It’s hard to see what these women gain from their accusations. The fact that they have been around for some time but were not publicly discussed by the media only further enhances the case that Cosby has a history of this behavior and that these women are not in it for the publicity or the money.
Ask a guy named Ray Buckey about “believing the victim.” Dozens of children accuse him of unspeakable acts against them, and claimed that he did things like kill small animals in front of them, to let them know what would happen if they talked. Ray Buckey spent five years in prison just awaiting trial, because the charges were so heinous, and the claimants so numerous, but he ended up not being convicted of a single thing, after one of the longest and most expensive trials in history. It turned out that it started with a credulous police department which did not properly vet the first complainant, and then went searching for further ones, even more credulously under the mantra of “believe the children.” And the DA hired a horribly unscrupulous person to interview the children (albeit, the DA probably didn’t realize how unscrupulous).
Anyway, the idea that victims must axiomatically be believed, or where there’s smoke there’s fire, or that multiple complainants are more credible than one are all false. On the last, you have to assess the credibility of each person individually, before you look at them as a group. Would 16 Richard Nixons be more credible than one? No matter how many times you add zero to zero, you still have zero.
I didn’t know you could get internet hook-up in that cave.
But not only are there no good reasons to think anything like that happened in the Cosby case, there are in fact good reasons to think nothing like that happened in the Cosby case.
To me one thing that stands out about this case is it seems to be a statistical outlier. When celebrities have been accused of rape or child molestation historically, how many people came forward? One? Two? I’m sure I don’t know all of the high-profile cases like this, but those that I do remember, such as Michael Jackson, Woody Allen, et al. have not involved a high number of complainants (not saying these cases are therefore not credible, just kind of looking at the trend in terms of numbers of accusers.)
So why so many women in this particular case? What is special about Bill Cosby that he’s not being accused by one or two, but sixteen women?
More to the point, if there are such horrible people in the world that would falsely accuse someone of rape to gain money or attention, why are there sixteen in this case but not generally the same number in other cases with equally high-profile celebrities?
I agree, and I’ll go a step further, and say that if he is proven guilty then there ought to be no quarter.
But until the point when there’s something more substantial than unproven, vaporous allegations, I’m not going to pillory the guy, even if what he’s being accused of is heinous and unforgivable.
That’s the difference between mob justice, kangaroo courts and lynchings and the rule of law as administered in legitimate courts by impartial juries.
Why do you think anyone needs to be assured of this?
You seem to be talking to people who are advocating for capturing Cosby and physically punishing him in some way. Maybe you got your forums mixed up? Over here we’re talking about what it’s reasonable to think about whether the accusations are true, not about what to do in response to them, much less whether to somehow punish Cosby for them.
That is something I considered as well. It could be a simple numbers problem. If Bob, the assistant manager down at the local supermarket, has 16 independent accusations of rape or other sexual impropriety against him, that is pretty convincing that he did something wrong. However, Bill Cosby may have slept with literally thousands of women over many decades. It is well-known and admitted that he was an extremely accomplished philanderer with at least one secret love child but that is a different complaint than what is being accused here. If he slept with 2,000 women over several decades and even 1% of them are prone to making false accusations for any reason at all, that would account for 20 false, embellished, misreported or misremembered complaints just through statistical noise.
That doesn’t mean that the vast majority of all women aren’t telling the truth when they report such things but those few outliers always exist. If your sample size is large enough, you will always pick up such oddities even if they aren’t based in real facts. The accusers themselves may not be truly lying in their own minds. They may very well believe something that never really happened. There is a whole branch of psychology and neuroscience dedicated to the ways that human memories can be created and then completely reformed spontaneously as the years go by. We like to think that our brain is like a book or computer hard drive full of accumulated static facts when nothing could be further from the truth. Experiments show that eye witnesses have an abysmal record for events that happened just a few minutes prior let alone decades before and even established memories can undergo radical changes over time.
Have you ever had a conversation with a friend or relative in which they described an event that you witnessed in a completely different way? I know I have. I also know that even my own relatives have mentally inserted me into places and events, even whole vacations, that I was never present for in the first place. When I point out that I was some place far away like at college when it happened, they still have a hard time accepting that without firm proof because their memories are very real to them. That is a universal human trait and one that the eye witness based evidence model has to be constantly vigilant and skeptical about.
I completely agree with your rationale that memory is a tricky thing, in fact I had a recent experience with this where my mother chose to selectively edit memories of me out of a good portion of my early 20s. She had no memory of me working or living with her when I was in college because it didn’t suit her narrative.
But a couple points to keep in mind.
Traumatic memory is probably processed very differently than narrative memory in the brain. (It’s arguable that that difference is a major factor in the development of PTSD.)
While it’s pretty common for people to misremember details of events - even significant details - it’s not common to remember things in ways that are qualitatively different from the way they happened. If a person is in a car accident, they may be wrong about the color of the car that hit them, the location of the accident, or the duration of time it took to get hit - but barring head trauma they will remember that an accident took place. Three people in the same accident might remember it differently, but all would be in agreement that it happened.
So, it’s not likely that someone would have a consensual experience and then later narratively edit that experience to be traumatic. That’s barring having therapists/hypnotists fucking around with them neurologically, of course.
…probably fine Americans. I will allow a Judge or Jury decide if he’s guilty of a crime.
I haven’t read the threads you’ve linked to, so I don’t know what specific things have gotten your goat, but The Cos is entitled to a defense at this point.
I want to give you a compliment and say again that you are consistently fair, balanced and rationale even if we don’t always agree on some core issues. Your style and personality are a breath of fresh air in a world full of pollution of every type. This board, no the whole world, would be better off if there were more people like you.
Is there any evidence of that, or is it just the fantasy speculation of fellow rapists. Cosby says this is all untrue. He doesn’t claim, like Wilt Chamberlain did, to have had sex with thousands of women. Thousands of women have not claimed to have had sex with him. Over a dozen women have had sex with him. They state in full seriousness that he asked them to take some medication to clam them, then they woke up at some point and it was clear he had sex with them.
When a rapist has consensual sex with women he hasn’t raped, that doesn’t make the rape accusations less credible. It just means that on some occasions he had consensual sex.
They way you guys abuse logic in defense of rapists is just amazing. Should every rapist who is able to prove that he at some time had consensual sex with a woman be freed? Or, by the standard you are now suggesting, should every rapist that you fantasize had sex with thousands of women be freed?
The stupid is really strong with you rape fetishists.
Indeed he is, and his chosen representative is his lawyer who has loudly proclaimed that these women have lied and defamed Dr. Cosby. However, I would be willing to guess that no lawsuits would be forthcoming despite the fact that Dr. Cosby would be able to prove humiliation and loss of projects. Dr. Cosby will never bring a civil suit against these women, who would be entitled to demand he testify under oath. And testimony under oath from Dr. Cosby would claim that he never drugged or raped these women, and that would be perjury, well within the statute of limitations, see the Alger Hiss case. Then each of the women would testify. The initial round of testimony would be at depositions, and then in Court in front of a jury. The jury would be asked if the rapes occurred and the allegations were true in the form of a special verdict interrogatory. It would be on the basis of a preponderance of the evidence. That is how a legal defense of Dr. Cosby’s reputation would proceed. He won’t do it because he cannot overcome the mountain of evidence against him any more than creationists can overcome the evidence for evolution.
Let’s keep track of all the bending-over-backwards.
They are all making it up for money
They are all making it up for fame
They are all making it up to get jobs
They probably just wanted to fuck a star and felt bad about it after
They were probably golddiggers and felt bad about it after
Rape was okay back in the day, really! Everyone was cool with it!
Consensual sex just looked like rape back then
Forced kissing isn’t sexual assault! Why is she being such a baby about it?
I can’t imagine how you would force someone to give you a hand job
Not all of the described violations are rape, so probably nobody got raped
They waited to long to report it
They didn’t report it to the right people
He didn’t rape everyone he met, so clearly he isn’t a rapist
Too many accusers. How could someone rape 16 people?
They probably just misremembered, it’s easy to get mixed up!
I don’t believe all their stories, so I won’t believe any of them
I don’t think each and every of their stories count as legal rape, so why should I care?
I want legally admissible evidence that probably doesn’t exist anymore!
But he was so rich, why would he want to violate other people’s sexual bounderies?
Whoopi likes him!
This is probably some bizarre race conspiracy
It’s all made up by the media to sell headlines
It’s all made up by the frenzied crowd ready to destroy another career
…
If there is such a compelling argument that we have no reason to believe these are probably true, what’s with the crazy grab-bag of justifications (especially the ones that just happen to resemble the tired old ones that have always been used to discredit rape victims.) It seems to me like if this was really a matter of “there just isn’t enough evidence, I don’t know who to believe” then that’s really all that particular argument would take. You probably wouldn’t need to bring in the race conspiracies and Whoopi and the fact that nobody should get upset about being groped or that sex in the sixties was a big fun rape-fest.
Look guys, we were born with some level of judgement. I’m pretty sure OJ killed Nicole Simpson. He was declared innocent in a court of law, but I really don’t think that reflects what really happened. This is the same thing. It’s completely legit to take a look at available evidence and decide for yourself what you think. Not everything is going to be hashed out in court.
I am pretty sure at this point that Cosby has a history of repeatedly violating sexual bounderies and initativing sexual acts with less-than-consenting partners. I’m not sure if his acts crossed the line into what would legally be defined as sexual assault, but I don’t think that really matters. Having sex with anyone who isn’t enthusiastically consenting is creepy, sleazy and dangerous. That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if he crossed the line legally at points.
None of this is going to court, and I’m in no position to do Cosby any harm. But just the power of these women telling their story a very powerful thing. After civil wars and genocides, where you can’t very well arrest half a country, truth and reconciliation activities have been very powerful tools for allowing people to move on with their lives and find peace. And these mostly boil down to letting the victims tell their stories. Yes, at this point Cosby isn’t going to jail and justice won’t be done. But if he harmed these women, having their voice heard is a good thing. Sexual assault tends to cause harm beyond the physical violation precisely because it’s so surrounded by silence, blame and shame. We are better off if we can move past that.
90 year old man comes forward to say he made payments to women on behalf of Cosby. Cosby’s lawyer claims it is a lie so he can get 15 minutes of fame. Has copies of money orders.