Carolyn Gage
  • Home
    • Butch Visibility Project
    • Bio and Vitae
    • Endorsements
    • Production History
    • Catalog of Books and Plays
    • Online Essays >
      • Lesbian Culture and History Essays
      • Theatre Essays
      • Feminist Essays
      • Reviews
    • Interviews >
      • Audio/Video Interviews
      • Print Interviews
  • Books and CD's
    • Gage Play Anthologies
    • Feminist Thought And Spirituality
    • Lesbian Theatre
    • CD's and DVD's
    • Anthologies with Other Authors
    • Journal Anthologies
  • Plays
    • One-Woman Shows >
      • The Second Coming of Joan of Arc
      • La Seconde Venue de Jeanne d'Arc
      • Joana Dark - a re-volta
      • Giovanna d'Arco - la rivolta
      • ВТОРОТО ПРИШЕСТВИЕ НА ЖАНА Д’АРК (Bulgarian tranlsation of The Second Coming of Joan
      • 贞德再临_中文 (Mandarin translation of The Second Coming of Joan of Arc)
      • The Last Reading of Charlotte Cushman
      • Crossing the Rapelands
    • Musicals >
      • The Amazon All-Stars
      • Babe! An Olympian Musical
      • How to Write a Country-Western Song
      • Leading Ladies
      • Women on the Land
    • Full-Length Plays >
      • The Abolition Plays
      • The Anastasia Trials in the Court of Women
      • AXED!
      • Black Star
      • Coming About
      • Esther and Vashti
      • The Goddess Tour
      • In McClintock's Corn
      • Sappho in Love
      • The Spindle
      • Stigmata
      • Thanatron
      • Ugly Ducklings
    • One-Acts >
      • Ain't Got No - I Got Life
      • The A-Mazing Yamashita and the Millennial Gold-Diggers
      • Artemisia and Hildegard
      • Battered on Broadway
      • Bite My Thumb
      • The Boundary Trial of John Proctor
      • Cookin' with Typhoid Mary
      • The Countess and the Lesbians
      • The Drum Lesson
      • Easter Sunday
      • Entr'acte or The Night Eva Le Gallienne Was Raped
      • The Evil That Men Do: The Story of Thalidomide
      • Female Nude Seated
      • The Gage and Mr. Comstock
      • The Greatest Actress Who Ever Lived
      • Harriet Tubman Visits A Therapist
      • Head in the Game
      • Hermeneutic Circlejerk
      • Heterosexuals Anonymous
      • Jane Addams and the Devil Baby
      • A Labor Play
      • Lace Curtain Irish
      • Lighting Martha
      • Little Sister
      • Louisa May Incest
      • Mason-Dixon
      • The Obligatory Scene
      • The P.E. Teacher
      • The Parmachene Belle
      • The Pele Chant
      • Planchette
      • The Poorly-Written Play Festival
      • Radicals
      • The Rules of the Playground
      • St. Frances and the Fallen Angels
      • Souvenirs from Eden
      • Starpattern
      • 'Til the Fat Lady Sings
      • Valerie Solanas At Matteawan
    • Short Short Plays >
      • 52 Pickup
      • At Sea
      • Black Eye
      • El Bobo
      • Brett Hears the Mountain Gods
      • Calamity Jane Sends a Message to Her Daughter
      • The Clarity of Pizza
      • The Great Fire
      • Hrotsvitha's Vision
      • The Intimacy Coordinator
      • The Ladies' Room
      • Miss Le Gallienne Announces the New Season
      • On the Other Hand
      • Patricide
      • The Pickle Play
    • Dramatic Adaptations >
      • Amy Lowell: In Her Own Words
      • Brett Remembers
      • Deep Haven
      • El Bobo (one-act play)
      • El Bobo (short screenplay)
      • Emily & Sue >
        • Touring Production of Emily & Sue >
          • The Creative Team
          • Director's Vision
          • Adaptor's notes
          • Open Me Carefully
      • Georgia and the Butch
      • I Have Come to Show You Death
      • Speak Fully The One Awful Word
      • We Too Are Drifting (Screenplay)
    • Special Index: Plays That Deal with Sexual Violence Against Women and Girls
    • Special Index: Women's History Plays
    • Special Index: Romantic Plays with Happy Endings
  • Touring Work
    • Performances >
      • Lace Curtain Irish
      • Crossing the Rapelands
      • The Parmachene Belle (performance)
      • Calamity Jane Sends a Message to Her Daughter (performance)
      • Gage on Stage
    • Lectures >
      • Lizzie Borden and Lesbian Theatre
      • The Secret Life of Lesbians
      • Paradigms and Paradigm-Shifting
      • When Sex Is Not the Metaphor For Intimacy
      • Meeting the Ghost of Hamlet's Father
      • A Theatrical Journey Through Maine's Lesbian History
      • Tara and Other Lies
      • Teena Brandon's Inconvenient Truth
    • Workshops >
      • The Art of the Dramatic Monologue
      • Acting Lesbian
      • Interrupting Racism: A Workshop
      • Playwriting Techniques for Poets and Fiction Writers
      • Ugly Ducklings Workshop
    • Residencies
    • The Lesbian Tent Revival >
      • Testimonials
      • The Lesbian Tent Revival Radio Hour Podcasts
      • The Lesbian Tent Revival Sermon on Dying Well
      • Sermons for a Lesbian Tent Revival
      • Supplemental Sermons
      • Hotter Than Hell
      • The Synapse Pendant
    • Cauldron & Labrys >
      • A Brief History
      • Upcoming Productions
  • Calendar
    • Productions of Gage's Work and Appearances
  • Contact/Storefront
    • Privacy Policy
  • Blog

The Bill Cosby Rapes: The Reboot

12/28/2014

2 Comments

 
Picture
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.  

Picture
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.


Picture
Picture
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. 

Picture
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.

Picture
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.

Picture
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.
PictureWarrior 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.

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. 
Picture
Suggested Bumper Sticker
2 Comments
marie cartier
12/28/2014 09:03:09 pm

thank you. yes! #webelievecosbyaccusers

Reply
Carrie England
12/28/2014 11:53:34 pm

Sign me up for a bumper sticker!

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Picture

    Carolyn Gage

    “… Carolyn Gage is one of the best lesbian playwrights in America…”--Lambda Book Report, Los Angeles.

    SUBSCRIBE:
    To subscribe to the blog, scroll down and click on "RSS Feed". To subscribe to my newsletter, click here.

    Categories

    All
    Child Abuse
    Civil Rights
    Incest
    In Memoriam
    Interviews
    Lesbian Feminism
    Lesbian History
    Psychotropic Drugs
    Rape
    Reviews
    The Environment
    Women And Theatre
    Women's History

    Archives

    September 2023
    July 2023
    June 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    June 2022
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    July 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    October 2019
    July 2019
    May 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    November 2018
    September 2018
    June 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    February 2017
    December 2016
    October 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    April 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    December 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    July 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    August 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    April 2011
    January 2011
    December 2010
    October 2010
    July 2010
    June 2010

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.