The Fall of Bill Cosby

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It's strange but back when I was a kid watching the Cosby show, I always had an uneasy feeling about Cosby. Most people seemed to love him, but to me his mannerisms most of the time seemed on the verge of or outright sleazy, so I never really bought his America's favourite dad act.

So when the accusations against him started to appear, it was exactly like something that I'd attribute to his character. And since I try to make it a point not to judge anyone based on appearance, this actually bugged me quite a bit.

So I'm wondering, did anyone else feel the same about Cosby from the get-go, or is it just me?

 

I rarely watched the Cosby show, so I cannot comment on that. I actually liked his recorded comedy though, as he was very funny without the need to resort to cursing. That said, he is and has been a criminal and I am just glad to see that this jury managed to convict him when the other one did not.

 

The audio go through multiple city blocks just so that I the QB can fake a pass to you was one of the funniest things I've ever heard.

So Tal, what was it about his mannerisms that gave you a creepy vibe? I picked up fakeness / pretentious / preachy, but sleazy wasn't part of my perception.

 

It wasn't just one single thing and it's hard to pinpoint it now after all this time, I'd need to watch a few shows again to find examples but that'd be pretty much . It's just the general feeling towards him that I got, I guess. One of those things that you just can't shake off no matter how much you try.

 

Hardly perfect, but let's not go victim-blaming, hmmm. He apparently did this enough where there isn't any real doubt as to his guilt. He got away with it due to his fame, fortune and public persona, and it was a combination of the #metoo movement and a rather large statute of limitations for this particular rape that saw him convicted.

 

Did you miss the bit where he confessed to routinely drugging up women to have sex with them?

 

Yeah, folks, what Tal linked to. Seriously, his guilt just isn't in doubt to most people who have read up on this, the only question is whether the prosecutor could convince a jury of the guilt to the legal standard applicable for a criminal case.

Again, he's a scumbag, no matter what you think of the accusers. No one, not even some mercenary solely trying to advance her career, deserves to be drugged and raped by anyone.

 

Yes it's an order of magnitude worse. You give someone a pill under the pretense that it is something else and, instead, it causes them to be unable to resist and you have your way with them, that's rape. To address your counter-example of getting someone drunk in a bar, if you buy drinks for someone and they accept the drinks, the do so knowing what the potential impact is. (For legal analysis, we can ignore the moral issues with doing it and just assume that everyone understands the transaction involved in the alcohol consumption issue.) Presumably you are not giving someone a full glass of alcohol claiming it is water and they do not drink it not understanding it's, say, vodka. There is an obvious and marked difference between the two scenarios.

I don't think the evidence is as flimsy as you do. Apparently, the jury did not either. We weren't in the courtroom, so we don't know the full extent of the evidence, but my understanding of what was in play and the consistencies in the accuser's statements through the process lead me to conclude that there was enough to try the case.

 

dmc and any other lawyers - I'd be interested on your opinions on the law: My understanding is the conviction was mainly due to the unsealing of a sealed civil deposition where as Tal says he confessed to giving women Quaaludes in order to have sex with them. My understanding also is that the judge that unsealed the deposition did so because Cosby had been making speeches essentially laying blame for the high criminality rate in the black community on the black community itself (most importantly the "pound cake" speech) thus holding himself up as some kind of moral example.

Regardless of the truth of my understanding does it make legal sense for a judge to do such a thing and for such a reason (i.e. was the legal justification to unseal really justified)? It seems to me that Cosby would not have admitted to what he did unless he had been assured that what he said could not be used against him in some other trial. It seems legally unfair to then unseal it.

Is my understanding correct or did I get something wrong?

Not that I really care about Cosby; I don't care if a criminal is a celebrity or not.

 

There are a couple of issues here. First, the depo was unsealed prior to either of the criminal cases and was unrelated to them (although I believe it directly led to them). It was unsealed (in my understanding of the secondhand info I have read) based on Cosby's own interjection of himself back into the public on issues or morality, crimes, and other similar topics such that he, essentially, made himself a public figure on those topics. Being a public figure comes with a much diminished expectation of privacy, which forms the basis for the unsealing of the deposition. I don't disagree with that ruling and he should have just kept his mouth shut.

Then, the issue became whether the depo testimony could be used in the criminal cases. Cosby and even the DA (from the 2005 timeframe) both said that he was promised that he would not be prosecuted based on the depo testimony. The DA basically said that, at the time, he felt that the only way anyone would get some reparations out of Cosby was in the civil forum, so if he agreed not to prosecute, Cosby would not be entitled to plead the 5th amendment in order to avoid answering questions. That led directly to what was a pretty sizable civil settlement. Frankly, I think Cosby's lawyer committed malpractice there because he should have gotten it in writing (my understanding is that he didn't, for reasons that have not been explained in anything I have read). I don't know enough about criminal law to give any sort of opinion on whether Cosby could have made some sort of ineffective assistance of counsel argument on why they still should not have been able to use the depo. Maybe they made the argument and it got no traction, I just don't know.

One of my former partners represented Cosby in the first trial, but we don't speak, so I can't even ask what happened in that regard.