Thirty-Five women who have accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault are featured on the cover of New York magazine, with an in-depth essay series that gives the women a voice loud enough to cut through any remaining noise from sceptics.
The women, who range in age from 44 to 80, were, “interviewed separately, and yet their stories have remarkable similarities in everything from their descriptions of the incidents to the way they felt in the aftermath,” the introductory essay penned by Noreen Malone reads.
Malone uses the essay to bring to light not only the despicable behaviour of Cosby, but also the horrific way these women’s stories were treated, and ignored, in society. She says, “Months after his depositions, Cosby settled the case with Constand. The accusations quickly faded from the public’s memory, if they registered at all. No one wanted to believe the TV dad in a cardigan was capable of such things, and so they didn’t. The National Enquirer had planned to run a big story detailing one of the women’s accounts, but the magazine pulled it when Cosby agreed to give them a two-page exclusive telling his side (essentially that these were instances that had been “misinterpreted”).”
This powerful essay is accompanied by each of the women’s individual accounts and video accounts from six of the women including Janice Dickinson and former model and playmate Victoria Valentino.
Perhaps the most powerful of all of is the photographic portrait series by Amanda Demme, and the cover by the . The women’s photographic presence, faces clearly visible and pictured in front of blank backgrounds so as to avoid distraction, is undeniable.
Even more undeniable is the women’s horrific accounts. Barbara Bowman recalls, “I was invited down to Atlantic City to see his show and had a very confusing night where I was completely drugged and my luggage was missing. When I called the concierge to find out where my luggage was, Cosby went ballistic. He slammed the phone down and said, ‘What the hell are you doing, letting the whole hotel know I have a 19-year-old girl in my hotel suite?’ The next morning, he summoned me down to his room and yelled at me that I needed to have discretion. He threw me down on the bed and he put his forearm under my throat. He straddled me, and he took his belt buckle off. The clanking of the belt buckle, I’ll never forget.”
To add to the horror of the attacks, the women’s fears about coming forward are heartbreaking. PJ Masten says, “I told my supervisor at the Playboy Club what he did to me, and you know what she said to me? She said: ‘You do know that that’s Hefner’s best friend, right?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ She says to me: ‘Nobody’s going to believe you. I suggest you shut your mouth.’”
Tamara Green recalls, “People often these days say, ‘Well, why didn’t you take it to the police?’ Andrea Constand went to the police in 2005—how’d it work out for her? Not at all. In 2005, Bill Cosby still had control of the media. In 2015, we have social media. We can’t be disappeared. It’s online and can never go away.”
As gut-wrenching as the stories are, there is some small glimmer of hope that this kind of no-holds-barred mainstream media publication could change not only these women’s lives, by finally giving them a powerful voice, but also the lives of the countless women who have been too afraid to come forward and report sexual assault over the years. It is a gutsy move from New York magazine, and an even gutsier move on the part of the 35 featured women. Read the full story here.
