Chasing Cosby

INTRODUCTION: COSBY’S GIFT

One Friday night not long ago I was flipping through channels on my television when I came across a rerun of The Cosby Show. There on my screen was the loveable, sweater-clad Dr. Cliff Huxtable, sitting between his son, Theo, and his wife, Claire, in a learning specialist’s office. Theo had done poorly on a Greek mythology test that week, even though he knew the material, so all three were meeting with the specialist, who thought Theo should be tested for dyslexia. If Theo does indeed have it, she assured the Huxtables, he could get help to overcome the learning disorder.

“Dyslexia!” Cliff says with a relieved smile on his face, gratified to know why his son was struggling in school. “Now fix it!” he quips, jubilant. Cue the laugh track.

Like millions of other Americans who helped make the comedy one of the most popular shows in the history of television, I became a fan of The Cosby Show when it first aired in the 1980s. It debuted my senior year of high school, the same year my older brother died, and watching the show gave me an escape out of my own, fraught home and into the cozy normalcy of a family not traumatized by death. For me the Huxtables were a thirty-minute visit to a warm and stable world, where the kids would borrow each other’s clothes without permission and sneak out to concerts, all while the parents lovingly guided them with witty life lessons. My own mother was nearly paralyzed with grief over the loss of her only son, and my father had all he could do to hold her together while juggling the demands of a job that took him out of town two or three nights a week. The Cosby Show was steady. The Cosby Show made me feel safe.

Watching the show again brought me back for a moment to that time in my life, and I mean that in a good way. Cliff Huxtable’s tough-love parenting style, sprinkled with humor, also reminded me of my own father. And this episode was particularly tender—it revealed a dad who worried for his son while at the same time acknowledging his own flaws as a parent. When Theo tells his parents he is indeed dyslexic, Cliff and Claire erupt in cheers.

What I also appreciated, though I didn’t know it when I was a teenager, was that the show was never overly saccharine—funny, yes, but not hyper-sentimentalized. In this episode Vanessa chastises Cliff for calling Theo “lazy” all those years when it was really dyslexia holding him back, and Cliff doesn’t laugh her off; he knows she’s right. Then, when Theo later proudly reveals he got a B-plus on his next test, Cliff couldn’t be prouder. “I think he should probably finish undergraduate school in two years because there’s no sense in holding him back in going to medical school and becoming what? Dr. Huxtable Jr.!”

“Theo’s Gift” had heart, intelligence, and humor, a recipe that was the show’s hallmark. It was real and familiar. I’d watched my own father and brother engage in similar battles throughout my childhood—although, unlike Cliff and Theo, they were never able to resolve their issues before my brother’s death. When Bill Cosby’s son died young too, I couldn’t help but feel an emotional connection to him—his love for his family, the grief he must have felt. I mourned with him.

That night, watching the rerun while my husband, used to my fascination with Cosby by now, read a book, I found myself mesmerized, laughing along with the jokes, smiling at the warm-hearted moments. And horrified too. Because now, all these years later, I knew that the Bill Cosby on my screen—with his dad jokes and self-deprecating style of imparting wisdom to his kids, the man who left an entire generation wishing he was their father—was also a monster.

A monster who preyed on women, manipulating them into a false sense of security, drugging them, and assaulting them. And masquerading as Cliff Huxtable—the personification of the family-oriented, warm comedy he’d been performing for decades—was the perfect disguise.

For nearly half a century, enabled by a cadre of paid handlers and silencers who did their jobs protecting his carefully honed image, Bill Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted women who thought he was their mentor. He slowly and carefully coaxed each one into feeling safe and cared for and then left them to pick up the pieces of their lives.

I WAS STILL A believer in the Bill Cosby/Cliff Huxtable myth in 2005, when Andrea Constand first told the police what Cosby had done to her. I was working as a reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News, a tabloid-style daily that was part of the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain, when I first heard that a woman had accused Cosby of drugging and sexually assaulting her. Along with the rest of America, I was shocked. And itching to disbelieve. Not the Cos! I thought. But then my boss assigned me the story, and I began reporting.

I made calls. I asked questions. I read files.

I grew more and more astounded.

With every conversation, every interview, every new source, the validity of the charges came to light. The women who spoke out were credible. Crimes had been committed, and it didn’t matter that the perpetrator was one of America’s most beloved cultural icons. The truth had to be revealed.

So I wrote about the case. I wrote and wrote—about Andrea Constand, the court filings, the evidence, the other accusers. The more I wrote about the case, the more the story spread and other news outlets picked it up and broadcast the details I’d reported.

I was thrilled to see my stories go out on Knight-Ridder’s wire service. But Cosby, obviously, was not. It wasn’t long before Cosby’s attorney, Marty Singer, threatened to sue my newspaper. Then the prosecutor on the case made veiled threats to have me arrested.

Meanwhile other media outlets were stepping away from the scandal. Maybe they were too skeptical, I surmised at the time. Or maybe they were too afraid. Cosby had always had an uneasy, often adversarial relationship with the press, and few were eager to take him on. “Newspaper columnists have been… reluctant to join the fray,” wrote Tony Norman, a columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “Who can blame us? Nobody wants to incur the wrath of Cos over what may turn out to be a frivolous charge.”

But I couldn’t give it up. I believed Andrea. And the lies that I believed Cosby’s attorneys were telling about her infuriated me. Cosby’s power and influence may have swayed other reporters and editors, but my editors supported me as I dug deeper into the research and the slowly unfolding truth: while Cosby was enjoying the adoration of a public who loved his down-to-earth, no-profanity comedy routines, television shows, and Jell-O pudding pop commercials, cementing his image as America’s Dad, he was also leading a dark, secret life cultivating friendships with young women by promising them mentorship and connections and then waiting until they felt secure to drug and violate them.

BILL COSBY CHOSE his victims carefully, with the instincts of a predator. He chose young, vulnerable, star-struck women, many of them budding actresses, models, and singers, all of them in less powerful positions than him, blinded by his squeaky-clean reputation, and whom, he knew, would not be believed should they come forward with their tales of mentorship and betrayal run amok.

He used the same technique, over and over again.

First, he’d befriend a young woman he’d met either through their agent or by chance. She might be an aspiring model or actress or just a pretty young woman dazzled by his attention and confident he was who he seemed to be. His status as a beloved celebrity created instant trust.

He’d ask them about their lives and offer advice, auditions, and help with their careers. He might even meet their mom, flattering her with praise for her children or inviting her to a performance at which he’d roll out the red carpet with backstage passes and premium seats and pose for a picture or two. Perhaps he’d come to a family dinner, praising the home-cooked meals of a hardworking grandmother and bringing ice cream to offer the children. And Jell-O pudding pops.

Then, when the time was right, he’d entice them into an environment he controlled—a hotel room, his dressing room, his own house, or even a friend’s home that he was borrowing—and he’d slip a drug into a drink or offer “cold medicine.” Several hours, a day, or even two days later the woman would wake up, bruised and disoriented, with her clothes off and a strange sense that violence had been done.

Andrea Constand was the first to publicly accuse Cosby of both drugging and sexually assaulting her, but soon after, thirteen other women came forward with similar stories. They were drugged and then assaulted or he tried to drug or assault them. All of them said Bill Cosby—that lovable, wholesome father figure—was a not who we thought he was. They were the original #MeToo women, long before there was a movement, speaking out to support Andrea by calling out their own truth against a powerful, wealthy, influential man.

These years of reporting on Bill Cosby’s crimes have taught me the dangers of deifying celebrities. We don’t know who they truly are; we see only what they allow us to see. Their images are carefully managed. The peeks and glimpses we get through interviews they give are so well orchestrated that we never realize there is a man (or woman) behind the curtain, pulling the strings.

It’s not just celebrities, though. We assume someone is a good person just because they excel in one area, a cognitive bias called the “halo effect.” We thought O. J. Simpson was a good person because he was a football star, refusing to believe he was capable of the type of violence his wife, Nicole, reported. We assumed former Penn State defensive coach Jerry Sandusky was a saint because he adopted foster children and founded a charity for at-risk boys, never suspecting it was merely a façade he created and cultivated to cover up his sexual abuse of young boys. The same goes for Catholic priests, Boy Scout leaders, gymnastics team doctors, and others who used their positions of trust in the community to get away with unspeakable crimes for years on end.

And for Bill Cosby.

WHEN ANDREA FIRST spoke out, Cosby was one of the most famous and powerful entertainers in the country, if not the world. His long, seemingly happy marriage to Camille, the mother of their five children, only added luster to his picture-perfect image as a devoted husband and father. He counted South African president Nelson Mandela and civil rights pioneers Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton among his friends. He cherished his role as a humanitarian and educational philanthropist, donating millions to charities and colleges alike while chalking up numerous awards, including the Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime achievement in the performing arts and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Nearly sixty colleges and universities across the country had showered him with honorary degrees. (Many of these awards and more than half of these degrees would later be stripped from him, one by one.)

He broke cultural and racial barriers, becoming the first African American to costar in a TV show with his first role in I Spy, for which he won three Emmys. He’d written best-selling books about parenthood, and he based much of his Grammy Award–winning comedy routine—later used to develop The Cosby Show—on his folksy, relatable experiences as a father and husband. His fame—and wealth—continued to grow as he became the pitchman for products such as Jell-O and Coca-Cola. “The three most believable personalities are God, Walter Cronkite, and Bill Cosby,” Anthony Tortorici, Coke’s PR chief, told Black Enterprise magazine in 1981.

And Andrea’s allegations in 2005 did little to tarnish the public perception of him. He was inducted into the NAACP Image Awards Hall of Fame in 2006 and, in 2010, awarded the National Football Foundation’s gold medal, which each year recognizes “outstanding Americans” for their “honesty and integrity.” He was honored with the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2009 and the Johnny Carson Award for Comedic Excellence in 2014 and was made an honorary chief petty officer by the US Navy, which he’d served in from 1956 to 1960, in 2011.

He had amassed a mountain of accolades.

Maybe that’s why the rest of the media didn’t seem to want to believe the drugging and sexual assault accusations.

Honestly, at first, neither did I.

But I saw there was another truth.

I became as determined as ever to find out new information or get interviews no one else had. The crime itself was just so chilling, the method so diabolical. These women were powerless. They couldn’t fend him off, let alone walk away—the drugs he gave them made that impossible. And no one seemed to realize how dangerous it is to give someone a drug without their knowledge or consent. What if they were allergic to it or it interacted badly with another intoxicant or drug in their system? What if they got into a car and drove after being drugged and got into an accident? Someone could have died.

During my journey I have wrestled with so many questions about Bill Cosby, and I still do: Who is he as a human being, really? How could someone who’s done so much good in this world do so much evil at the same time?

As a journalist, I wanted the details. I wanted facts and answers. Instead of seducing women, the way most “casting couch” Hollywood stars might, why did Cosby drug them? Could he be a somnophiliac—someone who can only have sex with an unconscious person?

How many people in Hollywood knew what Cosby was doing and stayed quiet? And why? Are there other victims who have not yet come forward? How many—six more? Sixty? Why did this scandal take hold in 2014 but not in 2005?

And as a woman in America, I also have questions about the culture we live in. Why is there a visceral distrust of sexual assault claims—from the public, the media, and the criminal justice system—unlike any other violent crime?

I explore all these questions in Chasing Cosby and offer my reflections as well on how fear, bullying, and intimidation helped silence these women, as we’ve seen play out in countless other examples of powerful men who were able to keep their sexual misconduct secret for decades.

The Cosby story is a lens through which we can look inward at our own beliefs and prejudices and how it influences who we choose to believe and why, who we choose to idolize and why.

Ultimately, though, this is a David-and-Goliath–like tale of courage; of one woman who stood up to her attacker; of her mother, whose fierce love for her daughter transcended her fear of confronting a beloved national icon; of her attorneys, whose two-woman firm proved to be more than a match for some of the biggest sharks in the legal world; and of the prosecutors, who finally listened to what all of them had to say and arrested America’s Dad.

But first let me take you back to January 2005, when it all began.