I'm an Anita/Juanita person, by which I mean I believed both Anita Hill about Clarence Thomas and Juanita Broaddrick about Bill Clinton. You would think there would be a lot of us — women who are constitutionally inclined to believe other women's specific and detailed accounts of sexual misconduct by powerful men — but the truth is more complicated.
In both of those cases, willingness to accept the truth of the women's stories often depended on the listener's politics.
If you were a conservative who supported the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, you were inclined to think Hill's account was a pack of lies, fabrications dreamed up at the eleventh hour and splashed out before the whole world in a high-tech lynching. If you loved Bill Clinton, Broderick was another opportunist who had shown up when someone dragged a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park.
Both women lacked credible witnesses, neither had contacted the authorities at the time of the alleged abuse, and all we had to go on were the stories they told us. I believed them both, completely.
Here we go again, this time in Hollywood, not Washington. Do we believe the terrible stories so many women are telling about Bill Cosby, or not? And given that many of these allegations have surfaced at various times over the past decade or so, why does it take a half-dozen women coming forward at one time, with nearly identical tales, to get some of our heads around the idea that yes, America's TV dad might also be a loathsome, abusive, possibly criminal creature?
It is sobering that a man's lifetime work can be destroyed on the strength of just that — stories.
"Until you know that it's true — it's an allegation. That's all that it is," Whoopi Goldberg said on "The View" last week, to applause. It's the unpalatable, ancient truth about rape: Almost always it takes place somewhere private, almost always — absent a rape kit and a police investigation — the woman is left with only a story to tell.
Often, victims don't ever come forward for this very reason. Who will believe them?
Not one of the Cosby victims would make a district attorney glad to get up and go to work in the morning — even if we forget, for a moment, the fact that statutes of limitations long ago lapsed.
None of them called the police or went to the hospital at the time of their alleged assaults; all of their complaints arrived years later. They lack witnesses or evidence, and their accounts often come with the kind of complicated and complicating factors that juries tend to disfavor.
Many had ongoing relationships with Cosby after the first rape, and most had something to gain from him: rent money; the chance to write material for his act; a three week stay in a penthouse hotel room; front-row tickets to his sold-out act, and in one case, a $5,000 payment that came when a victim asked him for money many years after their relationship had ended.
Goldberg is right: Like Anita Hill and Juanita Broderick, like most of the women throughout history who have come forward to describe rapes, all these women have are memories and words. But no person of good will can read about the consistent factor in all of these stories - Cosby's drugging women and then having sex with them when they were incapacitated - and not believe what these women are saying.
What's striking is not just the common feature of the drugging, but also the range of small variations in how he accomplished the act, variations which lend credibility. Some women report that the drug was slipped into their drinks — in a glass of red wine, a "favorite" coffee prepared by Cosby, a specially doctored cocktail.
For others it was offered as a benign pill: a "Contac" for a slight fever he had detected in a young woman; an herbal remedy for another's anxiety, a painkiller for menstrual cramps. In one case, two white pills were doled out Dr. Huxtable-style to a young, unquestioning woman who was excited to have been invited backstage after one of his shows.
In each case, the women say they were suddenly and deeply incapacitated, and came to either in the midst of a sexual act, or the morning after, having clearly been violated.
"Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker," Ogden Nash taught us. A man can go the arduous old route of heart-shaped boxes of chocolate and bouquets of flowers, or he can take the express train by getting a woman drunk and removing her inhibitions. Today this old strategy is less socially — and, increasingly, legally — acceptable than it was in Nash's time.
But secretly drugging a woman is not, nor will it ever be, the stuff of witty couplets. It's a hideous crime, presupposing on the part of the rapist sexual desire for a corpse-like partner, and robbing a woman of her ability to fight and scream, even her memory of what happened — her words, her story.
JEFF KOWALSKY
Angela Leslie
Clearly this was a strange and particular pathology on his part. The women Cosby allegedly drugged had no problem coming to his hotel room. Many were dazzled by his talent and power. This was not the buffoon frat boy who has no hope of sexual congress short of slipping roofies in the punch. This was a wealthy, urbane man, adored by millions and at the height of his professional powers. He could have gotten these women — or others like them — to sleep with him by conventional methods, but what he seemed to prefer was the necrophiliac charge of the limp body.
In a now-notorious standup routine from 1969, Cosby joked about learning, at age 13, of Spanish Fly — the mythical tincture you could slip in a girl's drink that would allow you to do whatever you wanted to her.
Perhaps the strange nature of the alleged crimes explains why, for a long time, America didn't want to believe these women.
Of at least equal importance, our love for the man they accused was so great. The women — each, in her own way, a relatively marginal figure in the shadow of his great fame and longevity — were seen to be challenging Cosby's self-appointed role as paterfamilias to several generations of lost youth, young people in need of an at-times demanding, at-times cajoling masculine presence in their lives to encourage them toward education, hard work, achievement.
It's a role he has genuinely embraced for most of his long career. It conferred on him the moral authority of a figure for whom there was apparently a deep yearning in both the white suburbs and the black inner cities: a father who was sure of himself, entirely willing to put limits on his kids, and not particularly concerned with earning their affection.
"You are going to try as hard as you can," he tells his teenage son Theo — who has been getting D's in school — during the famous speech in the pilot episode; "I am your father… I brought you into this world, and I'll take you out of it." This wasn't Mike Brady trying to nice his kids into seeing things his way; this was different, and it stirred a wide audience and cemented Cosby's role in the popular imagination as the demanding father determined to keep his kids on the right path no matter what.
From the very first episode, he announced that he knew what was right for the wayward young black male who was becoming an increasing problem in the 1980s. When he heads up the stairs to talk to Theo, he originally grabs a baseball bat, until his TV wife Clair stops him.
So perhaps unsurprisingly, there was something deeply — and grotesquely — paternal in Cosby's relationships with many of the women who have come forward. These were young women in need of guidance, direction, encouragement. He offered them life lessons, flew them to him for career advice, doled out rent money and money orders, gave one the opportunity to write material for his act, conferred nicknames.
He reportedly told one woman that if she went to college he would give her $500 for every A she earned; called another woman a "baby" and sent her to her room when she refused him sexually, checked for "fevers" and medicated tummy aches.
He was, in their telling, America's creepiest dad, lurching around in his bathrobe while drugged women slept, then popping up at graduations to hector young people about right behavior.
Finally, the public is coming to believe the stories these women have long been telling.
We are in a strange territory, certainly — destroying a man on the strength of the words of women who had much to gain from him during their relationships with him. It is their word against his — just as it was Anita Hill's word against Clarence Thomas' and Juanita Broaddrick's against Bill Clinton's.
Throughout the long history of rape, there have been women brave enough to come forward to say, "He did this to me." When their claims take place outside of the courtroom, it has always been up to us — the listeners, the public, the unofficial judge and jury — to decide which women are lying and which are telling the truth.
Apparently we are hard to convince. And now we know how many raped women it takes to make the case against a serial rapist strong enough that most of us will believe them: a very large number of women, over a long number of years.
Flanagan, a contributing editor to The Atlantic, is the author of "Girl Land."