I just read this:
“The comedian[ Bill Cosby], fighting an onslaught of accusations that he sexually assaulted more than two dozen women over many years, is paying six-figure fees to private investigators for information that might discredit his alleged victims. Multiple sources confirmed that Cosby, through his Hollywood attorney Martin Singer, is implementing a scorched-earth strategy in which anything negative in his accusers’ pasts is fair game.”
Yes, it was on Page Six of the New York Post. Yes, it is citing anonymous “sources.” But I think it would be incredibly naïve not to understand that this is a story that was generated by Team Cosby, serving the function of threatening current accusers, dissuading potential future accusers, planting seeds of doubt, and testing the waters to see if this is a strategy that will be well-received in Cosby’s struggle to win back his reputation.
Which is why I am going to respond to it.
“The comedian[ Bill Cosby], fighting an onslaught of accusations that he sexually assaulted more than two dozen women over many years, is paying six-figure fees to private investigators for information that might discredit his alleged victims. Multiple sources confirmed that Cosby, through his Hollywood attorney Martin Singer, is implementing a scorched-earth strategy in which anything negative in his accusers’ pasts is fair game.”
Yes, it was on Page Six of the New York Post. Yes, it is citing anonymous “sources.” But I think it would be incredibly naïve not to understand that this is a story that was generated by Team Cosby, serving the function of threatening current accusers, dissuading potential future accusers, planting seeds of doubt, and testing the waters to see if this is a strategy that will be well-received in Cosby’s struggle to win back his reputation.
Which is why I am going to respond to it.
This is what powerful men do… actually, no, correct that…. This is what forceful men do when they are threatened, and especially threatened by women. Men with any kind of understanding of real power don’t rape and abuse in the first place. Anyway, these forceful criminals know how vulnerable women are to charges of lying, being crazy, or being sluts in patriarchy, and often it is this very knowledge that enables the men to perpetrate, and especially to perpetrate serially as Cosby has allegedly done for decades.
I remember in the bad old days when a defense attorney was allowed to introduce a victim’s entire sexual history in a rape trial. In 1973 I saw how my sweet, hippie housemate, who was a victim of a knifepoint rape, was decimated by her rape trial, where her middle-class rapist, sitting next to his wife and children, actually laughed at her while her freewheeling ‘60’s-style sexual liberation was paraded past a puritanical judge.
And I know that one of the ways that “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” played out in the military was in the rape and sexual harassment of lesbian soldiers. Their assailants could blackmail them into silence with threats of “outing” them. Lesbians were actually targeted because of this vulnerability. Now that DADT is gone, lesbians face the same 30% vulnerability to sexual assault that their heterosexual sisters-in-arms confront. And a whopping 85% of women who report military rape are discharged, usually without medical benefits for treating their PTSD. The women are usually accused of fabricating, exaggerating, and/or blaming the military rape for symptoms they already had from previous rapes.
I remember in the bad old days when a defense attorney was allowed to introduce a victim’s entire sexual history in a rape trial. In 1973 I saw how my sweet, hippie housemate, who was a victim of a knifepoint rape, was decimated by her rape trial, where her middle-class rapist, sitting next to his wife and children, actually laughed at her while her freewheeling ‘60’s-style sexual liberation was paraded past a puritanical judge.
And I know that one of the ways that “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” played out in the military was in the rape and sexual harassment of lesbian soldiers. Their assailants could blackmail them into silence with threats of “outing” them. Lesbians were actually targeted because of this vulnerability. Now that DADT is gone, lesbians face the same 30% vulnerability to sexual assault that their heterosexual sisters-in-arms confront. And a whopping 85% of women who report military rape are discharged, usually without medical benefits for treating their PTSD. The women are usually accused of fabricating, exaggerating, and/or blaming the military rape for symptoms they already had from previous rapes.
The top civil rights attorney in the state agreed to take the case on contingency and then my senator ordered a sweeping audit of the Registrar’s records. The audit confirmed the fraud, that it had been going on for three years, and that it was in all the departments of arts and sciences. So, now, the university wanted to settle the case and they wanted it pretty badly. They had apparently forgotten how unstable I was.
I wanted my day in court, and, against my attorney’s strenuous objections, I turned down the offer. I knew how much money the credit fraud was raising for the university, and the settlement they were offering was not even close. I could do the math as well as they could, and I knew that wealthy perpetrators nearly always can buy their victims’ silence at bargain basement prices. Or, at least, prices that are worth it to them.
So, here is where I’m feeling the pain of the Cosby victims. The state Attorney General sicced his dogs on me. The AG’s office requested seven years of my tax filings, just to see if I would flinch. What did my taxes have to do with anything? Well, most folks would squirm at having a battery of government attorneys take a microscope to their tax filings of seven years. They did it just to scare me off the suit. They deposed everyone who might ever possibly have been a friend, fellow-student, or a colleague, just to see if they could destroy my networks. A deposition is a very, very unpleasant, under-oath procedure that goes on for hours. I lost many friends. My colleagues felt violated and compromised by having ever associated with me. I would never get recommendations from them. The whole time this “investigation” was pending was a nightmare. It was a form of legal stalking.
I wanted my day in court, and, against my attorney’s strenuous objections, I turned down the offer. I knew how much money the credit fraud was raising for the university, and the settlement they were offering was not even close. I could do the math as well as they could, and I knew that wealthy perpetrators nearly always can buy their victims’ silence at bargain basement prices. Or, at least, prices that are worth it to them.
So, here is where I’m feeling the pain of the Cosby victims. The state Attorney General sicced his dogs on me. The AG’s office requested seven years of my tax filings, just to see if I would flinch. What did my taxes have to do with anything? Well, most folks would squirm at having a battery of government attorneys take a microscope to their tax filings of seven years. They did it just to scare me off the suit. They deposed everyone who might ever possibly have been a friend, fellow-student, or a colleague, just to see if they could destroy my networks. A deposition is a very, very unpleasant, under-oath procedure that goes on for hours. I lost many friends. My colleagues felt violated and compromised by having ever associated with me. I would never get recommendations from them. The whole time this “investigation” was pending was a nightmare. It was a form of legal stalking.
And college campus rapes? During my ten minutes of an academic career, I advocated for a nineteen-year-old survivor against an administration hell-bent on protecting a three-time rapist. He was, of course, a scholarship athlete. She was officially shamed and blamed, and offered the same protocol used for charges of plagiarism, where she and the rapist could tell their respective version of events to a hearing made up of her professors and fellow-students. This was 1999. And very little has changed. Campus rape victims are still scapegoated for reporting.
And I have my own story to tell. It’s not a rape story, but it is a story of a young woman (me) who attempted to speak truth to power and, as a result, became a target for a vicious witchhunt. I was a whistleblower for a credit fraud scandal at a large state university. I was told by the head of my grad school department, on orientation day, that all the students who were on state fellowships would be required to participate in credit fraud. Every professor in the department was in the room when they did this. They did not use the word “credit fraud,” but they did say we would be required to register for six hours every semester of courses that did not exist. We were instructed to register for these as pass/fail “Reading and Conference” classes. Needless to say, we were assured we would pass.
I resigned from the program and reported the practice. The university attempted to frame it as a misunderstanding, but when I refused to go along with the cover-up, they offered to investigate themselves… you know, like the military does. It took them a year to release their results, and not surprisingly the official report was unable to turn up any evidence of fraud, but they were able to determine that I was “emotionally unstable.” Yeah. They had no idea.
And I have my own story to tell. It’s not a rape story, but it is a story of a young woman (me) who attempted to speak truth to power and, as a result, became a target for a vicious witchhunt. I was a whistleblower for a credit fraud scandal at a large state university. I was told by the head of my grad school department, on orientation day, that all the students who were on state fellowships would be required to participate in credit fraud. Every professor in the department was in the room when they did this. They did not use the word “credit fraud,” but they did say we would be required to register for six hours every semester of courses that did not exist. We were instructed to register for these as pass/fail “Reading and Conference” classes. Needless to say, we were assured we would pass.
I resigned from the program and reported the practice. The university attempted to frame it as a misunderstanding, but when I refused to go along with the cover-up, they offered to investigate themselves… you know, like the military does. It took them a year to release their results, and not surprisingly the official report was unable to turn up any evidence of fraud, but they were able to determine that I was “emotionally unstable.” Yeah. They had no idea.
And let’s put this in context, specifically the context of rape. Rape laws are always being revised. It used to be that a woman had no grounds to accuse a man of rape if she was not a virgin or if she was over eighteen. And during my own lifetime most states held that a wife had no legal right to claim that her husband had raped her. He was simply enforcing his conjugal rights with a party attempting to reneg on a contract. And historically women, because of our supposed innate frailty, feeble intellect, and emotional instability, were not allowed to serve as jurors… a situation that lent itself to juries partial to the defendant and hostile to the victim.
So we come to rape with this historical baggage. Women lie, exaggerate, suffer from delusions, are emotionally unstable. We are simply not credible. Oh, and we are greedy. The university spent five hours in deposition with me attempting to prove that my low-income job of working with developmentally disabled children was my motivation in attempting to extort money from a university. Seriously.
So I have a gut understanding of what Cosby is going to do. And, of course, he’s going to find stuff. Because we are all human. Sadly, he will probably find stuff that will make some of his accusers settle with him or back off entirely. Because getting violated twice by the same perpetrator is more than many of us could bear.
So I have a gut understanding of what Cosby is going to do. And, of course, he’s going to find stuff. Because we are all human. Sadly, he will probably find stuff that will make some of his accusers settle with him or back off entirely. Because getting violated twice by the same perpetrator is more than many of us could bear.
Warrior Woman Hill Finally… Anita Hill. Anita Hill, who testified against Clarence Thomas at the Senate hearing to confirm him as a Supreme Court justice. She was characterized as unstable, vindictive, and sexually delusional, because she had the temerity to accuse Thomas of sexual harassment. Thomas referred to it as a “lynching.” After the hearing, there was a serious effort to get her fired from her university and to permanently destroy her reputation in academia.
But something happened. The women of America who had watched the hearings, the women of America—a majority of whom had suffered harassment ourselves and lost jobs because of it—rose up and said, "We believe Anita." It was on buttons and bumper stickers all over the country. Dr. Hill ended up teaching at Brandeis, becoming a national role model, and going down in history as the woman who put sexual harassment on the national agenda. She changed the lives of millions of women.
But something happened. The women of America who had watched the hearings, the women of America—a majority of whom had suffered harassment ourselves and lost jobs because of it—rose up and said, "We believe Anita." It was on buttons and bumper stickers all over the country. Dr. Hill ended up teaching at Brandeis, becoming a national role model, and going down in history as the woman who put sexual harassment on the national agenda. She changed the lives of millions of women.
And here is why I am writing this: I want to say, Stay strong, Cosby victims. Stay strong and understand that this is when you shine. This is when your credibility is the greatest… when they find reputation-destroying vulnerabilities and you continue to hold the line. Because no one deserves to be raped, and this is what it really comes down to.
I want to suggest a hashtag campaign of #webelievecosbyaccusers and I want to encourage a bumper sticker campaign, too.
Because I believe Andrea, Tamara, Beth, Barbara, Joan, Linda Joy, Janice, Carla, Louisa, Theresa, Kristina, Renita, Angela, Victoria, Jewell, Judy, Helen, Chelan, Beverly, Choe, Lisa, Kathy... and all the Jane Does who have not come forward publicly... yet.
Let's let Bill Cosby know that this tactic is only going to make it worse for him.
I want to suggest a hashtag campaign of #webelievecosbyaccusers and I want to encourage a bumper sticker campaign, too.
Because I believe Andrea, Tamara, Beth, Barbara, Joan, Linda Joy, Janice, Carla, Louisa, Theresa, Kristina, Renita, Angela, Victoria, Jewell, Judy, Helen, Chelan, Beverly, Choe, Lisa, Kathy... and all the Jane Does who have not come forward publicly... yet.
Let's let Bill Cosby know that this tactic is only going to make it worse for him.
Suggested Bumper Sticker
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