What I Know About Bill Cosby

In the early 1980s I was living in New York City and working as a flight attendant. I shared an apartment with three other flight attendants, one of whom was having an affair with Bill Cosby. I think she met him on a flight but I don't remember that part for sure. I even spoke to him on the phone once. In those pre-cell phone days, we had one landline phone and we all used the same phone number. I answered the phone one day and it was Mr. Cosby, looking for my roommate. I advised him that she wasn't home at the moment and I would give her the message. He said thank you and that was it.

Unlike rape, infidelity isn't illegal and cheating on his wife doesn't prove that he rapes women. On the other hand, when The Cosby Show hit it big in 1984 and Cosby became America's warm, wise, cuddly role model husband and father, I had personal evidence that his private life didn't match his public image.

The whole sordid Cosby story appears to have hit the "tipping point." Yesterday NBC canceled plans to make a new sitcom starring Bill Cosby. AP released the unedited version of a Nov. 6 interview with Cosby and his wife, in which he says "I don't talk about it," referring to the rape accusations, then asks the reporter to "scuttle" that part of the interview. At The Daily Beast, entertainment blogger Mark Ebner has a devastating article titled "I Warned You About Bill Cosby" that refers to a story first posted on his blog in 2007. The entire article is fascinating and horrifying; you can read it here. If you're wondering how there can be such a disconnect between a famous man's public image and his private actions, the final paragraph provides a clue:

As is equally clear from his shambolic talk-show appearances and his extemporaneous attempts at social commentary in a public forum, Bill Cosby has long existed in a bubble. You don’t create movies like Leonard, Part 6, a catastrophically conceived 1987 James Bond parody in which the comedian at one point rides an ostrich, and not be dangerously out of touch with the world around you, or protected behind layers of hierarchy and protocol. With this much darker turn into pathology and alleged predation, it appears that for the entire 45 years of his public life, Cosby has been, in Shawn Upshaw’s words, “an incurable womanizer,” adulterer, and accused serial rapist—alleged actions in which his media champions were complicit. Moreover, the duration and degree of these incidents suggest a parallel history, one that once revealed in all its explosive detail, may render what we now know so far merely the tip of the iceberg.

Read the original story from January, 2007 here.