally, who cared in media?
It’s true that the time spans are equivalent, but really that’s about all. Altar boys truly are children, whereas the women alleging rape by Cosby were grown women. One was a model and one was a Playboy Bunny. The media has taken to referring to them as young girls or teenagers, but at 19 or so years old they were grown women.
Much of the country’s female population was getting married and having children around that age (my mother, for instance, had been married twice and was having her second child by the time she reached that age in the forties and no one gave it a second thought). They were joining the military, working as airline stewardesses, Playboy Bunnies, office workers, etc. Mia Farrow (to bring up suggestions of another guy who’s been a victim of the internet mob mentality) was successfully working as an actress in Hollywood and seducing 50-year-old Frank Sinatra at that age and apart from a little tut-tutting about their age difference no one really cared. It’s only been in the wake of the pedophile hysteria triggered by the internet age that some people have started thinking of 18 and 19-year-old women as children or young girls barely out of childhood.
So on the one hand you have young boys being forced into homosexual relationships with men that they had no way to avoid or escape, and on the other you have a group of exceedingly attractive grown women who should’ve been quite proficient by that time in calling the shots regarding how far men were allowed to go with them sexually. Many if not most of them wanted something out of Cosby and it’s far from proven at this point that he drugged any of them beyond perhaps some Benadryl for their allergies (even the description of the pills by the alleged victim matches that of Benadry) or that he forced any of them to have sex with him.
So yes, the time frame is roughly equivalent but there’s little in common between the two scenarios other than that.