Der Fall Bill Cosby

This thoughtful and intelligent look at the complexity of the legacy of Bill Cosby is a must see. While the creator, W. Kamu Bell, makes it clear about his opinion of the guilt of Cosby, that does not stop him from doing two important things. The first is to provide a platform for a wide variety of opinions on Cosby and his legacy. The second is highlight the positive and negative impacts in a societal and personal way. There are a tons of interviews of people who have first hand accounts, were influenced by Cosby, and experts in the industry. The footage of Cosby on television, in standup, and in movies, makes this worth seeing alone. It is an archive of great film and television. One of the complexities of this project is that as it was completed there was a dramatic change in the legal proceedings against Cosby-which extended the project. I have seen Bill Cosby several times live. He was amazing. His impact on the world was amazing. That doesn't change by my belief that he did terrible things. It is complex. I don't have an opinion more than that people are more than any one thing they do, or don't do.

I've always believed human beings have a darker side. (Even the Force of "Star Wars" has its dark side.) The hope is that the darker side doesn't dictate our behavior. Shockingly , one of America's most beloved iconic entertainment figures, Bill Cosby, had a dark side that controlled secret criminal behavior when he was off-camera. Cosby the entertainer and Cosby the predator appear to be two very different people occupying the same body.

When the truth about Cosby's sexual assaults, not just adultery mind you, was exposed, I was stunned. I had "Himself" on video and many of his comedy albums. I had watched "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids" when I was a pre-adolescent kid. He was one of the funniest and most entertaining figures in American entertainment, one who always came off as unpretentious and good-natured. He also seemed to have a high sense of morality until he began ranting about the shortcomings of the African-American community as if they were some kind of monolithic entity. Interestingly shortly after his "rantings" began, the accusations of sexual assault avalanched into the mainstream media when dozens of female victims came forward.

This documentary produced by W. Kamau Bell in four parts is a retrospective on Cosby the lovable entertainer and Cosby the secret predator. Bell's approach is excellent being both a comedian and a commentator-presenter on CNN often producing down-to-earth stories concerning race in America. There is little "script" as the documentary is essentially "written" mostly by the interviewees with occasional comments and narration by Bell. Women and men involved with entertainment, comedy, and show biz news discuss the man they thought he was and who he turned out to be including some fellow comedians and even actors who had worked with Cosby on previous shows. The main bulk of the discussion is with female victims who tell their stories about how Cosby sexually assaulted them. The reason their stories are so very plausible is because of the striking similarities between the incidences.

Cosby had a ready-made sequence concerning how he went about his criminal business. Often Cosby would "invite" a young woman to some kind of social gathering, the understanding being that it was to help the young actress meet people in the industry. But when she came to Cosby's home or hotel, no one else was there but Cosby. He would then offer the girl some sort of beverage often accompanied by a barbiturate. She would lose consciousness and Cosby would have his way with her. She would wake up many hours later disoriented but knowing she had been a victim of rape or some kind of sexual assault at the very least.

In one instance, she asks Cosby what happened and he would tell her to use the phone to call a cab, which tells us he was also misogynistic. He didn't care at all about the girls he assaulted. They were just his playthings to be cast off when he was finished. This fact makes the accusations even more disturbing that he wasn't this kind-hearted fatherly figure but a malicious felon who cared nothing about his victims. So unlike America's Dad of the television show of the 1980's, arguably the highest rated show of that decade.

For perspective I was a Cosby fan. Not so much of the 1980's television show, but his stand-up comic routines, and some of the cartoons. I grew up with "The Electric Company" and "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids", the latter probably my favorite ongoing show with Cosby. I also own many of his stand-up comic albums.

The one show which forever solidified my admiration for Cosby was the HBO special "Himself" which I happened upon accidentally at my grandparent's house. (They were HBO subscribers but my family wasn't.) I began watching this program and I was stunned. To say it was funny and introspective is almost an under-exaggeration. So many of the stories I identified with as a kid. The story "Chocolate Cake" for breakfast made me laugh so hard I was almost gasping for breath. Still possibly the greatest comedic performance of introspective and storytelling humor ever broadcast on cable television. And yet this same man who seemed to know everything about human nature was not as introspective and self-analyzing on "himself" as we thought.

He was definitely both, monumentally important to black lives in the 60s and beyond, and a real monster to individual women. Horrible human being with two faces.

In the late 1970s, I went to a comedy club with my housemate, a woman from Philadelphia. I thought the young comics were great, but pretty raunchy. On the way home, I joked that there weren't any funny comics who didn't rely on dirt jokes.

She said, "Well, there's Cosby, He doesn't tell dirty jokes, but he acts like a dirty man. He put his hands on my friend when she went to see him,"

The cab pulled up to our building at that time, and we were distracted by paying the cab driver and getting out the flat keys. That was the end of it.

By 1985, I had moved across the country, gotten married, and gotten involved with showing dogs. My dog did well, and it wasn't until the Southwest finals that I found out it was the same breed that Cosby owned. In fact, my dog was from a litter by the same sire and dame that Cosby owned, which made our dogs brother and sister. I was grooming my dog backstage at the show, when I heard Cosby was visiting the private staging room next to the show ring,

One of the other dog owners knew him, and asked if I wanted to meet him. My husband said he would watch my dog if I wanted to go, and I started off to the staging room. Just then, a woman stepped in front of me and said, "Don't be alone with him. Take your husband with you. It isn't safe."

I only tell you these stories because I am not a model, beauty pageant winner or a showgirl. I am a 70 year old woman who isn't the least bit involved in show biz, And, I am telling you that, to young women in the 1970s and 1980s, Cosby's perfidy was the least kept secret in the United States. If I knew, everyone knew. I was no one special.

Why didn't anyone out him? Women tried. They were humiliated.

And, let's be honest, no one wanted to believe that a decent black man would do the things those two women told me he did. No one in my liberal, white and black circle of friends wanted it to be true. And we knew he wouldn't be prosecuted if he were arrested.

We hate Hugh Hefner and we hated that sexism, but there was no way to fight it. We just worked on passing the ERA.

I'm glad Cosby got caught. I wish he were still in prison. But, more than anything, I wish he hadn't been a monster who let down all the people who believed in him,

There's nothing new in this documentary, if you have been paying attention. But most people aren't paying attention, which is how Cosby got away with it so long,

He may be free on a legal technicality, but as director W. Kamau Bell points out in this four-part documentary, his legacy cannot be simply ignored. Bell recognizes the need to re-examine Cosby's life and groundbreaking career through the lens of the comedian's self-admitted behavior as a narcissistic sexual predator. Not only does Bell have some of the survivors recount their unsavory encounters with Cosby, but he also secures others well-versed with his deep cultural impact and challenged by how to reconcile the two Cosbys that co-exist.