Good news: Bill Cosby has resigned from the Temple University board.
US comedian Bill Cosby has resigned from the board of trustees of Temple University in Philadelphia amid ongoing allegations of sexual assault.
He said he wanted to act "in the best interests" of the university where he studied as an undergraduate.
I’m glad to hear it. Temple has a commendable mission, and Cosby was no longer a good representative for it.
I do wonder whether Temple pressured him to resign or if it was his idea. Either way, good news! I hope he faces some legal consequences as well at some point.
One of the women Cosby assaulted was at Temple, at the time. So it does look kind of bad when Trustees are raping employees. Even though it was years ago, it sends the wrong message, neh?
I always enjoyed Cosby’s work, with one exception. It’s hard to accept that someone you loved and respected could have done these things. I hope all the truth comes out and he faces real justice if they’re true.
The one exception I mentioned, a bit he did where he enthusiastically jokes about beating his children for being overly rowdy and not going to bed on time. That always struck me as off from the rest of his work.
Maybe, I should have taken it as a sign that he wasn’t as wholesome as he usually came off as.
I’ve been wondering what’s been going on inside his head of late. It seems as though he may have given up his hobby some time ago, as there aren’t any public allegations of recent assaults. And he hasn’t denied anything, he’s just kept silent. (Well, his lawyers have issued a couple of denials but they would do that.) For what it’s worth, which is not a whole lot, there may be some degree of remorse. Not sure what he can meaningfully do about it, however, other than fess up, which seems unlikely.
His routine about playing football for Temple (“Do not touch certain parts of your anatomy”) was pretty funny. This is a very sad business. BTW, as a sign of how avoidant the media were, I had never heard of these accusations until the past month. And I think of myself as pretty well informed.
When I heard the first report, I gave Cosby the benefit of the doubt. After double digits, I can no longer do that. It is very disheartening as he is such a talented comedian. Quite a terrible way to end one’s career.
Because ten is the magic number. And Cosby’s career is the important thing here.
You make me nauseous.
Just back from the grocery store (turkey-noodle soup day), and Bill Cosby is on the covers of People, Us, and The National Enquirer. And not in a good way.
The same benefit of the doubt for a much loved entertainer was given to Rolf Harris in the UK. Jimmy Savile was also much admired and so was the politician Cyril Smith. One of the reasons they got away with their crimes is because they go out of their way to be likeable and to manipulate the system. This popularity together with the power that these men have in their fields also restricts the ability of the abused to report the assaults and rapes; the victims are, without prompting, classified by the news media as liars and/or money grubbing publicity seekers.
Unfortunately I can see no easy answers to this problem.
lesherb @5,
To summarize: you gave Cosby the “benefit of the doubt” even when 9 victims had already come forward and Cosby’s comedy career is foremost in your mind well ahead of the well-being of the aforementioned victims.
That about right? Perhaps you ought to give this a good long re-think.
Can anyone with actual maths skills say how common false rape accusations would have to be in order for 9 false accusations against the same person to even be worthy of serious consideration? Even if false accusations were ridiculously common, like 50%, wouldn’t the odds of all 9 accusations being false be very low, as in under 1%?
0.195% assuming that each allegation is an independent event.
Err. 0.195% is the chance of 9 out of nine allegations being false assuming a 50% falsity rate.
For there to be a 25% chance that 9 allegations in a row were false, the false allegation rate would have to be 85.7%.
For a 50-50 chance, it’d have to be 92.6%.
0.5^9 = 0.001953125. Yep, that’s just under a fifth of 1%.
Beaten to it :-)
Thanks for the number-crunching, that definitely helps put things in perspective.
I just found out Whoopi Goldberg has been defending Cosby along with heaping blame on the victim.
Guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise from someone who said what Polanski did wasn’t rape-rape.
That is sad about Whoopi Goldberg. I hope she comes to her senses.