Would you like a pudding pop?
It turns out Bill Cosby isn’t nice Cliff Huxtable after all.
The 80-year-old actor, a fixture in American family entertainment for decades, erupted in response to a suggestion by the Montgomery County district attorney, Kevin R. Steele, that his bail should be revoked because he was a potential flight risk and owned a plane.
“He doesn’t have a plane, you asshole!” Mr. Cosby shouted. It was all the more startling coming from a man once beloved as the mild Dr. Cliff Huxtable on his hit NBC sitcom, the Jell-O pudding pitchman and the whimsical creator of the character Fat Albert.
In other news, sitcoms are not reality.
Could he appeal or is he certain to go to jail now? I want to believe he won’t get out of it but I dunno.
He’s out on bail and can appeal multiple times.
I really don’t think he’s getting out of it though. The numbers of accusers is so high, and there are other cases pending against him. He’s already had every project he was working on cancelled, so he’s already paying a price, but I don’t think he’s going to avoid prison.
We had a lot of his comedy albums (on vinyl) in the 60s. (I was born in 1955.) I loved them and thought them hilarious. I also loved I Spy. The current Accusations seem to date from about the 60’s, when he was starting to become famous.
Because I don’t need to sleep tonight, I’m wondering what was he up to before that?
He’s been able to take advantage of the disparity in image between sexual predator and genial, familiar comedian to avoid punishment til recently. For what it is worth, chigau, chances are he was just waiting for opportunities, or didn’t think in terms of taking them yet, back before he was famous. But after he was, well… fear of exposure slipped away, sense of entitlement crept upward, and the burden of resisting impulse was born entirely by scruple which was too weak a reed.
Perhaps there will be a Presidential Pardon coming up. Perhaps even a very special HSUPP – a Highly Sympatheitc and Understanding Presidential Pardon: with a gilt-edged proclamation certificate to match. In a gold frame of course.
One thing that always astounds me is this idea that a person who has a “nice guy” persona can’t be a sexual predator, a ruthless and amoral businessman, or a mass murderer. A lot of people seem to believe at some level that people who do evil things will be obviously evil people.
In part, that might be our very cultural socialization process, since we see movies in which we know that the person with the black hat is the bad guy, the guy in the red shirt will get killed on the mission to the surface of the planet, and people who are ruthless businessmen have no love in them, like Mr. Potter or Ebenezer Scrooge. We seem to believe evil shows in the face.
In reality, I suspect most sexual predators come across as genial nice-guys. That makes it easier. When I met Michael Shermer, he was quite pleasant and charming, for instance. I was reading one book that was discussing the cattle industry, and the author had pegged this one guy as a ruthless, take no prisoners businessman, but then he found out he had a family he loved and that loved him, and decided his assessment was wrong. Everything about the business practices showed the initial assessment to be correct, but he was steeped in our modern culture that seems to suggest that bad actors can never love or be loved.
@iknklast The man who assaulted me was charming, funny, intelligent and thoughtful. He was dating a friend of mine and I’d been so happy for her because they seemed like such a good match. After he attacked me and I punched him in the face (which by fluke, broke his nose), I lost a number of friends because he was able to paint me as a very troubled young woman who needed psychiatric help and it was oh so terribly sad. Nobody was interested in my side of the story, because he was such a lovely man. The picture of him as a serial sexual offender (which I believe he was, based on the skill with which he managed to separate me from my friends, there was no way it was his first time) didn’t match up to the genial image he had carefully constructed for the world.
One of the reasons I had to stop watching The Fall was how well they took this issue on. The bad guy didn’t seem like a creep, he had a normal life, even did a job that requires empathy and respect. Struck a little too close to home for me.
Cosby built his career as a night club stand-up comedian. In much the same work atmosphere as say…Lenny Bruce. Who knows how exploitative his sexual conduct might have been during those years? His albums from those years, which are indeed very funny, would never earn him status as anybody’s ‘mentor’ or substitute parent.
That television show, playing on the need for ‘role models’ and ‘positive family values’ put the fox into the hen-house. That grotesque, warm-fuzzy caricature made a perfect mask behind which the actual man could either degenerate into a monster…or perhaps develop into the predator.
Yeah, it’s unlikely that he’ll actually get the verdict overturned. The worst-case-yet-plausible scenario is the one where his attorneys successfully argue that he’s an old man who ‘doesn’t deserve to die in prison’. Of course, the only reason he is looking at the possibility of dying in prison is that he got away with his heinous conduct for so long, but the lawyers will invariably try that appeal, and a lot of judges are sympathetic to it (especially when the defendant is rich).
According to the appellate lawyers Cosby just retained, their appeal is going to be focused on the trial judge’s decision to allow 5 (out of the 19 the prosecution requested) other accusers to testify.
Normally, evidence of “prior bad acts” is not allowed, but there are some exceptions. My understanding is that these particular accusers were allowed to testify because the judge ruled their testimony would be relevant to establishing a common modus operandi (I think regarding the use of drugs, etc.).
I have no opinion on whether or not that was a correct decision or not — I don’t know the details of the ruling, and am not very familiar with that area of the law. But it’s the kind of attack that has a chance of succeeding, because (1) it’s an issue of law (or at least, a mixed question of law and fact) as to which there is less deference to the trial judge; and (2) that kind of evidence can be so influential that, if the court of appeal agrees that the trial judge erred in allowing it, then it’s hard to brush it aside as “harmless error” that did not affect the result. In fact, I seem to recall that in the original trial, the judge only allowed one other accuser to testify, and the prosecution has said that the difference in rulings had much more to do with the differing results than any change in climate from #metoo.
Of course, before any appeal is heard, there would be a sentencing hearing in the trial court, at which Freemage is probably correct that the defense will argue that Cosby is an 80-year-old partially blind man, etc. etc.
Unless you’re the accuser. Theoretically, it isn’t supposed to be allowed in those cases, but it often manages to find it’s way in – has the woman been sexually active? What was she wearing? How was she acting, standing, flirting?
I remember in the 1970s and 1980s, when that was finally considered improper for court proceedings, and women finally breathed a sigh of relief. But it seems to be back.
iknklast,
I think you’re referring to so-called “rape shield laws,” which were passed to limit the ability of defendants to pry into the sexual history of accusers. But I don’t think there’s been a trend in one direction or another, at least not in terms of the law. (There may well be a difference in terms of juror reaction — arguments that might have worked 20 years ago may not fly with jurors today, or vice versa, and that would affect defense strategies.)
The specifics will vary from one jurisdiction to another, but as an example I’ll use Federal Rule of Evidence 412 (even though most rape prosecutions are at the state level, a lot of states use federal rules as guidance for their own rule drafting). It bars “evidence offered to prove that a victim engaged in other sexual behavior” or “evidence offered to prove a victim’s sexual predisposition,” unless an exception applies. In criminal cases, the exceptions are (1) to show “that someone other than the defendant was the source of semen, injury, or other physical evidence”; (2) “evidence of specific instances of a victim’s sexual behavior with respect to the person accused of the sexual misconduct, if offered by the defendant to prove consent or if offered by the prosecutor;” and (3) “evidence whose exclusion would violate the defendant’s constitutional rights” (which is nice and vague, isn’t it?). The rule also requires the party seeking to introduce the evidence to bring a motion before trial.
So, to use your example questions, “has the woman been sexually active” is generally not a permissible area of inquiry. What she was wearing, how she was acting, whether she was flirting, at least on the “night in question,” would not be affected by such a rule, assuming it’s being offered to prove consent.
Screechy, I’m sort of thinking a bit more broadly. I do know what the law allows, and so forth, but that question of a woman’s sexual activity comes up a lot. I realize they aren’t supposed to introduce it in court, but there are ways to get it out there. The media practically obsesses on it, and bringing it up but having it cut from the record can be effective, too, because once the juror hears it, you can’t go in and erase it from his/her mind. Do lawyers play these games? I don’t know; IANAL. I imagine at least some of them do.
As for dress, the idea that clothes imply consent is a pernicious and false assumption. And many rapes happen when women are not particularly sexy in their dress, but somehow defense attorneys can make anything seem racy. (Maybe not a burqua or a nun’s habit). It’s time we start a new slogan: Clothing is not consent.
iknklast,
I think we agree that the bigger problem is not the legal rules themselves, but the assumptions and biases of the people who end up on juries, and as prosecutors, judges, police, etc.
As to this:
If you have in mind a scenario like this:
Defense Counsel: “Now, isn’t it true, Ms. Victim, that you had had a dozen sexual partners in the year before the night in question?”
Prosecutor: “Objection, that’s inadmissible under FRE 412”
Judge: “sustained.”
DC: “No further questions” (with a smug smile, knowing the jurors have heard the accusation and the damage is done)
then while I can’t say for sure, I suspect that in most courts that kind of “TV lawyer trick” would not go down that easily. (Most “TV lawyer tricks” don’t! The system is fucked up, but not quite as fucked up as drama usually likes to show. But damn, I miss the show “The Grinder”….)
There’s a lot of routine matters where yeah, you can ask the question, have an objection sustained, and get the benefit of having the jury wonder what the answer would be, and not usually get in trouble because the default rule is that you can ask whatever you want and it’s up to the other side to object. But remember that bit in Rule 412 about having to make a motion pretrial? Counsel would be pretty clearly intentionally violating a rule for a perceived tactical advantage, and would get absolutely roasted for it by any decent judge. I would think a mistrial, sanctions against the defense, and potential referral to the Bar for disciplinary action, would all be on the table. I’m sure some idiots are out there pulling such tactics, and perhaps occasionally a weak judge lets them mostly get away with it, but I’d be surprised if it was routine. But I’m at best extrapolating from my little corner of the legal world and would defer to any criminal law practioners on how the rubber really meets the road here.
At the time all this about started coming out in the open a few years ago, I remember Phylicia Rashad said that these women coming forward with accusations were part of an “orchestrated” effort to “destroy” his legacy. Cosby did that to himself. His legacy is that of a sexual predator who also happened to be a comedian. If Cosby didn’t want that as his legacy, he shouldn’t have started raping women. Simple. Nobody held a gun to his head. Nobody forced him to do this. He knew enough to conceal and then later deny doing it, so he knew it was wrong.
“…the guy in the red shirt will get killed on the mission to the surface of the planet…”
WHAT! No spoiler alert? Gee, thanks.
Part of the problem, I suspect, is that people’s “ability to assess character” (or however you want to think of it) has developed over a very long time. Humans are social creatures, right? Maybe we could even be described as pack (or herd) animals – there’s an awful lot of pressure for a kind of “social consensus”, everyone has to agree about how something/someone is perceived, otherwise those who think they should be in charge will make everyone else’s life an utter misery. Especially those who are obsessed with social status, and utterly convinced of their own brilliance…
How does this apply to Cosby? Well, our ability to assess character mentioned above has been around for a long time, but television has not. Lots of people are mistaking the character they’ve seen on the screen for the man behind the mask. They’re treating this as if it were a social setting where they’re hanging out with the guy, when they’re actually watching a carefully crafted performance. Lots of women know that it’s a performance, but an awful lot of men seem not to realise that – possibly because they simply don’t have to worry about being targeted by (male) predators in the same way.
Rather like how a lot of actors play bullies/baddies because of what they look like, but everyone says they’re so wonderful to work with off-screen, so gentle and courteous, and so on. Dudes just don’t get why a friend/girlfriend doesn’t want anything to do with a particular friend of theirs – “ but he’s always been fine with me!” (“Because you’re a dude and he doesn’t want to “have sex” at you”…), and guys generally are not good at working out if someone’s potentially a problem, because deep-down they seem to believe that they can beat up that “problem” if they want, and anyway, they don’t trust women’s assessments of safety/danger. They tend to think we’re making a fuss about nothing, right up until we get killed by the creepy stalker. At that point, the dudes go “but why didn’t she ask for help?!”, and every woman in hearing range sprains her eyes rolling them.
So many of the people who have been frantically defending Cosby seem to have committed a kind of fallacy – perhaps we could describe it as: The Actor is not the Character? This fallacy seems to result from that assessment of behaviour above – mistaking seeing someone on screen for seeing them in your local social settings – and this is probably completely unconscious in the majority of cases. This is why some of us have tentatively tied it into the social behaviour mentioned right at the start of this ramble. It’s also connected to the people who think that they are “really good judges of character” – the problem being that this *doesn’t actually apply to fictional characters*, only to the individual in a general setting. The error is to judge the character as the person, not understanding that what’s presented on screen is a carefully crafted *fiction*.
What’s revealing is how desperate so many dudes have been to minimise that behaviour – “ZOMG Feminazis! Nobody died!” – but many women were hurt and betrayed (at the very least), and yet again, we’re told that we don’t matter. Only the doodz matter. A large number of guys seem to admire that creepy, rapey behaviour, given how they’re desperate to excuse it at any opportunity. How many of them think that’s great? It’s interesting how there’s always a frantic backlash whenever women dare to assert our humanity, to say that we’re not toys which exist entirely for dudes, I mean, just look at what happens to anyone who dares question porn! It’s almost as if a large majority of men really do think that women and girls exist for their entertainment!