I would want to say yes. There’s early standup material where he jokingly says he’d love to drug women to take advantage of them. I forget the exact quote but at the time no one thought much of it but in retrospect its very telling.
Edit: Got it
Reading the joke its Spanish Fly so really he’s referring to an aphrodisiac but the point of the “joke” still is damn telling. He was openly talking about giving women stuff to sleep with them.
Anybody want to bet he takes the easy way out if he loses what will no doubt be a long, drawn-out appeal?
Hey, I saw one of those just yesterday.
“NO SELFIES!”
As has been pointed out above, he’s older than the average American male life expectancy (80, it appears). Why would he bother with suicide? He’s lived something of a charmed life, and it’s statistically likely that he’ll just not wake up one morning while the appeals process is playing out.
dRumph pardons him in 3, 2, 1…
Doubt he’d go out of his way to pardon a black man. On top of that there’s this:
In 1915, the Supreme Court indeed said, of pardons, that “acceptance” carries “a confession of” guilt. Burdick v. United States (1915). Other courts have echoed that since
The really important thing is that AFAIK, the President can only pardon federal crimes. Cosby was tried and convicted in a Pennsylvania court.
@Grey_Devil & @LurksNoMore - it just seems to me that he’s looking to try out his pardoning power, like an itchy trigger finger. Also, he would love to try to gain more POC to his side.
The fact so many of his victims couldn’t prosecute because of statutes of limitation is one of the factors that recently drove some states to change their laws so rape has no statute of limitation.
So while I feel for his victims and wish they never had to suffer, their experiences have resulted in something good.
I was curious and looked up if murder has a statute of limitations. I knew the answer but I was surprised to find there have been some rare exceptions.
Crimes considered heinous by society have no statute of limitations. Although there is usually no statute of limitations for murder (particularly first-degree murder), judges have been known to dismiss murder charges in cold cases if they feel the delay violates the defendant’s right to a speedy trial.
It’s also interesting/disappointing that rape hasn’t been considered a heinous crime against society.
Additional info on what crimes don’t have statute of limitations:
What crimes have no statute of limitation?
Murder, for example, has none. In some states sex offenses with minors, crimes of violence, kidnapping, arson, and forgery have no statutes of limitation. In Arizona and California crimes involving public money or public records have no statutes of limitation. While in Colorado, treason has none.
It makes a sick sort of sense to me. For too many people, rape has (and unfortunately continues) to be a problem for the victim. The victim’s fault, the victim’s problem, the victim’s issue to deal with. Teach potential victims to safeguard themselves and blame them if their efforts are inadequate. Don’t bother trying to change the culture that makes rape permissive. Teach the little girls to protect themselves. Don’t teach the little boys about consent and how females are real people and they are never owed sex. This is exemplified by how rape trials get conducted. What was the victim wearing or doing, was the victim drunk? Trials are too much about what the victim did or did not do and not what the rapist did. We don’t approach other crimes that way. Car theft- we don’t blame the car owner for leaving the doors unlocked. Embezzlement- we don’t let the embezzler off because the company had shoddy accounting practices.
I think this attitude derives from the idea that women were property. Property of the father and then property of the husband. It used to be (and still is in some parts of the world) that when a woman is raped, she is not the victim. Her father or husband is.*
Ugh. It’s depressing.
*Edit: I don’t mean to imply that only women are raped.
You know, this is one of those things that just sucks on multiple levels. I suppose this outcome is the right thing to happen, however.
Role model? Maybe if you only knew he was a successful person, but didn’t know anything about what he was actually like. Those of us who saw him at our graduation already knew he was a piece of crap. Here’s the details:
Ummmm… The TV show you liked as a child doesn’t matter. At all.
The public persona he constructed for himself is the reason he was seen as a role model. The Cosby Show was literally the first time people could turn on a TV and see a successful, well-adjusted black family (well, well-adjusted by sitcom standards) comprised of professionals like doctors and lawyers. As aspirational role models the Huxtables were a powerful symbol in their time.
When it became clear that Bill Cosby’s public persona was every bit as fictitious as the good doctor he played on TV it was probably inevitable that the news would be met with some degree of pushback and denial. It was a hell of a bitter truth for a lot of people to face.
Yeah, and by blinkered, self-involved bourgeois standards.
I don’t imagine Cosby and Cornel West ever got along very well.
I was talking about the family dynamics portrayed in the show. Parents that would unfailingly help their kids with homework assignments or any other issues that came up in their lives, loyal spouses who were absolutely smitten with each other even after decades of marriage, that kind of thing.
Yes, the show largely ignored serious issues of class and race in this country but then so did most sitcoms.
… except for the other ‘black shows’ (the Jeffersons/ Sanford and Son/ 227; plus the gritty detective shows like Hillstreet Blues) that focused on pretty much that all the time. I agree with your point that The Huxtables were groundbreaking, but I think because they gave both black and white audiences a chance to spend time with ‘blackness that’s no problem’.
I insist that white America wouldn’t have been able to read Obama in the 2000’s if they hadn’t trainings their eyes on the Huxtables in the 80’s and 90’s.
In that way, showing constant black pride: (the Africa necklaces, the anti-apartheid poster in Theo’s room (that the studio tried to censor), the spin off about Morehouse College and so on, was some of the most important work media personalities can do and imho as effective as any laws or policies in creating cultural change.
An exception would be when they literally sent Lisa Bonnet’s character back to Africa after appearing nekkid in a sex scene in Angel Heart.
Where is any data backing up that claim?
I think people have an unconscious bias towards something funny they once remembered fondly.
These beliefs may all be well founded but without any real supportive statistics on the matter it’s just fanboy conjecture.
Cosby’s creative works have nothing to do with anything. It’s that shit that allowed this rapist to act for so many, many years.
