Media attention around Bill Cosby’s alleged fondness for assaulting women might be fading, but it’s not going away. Yet Woody Allen just scored a new show, despite longstanding claims of molesting children in his own family. As pundits ponder why Cosby is nose-diving whilst Allen and countless others keep chugging along, it’s time to once and for all settle the question of why Cosby’s career really tumbled.
It’s a different question from the one most feminists have asked for years – namely why nobody was holding Cosby accountable for the alleged rapes of 13 women, before the story exploded in 2014. As recently as early 2014, some journalists had all but abandoned hope Cosby’s victims would ever see justice. Ironically, the impetus for this was Dylan Farrow’s public letter of condemnation of her father Woody Allen, prompting others to point out Allen was no different from men like Cosby or Roman Polanski, whose predatory ways were well-documented, yet ignored.
Less than a year later, Cosby was out of the get-out-of-rape-free club, his career in tatters if not ruins. We know what happened – the public and media finally began paying attention. But why did it happen, now?
The most widespread assumption is the public just didn’t give a damn about 13 female survivors, and only began paying attention when a man – comic Hannibal Buress, in this case – joked about Cosby’s rapes, during a stand-up routine in October 2014. But does this hypothesis hold up to scrutiny? Buress spoke a month before the story exploded in the media, and it was in response to the much-publicised release of a new Cosby biography that infamously omitted any mention of rape allegations. Coinciding with Cosby’s equally publicised attempt at a career comeback, it guaranteed the public would want to know more about Cosby and all that rape.
Now, this alone didn’t mean Cosby’s career was doomed. After all, Allen and Polanski have dealt with similar accusations, with little overall impact on their careers. So how come Cosby is no longer part of the untouchable elite?
Three alternatives come to mind: Cosby is 1) an annoying hypocrite nobody liked anyway, 2) a person of colour and thus fair game for Hollywood elites who refuse to nominate people of colour for Oscars, or 3) really, really stupid.
Let’s explore these alternative explanations, one by one…
1) Yes, Cosby is an annoying moraliser, especially when it comes to attacking the black community. That’s why Buress had no qualms about skewering Cosby for lecturing black people whilst being a rapist. But Cosby’s not the first “family values” celebrity who acts differently from his professed morals. Fellow celebrity R. Kelly built a public image around being a devout Christian who still attends church – yet despite prosecution in 2008 for 14 counts of child pornography, his career keeps soaring, along with Allen* and Polanski’s.
* Conversely, some pundits think Allen purposely builds his public image around being a weirdo, so that nobody will feel particularly surprised, betrayed or alarmed that he might be a rapist too. That hypothesis sounds unlikely, considering it didn’t exactly protect someone like Michael Jackson from prosecution.
2) Yes, Cosby is black, and separating his downward spiral from its racial context is impossible, especially when white celebrities like Judd Apatow attack Cosby whilst ignoring predators like Allen or Polanski. But whiteness matters less than celebrity when the public decides who gets the benefit of doubt, as evidenced by the many celebrities of colour who continue to enjoy career success, despite their predatory ways. And as the case of Jian Ghomeshi demonstrates, the public will hold even white** celebrities who act as dreadfully as Cosby accountable – under the right circumstances.
3) The truth is that Cosby is stupid. His stupid-ness is the reason that future PR textbooks will cite him as a perfect example of how not to run your PR. In fact, stupidity is why Cosby’s rapes have finally exploded into public consciousness. This might be cold comfort for feminists who believe truth and advocacy are enough to secure justice – but just as Ghomeshi’s public attempt at explaining himself sapped all his credibility (after a stupider attempt at explaining himself to CBC in private), Cosby’s downward spiral is largely a function of his own incompetence, not because his victims or their advocates suddenly became better at banging their drums.
Those rape allegations Buress mentioned in his stand-up routine in October? As Buress himself pointed out, Cosby’s rapes are old news. Rather, Buress went after Cosby because Cosby himself was back in the public eye, with a planned career revival and biography coming out at the same time. Yet media outlets were already starting to question why Cosby was still silent on the issue of rape allegations. Buress poured more fuel on the fire, but the fire had already started.
A month later, Cosby decided asking millennials to make memes about him was a great idea. (It obviously worked for the NYPD.) That’s when the story exploded. As the Internet blew up with amazing #CosbyMeme rape jokes that drew international attention, Twitter mentions of Cosby jumped almost 1,000 per cent. Cosby had handed to his victims the gift of free publicity, courtesy of the dumbest PR stunt his staff could have conceived.
His victims got another boost less than a week later, when Cosby partook in an NPR interview where he somehow made himself sound even creepier than Jian Ghomeshi. Not coincidentally, Twitter mentions of Cosby doubled overnight. By midmonth, over 100,000 tweets about Cosby were flying around each day. Cosby’s rapes had essentially gone viral, and that meant there was no going back – for him or his career.
So what’s the lesson to be drawn from all this?
Sadly, it’s not an encouraging one. Predators like Woody Allen, R. Kelly, Roman Polanski and many others may never be held accountable for their actions, because they’ve avoided making the sorts of missteps that have destroyed Cosby and Ghomeshi’s careers. But is accountability really a game of waiting and hoping for a public predator to botch his PR and invite the wrath of social media on him? Again, based on how politicians can belong to a party that openly sides with rapists over survivors, but only seem to be held accountable when they botch their talking points in ways that go viral, that answer appears to be yes.
In the end, Cosby was far more responsible for his reputation’s mauling than his victims or their advocates were. Cosby miscalculated in thinking #CosbyMeme should have ever been attempted, and the fallout led to the NPR interview that cemented his image as a predator. Perhaps the lesson advocates should take from this dreadful affair is that influencing our culture to take rape allegations more seriously should take precedence over attempts to raise the alarm over individual rapists.
** Ghomeshi identifies as Persian, but given how most Persians identify as white and how no commentators have argued otherwise in Ghomeshi’s case, lumping him with esteemed colleagues like Allen and Polanski makes sense in this context.