The Evil Behind Cosby And Polanski: Can We Overcome Our Long, Painful History Of Rape And Power?

This week’s extraordinary cover story by reporter Noreen Malone and photographer Amanda Demme in New York magazine, in which 35 women come forward to accuse Bill Cosby of rape or sexual assault – in considerable and often wrenching detail — ought to dispel the last shreds of doubt or ambiguity around the legendary comedian. To protect our proprietors and shareholders, journalists are still required to describe the charges against Cosby as unproven allegations, especially since he will almost certainly never face prosecution for any of them. I’m going to abide by those rules for those reasons, although they’re clearly ridiculous. None of the excuses or rationalizations floated over the years by Cosby’s defenders seem remotely sustainable in the face of all that overwhelming first-person testimony.

Given that the known number of Cosby accusers now approaches four dozen (11 more women were interviewed by New York’s reporters but declined to be identified), it requires either prodigious imagination or a prodigiously low opinion of women to suggest that they were all cases of misinterpretation or drunken consensual sex or conspiracy to blackmail or shameless promiscuity or sociopathic distortion of reality. If anyone in this terrible story has a distorted perception of reality, it isn’t the women who have spent years or decades struggling with the fact that they had been shamefully abused by an iconic and beloved celebrity.

But Bill Cosby is just one person, depraved as he may be, and the thorny moral questions posed by the slow and dreadful unraveling of his public persona as America’s dad go well beyond him. This might sound like an antiquated conception, but the whole Cosby story offers an opportunity for tremendous moral education and clarification to everyone in our society, I think, because the whitewashing of Cosby’s alleged crimes was a collective cultural phenomenon. That moment ought to have particular resonance for men and for members of the media, who have long observed a half-conscious code of silence when it came to male public figures, have often viewed the testimony of women as inherently unreliable, and have often lured themselves into a theological understanding of sexual consent as a profound mystery understood only by God.

But our moment of moral clarity will only pay benefits if we’re honest about the things we still don’t understand. Some questions have now been answered in the Cosby story, but other, bigger ones loom ahead. These are all interconnected, but we can start by describing them separately. How widespread is this kind of behavior among prominent and powerful men? Are there numerous other examples of male celebrities who have repeatedly abused women (or men, for that matter), but who have been more successfully insulated by layers of intimidation and money? Why was Cosby protected so assiduously by so many people for so long, when in retrospect the truth has been visible for years? Last comes a question that may seem peripheral but I think is fundamental: Why is Bill Cosby apparently convinced that he is not a rapist?

Now I’m going to turn those questions around, because the answer to that last one is easy (if profoundly uncomfortable) and because it leads to a greater understanding of the others. Some people have speculated, in the wake of this overwhelming wave of similar anecdotes, that Cosby may suffer from mental illness, or a pathological state of denial in which he does not remember or understand his own actions. I wouldn’t know, but it doesn’t have to be that complicated. Bill Cosby doesn’t think he’s a rapist because, under the terms of his own moral code, he is not a rapist.

I know exactly how that sounds. To be clear, I am not saying that the difference between right and wrong is purely a question of interpretation, and that Cosby is entitled to his own definition of rape. I’m saying that he is a product of a particular historical understanding of human sexuality and the essential nature of male-female relations, which is now widely seen as unacceptable but which continues to plague us. He is not the only person who is profoundly confused about these shifting codes and meanings, and that confusion represents a much larger problem. I’m also saying that we boil these questions down to unchanging absolutes about right and wrong at our peril; if we attempt to deny that morality is a mutating social process rather than an inflexible set of laws, we are likely to miss the most important lessons of the Cosby story.

These questions of perception and definition come up repeatedly in the first-person accounts of Cosby accusers compiled for that New York story. Malone observes that in his infamous “Quaalude deposition,” responding to the 2005 assault allegations made by Andrea Constand, “Cosby seemed confident that his behavior did not constitute rape.” He depicted himself instead as a rakish womanizer who was deeply attuned to “people and their emotions in these romantic sexual things.” In many cases the survivors of Cosby’s alleged assaults did not understand what had happened to them as rape until much later. In the words of Joan Tarshis, who says that Cosby raped her in 1969, “Back then, rape was done in an alleyway with somebody holding a knife to your throat that you didn’t know.” But the shifting legal and cultural understanding of rape, and the decades of feminist struggle that introduced unfamiliar concepts like date rape and marital rape into everyday usage (along with the fact that most rape victims know their assailants), are only one aspect of our agonizingly slow moral evolution.

Bill Cosby is not an isolated case or an anomaly. I don’t just mean that movie stars and tycoons and politicians have done the same things he allegedly did (or worse) as far back as we can see, although that’s clearly true too. Many people in Hollywood will tell you privately that the reason film-industry insiders were not more exercised by the case of Roman Polanski was that it did not strike anyone as unusual or especially egregious, at least compared to other stories they had heard from the rumor mill. In this reading, Polanski got caught for doing something once that Cosby has allegedly done dozens of times: Drugging a young woman into insensibility and raping her. To conclude the Hollywood-insider narrative, Polanski was a confused European whose wife had recently been murdered and who simply didn’t understand how the game was played. If he had gotten hold of the right lawyer and the right fixer the next day and written a sufficiently large check, it would have been just another ugly secret swept under the showbiz carpet.