Bill Cosby and the rape accusers: stop looking away and start believing women
We shouldn’t need so many women to tell such similar stories. We shouldn’t be filled with so much doubt. One accuser should be more than enough
Bill Cosby and the women claim a history of sexual assaults
Hadley Freeman: How Bill Cosby’s image shielded him
In a perfect world, I would be able to think that we don’t believe rape victims because we just can’t fathom rape as a thing that an otherwise normal-seeing person would ever do. I would be able to give apologists the benefit of the doubt that the truth of what rape is, what a rapist does, is so horrifying that they have to believe rape doesn’t exist.
But we do not live in that world. In this one, we simply don’t want to believe women – or, really, we don’t want to have to believe women, because doing so might, ever so slightly, complicate our own lives and our own preferred narrative.
It would be mighty inconvenient to have to see the world as it is.
Rape is an appalling crime. It’s difficult to wrap my mind around it, really – that a person can feel so entitled to the body of another that the person forces himself inside another person. Rapists take something so intimate – access to your insides – something to which they have no right. They violate your bodily sanctity, your emotional sanctity, your trust in your insides and everything outside, your confidence that your body is your own or that your trauma requires or deserves justice. Crime hardly feels like an adequate word.
Yet rape is pervasive, and nobody is truly immune from the threat of it.
There is so little justice to be found when it comes to sexual violence, be it in the courts or the court of public opinion. Instead, we have an excess of testimony from all manner of victims and a passionate chorus of disbelievers all too eager to tear apart their stories.
Perhaps it is so difficult to believe rape victims because it means facing the fact that at least one of every five women we meet in the United States alone – and maybe more, because many women never report – has been a victim in that way. Perhaps we cannot conceive of so many people enduring such a terrible violation and our so-called justice system doing almost nothing about it – and that’s why we demand evidence and testimony and unimpeachable victims … and still, that is not enough. Perhaps it is easier to believe that all those people are lying – that they have some ulterior motive, some nefarious agenda – than it is to believe how many other humans must be capable of such atrocity. Perhaps we contort ourselves into finding any explanation other than the most obvious one because the visceral truth of rape – what people we know either perpetrated or endured – is unbearable.
The accusations of rape that have quietly followed Bill Cosby for so long are apparently finally catching up with him. So many women have come forward with their stories that we can no longer look away, even if we want to. But we shouldn’t look away. We shouldn’t need so many women to tell such similar stories to believe. We shouldn’t be filled with so much doubt. One accuser should be more than enough.
NBC shelved the show Cosby was developed for the network. Netflix has postponed airing a recently filmed comedy special. TV Land is no longer airing reruns of The Cosby Show. In the court of public opinion, that might feel like justice, but such consequences feel more like gestures. Perhaps such gestures of belief are all his accusers will ever have. But being believed shouldn’t have to be enough.
We should have never ignored the accusations against Bill Cosby (which his lawyer says Cosby “does not intend to dignify”), but it’s difficult to believe something so sinister about a public figure as beloved as Bill Cosby. He gave us Fat Albert, The Cosby Show and A Different World. We ask ourselves, How could a talented comedian – a family man, a philanthropist – also be a serial rapist?
Cosby and other men accused of rape rely on us asking those questions. But those questions are a privilege not accorded rape victims, who have to go to extraordinary lengths to be heard, let alone believed – whether or not the men they are accused of being world-famous and wealthy.
Rolling Stone this week published a harrowing story about Jackie, a young woman at the University of Virginia who offers her account of being brutally gang raped during a party. The last assassin she describes in her story of the hours-long
