By Felicity Monk
On Thursday, Bill Cosby was found guilty of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand at his home in 2004.
Constand is one of more than 60 women who have accused Cosby of sexual assault, but hers is the only case that's made it to trial to date. Cosby, who has said it was consensual sex, continues to maintain his innocence.
Photo: AFP
He has been accused of rape, drug-facilitated rape, sexual battery, child sexual abuse or sexual misconduct with incidents dating back to 1965 through to 2008. And while many of his victims made allegations and laid criminal complaints over the years (more than 10 women in the mid-2000s alone), police never prosecuted and rumours of allegations and complaints remained just that.
So on he went, continuing to assault women, all the while positioning himself as a moral paragon and criticising the black American underclass. Lecturing them to be better parents, to lift themselves out of poverty, to discipline their kids and to, literally, pull their pants up.
Cosby's public fall from grace was finally - and somewhat arbitrarily - triggered in late 2014 when comedian Hannibal Buress mentioned, during his comedy routine, that Cosby had raped women. He told the crowd: "Google Bill Cosby rape." That's when it blew up.
More and more women came forward accusing Cosby of alarmingly similar attacks. But why did it take so long to reach the public consciousness? For people to begin believing that Cosby was capable of the things his victims accused him of?
The answer lies, in part, with the power that is Dr Cliff Huxtable. The affable, kindly, wholesome, patriarch of the Huxtable family who was tender at times, jokey at others, but always just the nicest guy. Cosby so thoroughly embodied Cliff that it was impossible to think they weren't one and the same.
As a kid growing up in the 80s I was a big fan of The Cosby Show. Sure, it was funny, the dancing was magic (those pursed lips, that constipated face, the wiggling head and rigid, jerky movements) and Rudy was adorable, but the real reason I was rooting so hard for the Huxtables is because it was one of the first positive representations of Black American culture that I had been exposed to. Here was a black upper-middle-class family, he a doctor, she a lawyer, the children were fun and quirky and annoying and clever. And I loved it. I wanted to have them as my neighbours, my friends, my doctor.
The Cosby Show was considered to be TV's biggest hit in the 1980s (it spent five consecutive seasons as the number-one rated show on television) and it helped pave the way for other shows, like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and In Living Color, which had predominantly Black American casts.
In an excellent New York Times piece, writer Wesley Morris (who himself is black), says it better than I ever could: "'America's Dad' is what we called Bill Cosby. And we called him that because, well, what a revolutionary way to put it. Through him, we were thumbing our noses at the long, dreary history for black men in America by elevating this one to a paternal Olympus. In the 1980s he made the black American family seem 'just like us.'"
The Cosby case is the first high-profile sexual assault trial to unfold in the wake of the #MeToo movement and is sure to have many other high-profile abusers very, very worried. The US National Organisation for Women called the verdict a "notice to sexual predators everywhere". And lawyer Gloria Allred (who represented many of Cosby's accusers) said outside the courtroom shortly after the verdict was delivered: "After all is said and done, women were finally believed."
* Felicity Monk is a freelance print and digital journalist with a particular interest in social issues, sub-cultures, trends, arts and culture. Also, a heroic wrangler of two small humans.
