I’m Starting to Wonder if There’s Anyone Bill Cosby Hasn’t Raped

Yeah, that title will probably get people sending hate comments without reading everything else I’m going to write, but I’m leaving it.

In case you’re part of my massive Amish following and don’t have access to the internet, let me recap what’s going on.

This is Bill Cosby.

 

He is an American comic who is best known for his roll as Dr. Cliff Huxtable on the Cosby Show. At one time, he was the highest paid actor on American television.  The next few facts are pertinent to the story that follows.

A well known comedian made a joke about Bill Cosby being a serial rapist
A few previously reported (but never prosecuted) sexual assault allegations resurfaced
New allegations began surfacing, though every one was well past the SOL
Enter the viral lynch mob

Look, I’m not saying I know the truth. Whether people are exaggerating or whether Bill Cosby deserved the number one spot on the sex offender’s registry, there is one simple problem with all of these stories.

That simple problem is that the American people adopted a well known maxim, and based our entire legal system on in. I’ll put it down in the original Latin, from chapter 4 of my old criminal law textbooks

cum per rerum naturam factum negantis probatio nulla sit

For those of us who don’t speak a thousand year old dead language, I slapped that into Google translate and this is what I got back

The proof lies upon him who affirms, not upon him who denies

Or to shorten it for all you die hard Law and Order fans…innocent until proven guilty. Look, even though that maxim sometimes allows bad people to go free, I stand behind it. I stand behind it because of this.

As a logical thinker, I know it’s virtually impossible to prove a negative. For example, I can’t prove that I’m NOT a terrorist. I could point out that I’m an American born girl who holds no extremist beliefs. I could point out that I have no affiliation with any known terrorists. I could point out that my knowledge on how to make both a pipe bomb and mustard gas results from research for my novels and I never intend to use any of this knowledge to hurt anyone.

In a country where ‘guilty until proven innocent’ prevails, that last sentence alone would be enough to convict me. After all, I can’t prove I’m NOT a terrorist, so I must be one. Otherwise, why would I need to know how to make a pipe bomb or mustard gas?

I don’t want to live in a place where logic like that is considered valid.

Right now, Bill Cosby is in the same situation. He can’t prove that he’s not a rapist…so he must be. Other than testimonial evidence, there is nothing. There is no physical evidence, no hospital reports, no lab collections, no security cameras, no eye witness testimony, nothing except for the first person reports of various women who waited more than 30 years to report a crime had taken place.

The women who are coming forward now are not going to fix anything. It’s way too late to have the man charged for these alleged crimes and it’s way too late to provide any real proof. Many of them are coming forward now, saying “I was too scared in the 1960’s, 1970s, 1980s, to come forward. Bill Cosby was a powerful man!”

Actually, he was a popular comic in the 60s and 70s, but he was by no means powerful. Let’s be honest, he was a black man in the United States during a time when people still used words like ‘colored’ and thought movies made in black face qualified as art.

Hell, when Kobe Bryant was accused of rape in the early 2000s people were damn quick to start organizing protests and demands for his arrest despite extremely limited evidence. Are you trying to tell me that people were actually more tolerant of the alleged illegal actions of a black man two decades earlier, when they had the nuts to put out movies like “Soul Man”?

Let’s admit that our country has a history of separating ‘the power of a black man” from “the power of a man.” Whether innocent or guilty, if a woman had accused Bill Cosby of rape and taken him to court, he would have been destroyed by the media, simply based on the color of his skin alone, in the 1980s.

So don’t use the excuse “but he was so powerful!”He was not a Bill Cheney, who could shoot a friend in the face, and then write it off as a hilarious drunk hunting story.

I know I sound aggressive and angry, and in a way I am. I’m angry because these women are turning real issues into an SNL punchline, while they do nothing for real victims, who had the real courage to stand up and face their real attackers when they could actually do something about it.

In the decades after their alleged attacks, didn’t they think, just once, that Mr. Cosby would be likely to do something like this again? Didn’t they think that maybe if they came forward sooner, when such a crime was still criminally prosecutable, even if they had lost, their case might have acted as a deterrent? They might have prevented Bill Cosby from allegedly victimizing another person.

Instead, they waited until it was far too late to do anything about it, far too late to prove their cases and far too late to stop it from happening again. Bill Cosby is 77-years-old for god’s sake and he hasn’t done anything notable since “Kids Say the Darndest Things.” He no longer has the power or the influence he once did. He no longer has the ability to victimize someone that he once did.

What the hell is the point now? If it’s closure, it’s a shitty, and ultimately selfish, goal.

Here’s my problem with our American rape culture; sometimes, men are innocent. Sometimes, a woman reports a rape, despite the fact that a rape never happened. And suddenly, our justice system turns from innocent until proven guilty to guilty until proven innocent.

Once a man is painted with the rapist brush, even if he is exonerated, he can never really clear his name. He might escape with no prison time, but he’ll always be dirty in the eyes of the public. “Sex offender” is a worse label than “murderer” in this country, even if you were never actually convicted.

If I had my choice, I’d rather be a convicted murderer than an accused rapist. The public would be more forgiving.

So yes, I will probably be accused of victim blaming, but I’m going to say it. I don’t think it’s brave to come forward 40 years after your alleged assault. I find it suspect and I think it’s an insult to real survivors, who did the right thing and bravely reported their assaults to the police, before facing their accusers in court and making them pay, criminally (not with a hefty monetary settlement) for what they did.

Reporting decades late, taking money from your alleged attacker, that does not make you look good. It does not make you look credible. It makes you look like an opportunist and it casts shades of doubt on every single woman after you who is really victimized.

If Bill Cosby really is a rapist, if he has recent victims who have actual physical evidence of their assaults, your 40 year old testimony is not going to help them. Instead, it’s going to make real victims look like women who just jumped on the “Bill Cosby raped me” bandwagon. You’re not helping anyone.

Both sides of the story always deserve to be told, but they need to be told on a timely basis. Witnesses die, memories change and old events become fuzzy. These women who are accusing Bill Cosby of rape 40 years after it happened aren’t helping anyone. Instead, they could possibly be smearing an innocent man’s reputation or a current victim’s case. We don’t know, but we continue to attack.

I’m a logical person. I like facts. The facts are this. There are none. We have no unbiased testimony. Instead, we have reports from women who may or may not be lying. We have reports of Bill Cosby settling cases for money. Let’s be honest. If I was a famous, family oriented man, and a woman accused me of sexually assaulting her, I’d probably pay just to keep my reputation intact. A criminal sexual assault case, no matter how unfounded, would have destroyed his career. I give a shit how powerful he is. We’ve seen far more powerful people be brought down by much less.

Monetary settlement is not admission of guilt. In fact, when I was an insurance litigator, we used to settle stuff for ‘nuisance value’, even when we knew the claim was bullshit, because it just wasn’t worth going to court.

On the flipside, if I was a woman who’d been sexually assaulted, there is absolutely no amount of money you could pay to shut me up.

To me, the evidence that is there is not enough. That means the Bill Cosby is innocent until proven guilty. The testimony of women who might have ulterior motives, who offer no physical evidence, is not enough for me.  So no, I won’t villanize Bill Cosby and I won’t jump on the hate bandwagon just because some women are choosing to bring their cases to the media. In the media, the rules of court don’t apply. There is no jury and plenty of people are ready to accuse people of ‘perpetrating a rape culture’ just for disagreeing with them.

I like our legal system the way it is. I like the fact that I don’t have to prove I’m NOT something based on flimsy and circumstantial evidence, presented by people who might have a vested interest in my conviction. So you want me to jump on the Bill Cosby hating bandwagon, I ask only one thing.

Prove your case rather than trying someone in the media and expecting the opinions of 1,000,000 people who don’t know all the facts to argue it for you.  Accept the fact that this is an innocent until proven guilty society. So report the crime when it happens, accept the backlash and keep the real perpetrators from victimizing someone again.

Rape isn’t a platform. It’s a crime. But reporting a rape that didn’t really happen in order to get attention and smear someone’s name is also a crime. It’s called fraud and it ruins just as many lives as rape. Just ask Bernie Madoff.

If you didn’t have enough faith in the intelligence of the American people 40 years ago, when you might have actually had some evidence to support your story, how can you really expect us to side with you now?

I won’t believe you because you’re a man. I won’t believe you because you’re a woman. I’ll believe you when you present some facts. That is the basis of our legal system and I stand behind that. It’s part of being a logical American.