Il faut parler de Cosby

As Episode 1 of "We Need To Talk About Cosby" (2022 release; 4 episodes of about 58 min each) opens, various talking heads offer their view of what has become of Bill Cosby these days. "The juxtaposition is just bananas", offers one. That would be the understatement of the year. We then go back in time as Cosby makes his first appearance on the Jack Paar show in 1963, and his career takes off in no time. But a dark side also emerges soon...

Couple of comments: this TV mini-series documentary is written, produced and directed by comedian W. Kamau Bell, who readily admits to having idolized Cosby as a kid (and he's not the only one). Indeed, the juxtaposition of Cosby as America's dad and Cosby as the serial rapist is hard to stomach, but the evidence as to the latter is undeniable and overwhelming, just as is his track record as one of the greatest comedians in American history. The key moments in this series are when women provide in-depth, first hand accounts of what Cosby did to them: he drugged them, and then he raped them. And then they blamed themselves (a/k/a "victim blaming"). Cosby got away with it for DECADES. How many women did he sexually assault during that span? Hundreds? Thousands? (Please note that Cosby was found guilty of sexual assault in 2018. In June, 2021, he was released on a technicality. Still that makes him a convicted felon, and not just "alleged" as IMDb lists it here.) Bottom line: this mini-series is revelatory in many ways, presenting both sides of the person that is Bill Cosby. To which I kept thinking: "how does this guy sleep at night?"

Episode 1 of "We Need To Talk About Cosby" premiered in Showtime last Sunday, and new episodes are released on Sunday evenings. (If you have SHO On Demand and SHO Anytime, as I do, all episodes are already available.) If you have any interest in Bill Cosby or how he got away with what he did for all these years, I'd readily suggest you check this out, and draw your own conclusion.

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.

Like Kamau, I grew up with Cosby. I adored Fat Albert, I laughed until I couldn't breathe listening to his comedy albums. It is incredibly heart wrenching to discover what a terrible person he was. It's also truly horrifiying to confront how many people over the years helped him keep that secret. And it's awesome in the worst possible sense of the word to realize how one person can be two utterly different people, one who does tremendous good in the world and one who is a monster. Thank you, Kamau, for this amazing and heartbreaking retrospective!

Wow. Brilliant documentary. It certainly went back in his history and further afield with his life than I expected. I learned a lot about Cosby, the man, I did not know before.

I loved him as America's dad, but that ship has passed. Author Ann Rule said to love the man but hate the deed (and she was talking about Ted Bundy!), but Cosby went way over the line.

I am very glad I watched this with an open mind. Yes, I am going to say the women were awesome! And brave.

THANK YOU, Kamau Bell!!

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,