Dr. Huxtable and Mr. Hyde

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

The news that broke June 30 that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had decided to set Bill Cosby free and reverse his conviction of drugging and raping Andrea Constand, an athetic director at Cosby’s alma mater, Temple University, in 2003 was shocking. A bare 4-3 majority of the Court’s seven justices seemed to deal a body blow to the whole idea that rich, powerful and/or famous men can ever be held accountable for their shabby (to say the least) treatment of women.

It wasn’t like there was really much room for doubt about Cosby’s guilt. This wasn’t a case like R. Kelly’s, in which a cable TV network put him on trial and found him guilty before the legal system has even had a chance to indict him, much less try him. It wasn’t like Michael Jackson’s case, in which he was actually acquitted in court – through the mechanism we have as a society to settle these things – only to have two people who testified for him come out of the rocks they were hiding under and claim they lied under oath to protect him … after he was dead and, conveniently, after the statute of limitations for perjury had expired so they couldn’t be punished for lying under oath.

It’s not like the case of Woody Allen, who’s been accused of unspeakable crimes by a vengeful ex-partner and the children of whom she’s the legal guardian and who was there when the kids were interrogated. Maybe he did exactly what his accusers said he did, but I take it with a grain of salt given that the accusers’ adoptive mother was there while they were being interrogated (as is required by law when the police question a minor) and the kids knew exactly what she wanted them to say.

When Bill Cosby was first charged – in the nick of time because the 12-year statute of limitations was about to expire in Constand’s case and had already run out for all his other victims – the Los Angeles Times and other publications quoted him as speaking in his own defense. The moment I read the bizarre tale he told – that he had got Constand’s consent to engage her in a weird sort of necking in which he claimed he brought her to orgasm without climaxing himself – the story was so preposterous and so outrageous I read it and thought, “He’s guilty as hell.”

It’s not that we hadn’t had clues before that. One magazine published a cover photo of Cosby on one side and the 60 women who had accused him of drugging and raping them on the other. The headline read, “He said … they said.” Women’s advocates often complain that police and other legal authorities don’t take complaints against rapists seriously if there’s only one complaining victim. That’s a bad thing, but the good thing (assuming you can call anything to do with sexual assault “a good thing”) is that this isn’t a crime most people who do it commit just once. Almost always there are other victims, and it should be the job of law enforcement to find them and bring justice to everyone the perpetrator attacked and abused.

I do remember thinking it seemed all too typical of American racism that the first celebrity charged and actually put on trial for sexual crimes in the #MeToo era was an African-American. Though I was convinced Cosby was guilty, it also smacked of the racist stereotype that all Black men have uncontrollable sex drives and will literally put their dicks into anyone or anything just to get off. Ironically Cosby himself had dropped a big hint of what he was up to all those years in a late-1960’s comedy album called It’s True! It’s True! which featured a routine called “Spanish Fly.” I had to ask my mother what that was. She said it was a (hopefully) mythical aphrodisiac men could slip to women and give them so uncontrollable an urge for sex that they would sit on a car’s gearshift lever and insert it into themselves just to have something up there.

On the album, Cosby expresses his sheer delight at the prospect of his TV show I Spy, in which he and Robert Culp played globetrotting secret agents disguised as tennis bums, was going to film an episode in Spain. He literally played a man who couldn’t contain his excitement over being in the land of this all-powerful sex drug. “This is the land of Spanish Fly, Spanish Fly, Spanish Fly,” Cosby said over and over again as part of his routine. Not that we took it seriously; he was a comedian, after all, and when that album came out it seemed at worst just a blip in the carefully constructed image of wholesomeness and child-like innocence Cosby had carefully built up for himself.

America has long had an odd love-hate relationship towards celebrities. “You Americans! You build up idols just for the fun of tearing them down!” a legendary celebrity once complained. His name was Rudolph Valentino, and he said it in 1923. For someone like Bill Cosby who’s been around as long as he has, we follow the ups and downs of his life as if he was part of our own family. We buy into the image he presents to us – and that only magnifies our sense of betrayal when he doesn’t live up to what he said, and got us to believe, he was.

A number of people who’ve been long-term fans of celebrities accused of sexual abuse of women – or men (quite a few of the most controversial allegations against people like Michael Jackson, Kevin Spacey and X-Men director Bryan Singer, have involved male victims) – have responded with a palpable sense of personal injury. “I played R. Kelly at my wedding!” one person complained to the media. Another wrote a weird mea culpa to the Los Angeles Times letters page questioning whether they should still listen to Michael Jackson, and ultimately deciding that they’d put aside his other songs but “Billie Jean” had been too much a part of their life to give up.

For me the celebrity whose #MeToo-inspired downfall was the most traumatic was Bill Cosby. During my own adolescence in the 1960’s my mother, my brother and I owned all of Cosby’s albums and played them over and over again. We responded to the down-home wit with which he retold the Biblical story of Noah and the Flood, and the silliness of his comments about Seattle – where, he said, people went out for “rain tans” and when the sun came up, they asked, “What did we do?” Mostly, though, we cherished the stories Cosby told of his own childhood in the mean but ultimately benign streets of Philadelphia, the “Buck Buck” games and the rivals that gave up when the huge “Fat Albert” was about to jump on them – a character so many people identified with and found lovable he spawned a children’s animated TV show called Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids.

This was the Bill Cosby I remembered, took to my heart and cherished. This was the Bill Cosby I saw perform live in 1965, when I was just 11. I saw him under unusual circumstances: he was coming to San Francisco to perform a benefit for the civil-rights organization SNCC (the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) and my mom, a heavy-duty civil-rights activist until SNCC was taken over by “Black Power” leaders who didn’t want white allies as part of their movement, was involved in organizing it. I remember the jazz singer Carmen McRae and the SNCC Freedom Singers – whose album we owned – were also part of the program. Cosby performed his “Noah” bit and was every bit as lovable as he seemed on his records.

When the news that Cosby regularly drugged and raped women first broke in 2018, I remember one of his victims published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times in which she said she resented that Cosby was portraying himself as an early supporter of the Black civil-rights movement and a personal friend of Martin Luther King, Jr. But Cosby was an early supporter of the civil-rights movement and a personal friend of King, and he put his career at risk giving money to civil-rights groups and performing benefits for them.

It’s occurred to me that the very entertainment industry in which Cosby made his fortune and achieved fame is responsible for this peculiar way of looking at humans and their behavior. We’ve been conditioned by the stories we’re told in movies and on TV to divide the human race into heroes and villains. The idea that a person can be a hero in some parts of their life and a villain in others is hard for our entertainment-conditioned minds to swallow. Bill Cosby was honorable and courageous in his early support for equal rights for African-Americans – and totally despicable in the way he treated women. But we’ve become so intolerant of moral complexity that when a story like this breaks we simply want to move Cosby from “hero” to “villain” in our moral lists.

I started losing interest in Bill Cosby in 1969, when he left Warner Bros. Records and started his own label, Tetragrammaton. I heard a local avant-garde radio station broadcast one of the four sides of his first LP for his own label, 8:15 12:15. The gimmick was that he had recorded it live in Lake Tahoe and had done two sets of shows, a family-friendly one at 8:15 p.m. and a considerably raunchier one at 12:15 a.m. The side I heard was from the 12:15 show and contained an interminable and highly unfunny skit ridiculing Gay men – and though this was well before I confronted my own sexuality, it still sounded insulting and not at all what I expected from the man whose tales of his childhood had been such an important part of my own. An Amazon.com reviewer named “Michael” wrote that this album was “out of touch with the warm, inoffensive quality that his later work is known for” and suggested that was why it was never reissued on CD.

Evidently Cosby himself wanted to retreat from the heavy-duty sexual content of this record, for in the 1970’s he did a 180° turnaround on his image. He starred in a number of TV situation comedies, most notably the sensationally successful The Cosby Show (1984-1992), in which he played Dr. Heathcliff “Cliff” Huxtable, upper-middle-class family man with a wife (Phylicia Rashad) and kids at a time when it was a novelty to see well-to-do African-Americans in any entertainment medium. When he wasn’t starring on The Cosby Show or indulging his well-known love of jazz by having great musicians like Dizzy Gillespie as guest stars (about the only reason I ever watched The Cosby Show), he was making public statements urging young Black people to stay in school, get good grades, avoid drugs and the “gangsta” lifestyle, and not listen to rap music.

That was fine by me – I can’t stand rap in general and “gangsta rap” in particular, and I can’t imagine why anyone would want to listen to it except the general rule that each new generation has to come up with a sound that pisses off the previous one. What I didn’t know, of course, is that Cosby’s pattern of drugging women and raping them would ultimately be documented stretching as far back as 1974. Neither I nor the rest of America knew that in his private life Cosby was a sex-hungry scumbag who was leaving a trail of women victims behind him: get him alone with a woman (whom he usually lured with the promise of some sort of favor the rich, well-connected can grant) and Dr. Huxtable turned into Mr. Hyde.

And now, though he served three years in prison on his original conviction, he’s got away with it at long last. Progressive activists sometimes say America has two systems of justice, but as the late Senator Eugene McCarthy said, we really have four: the one we learn about it in American civics classes, the one enforced against people of color and others official American society deems “less than human,” the one that protects police officers and the others who execute street justice (and sometimes literally “execute” it by killing them) against the people of color and other victims of system number two; and what McCarthy said was the worst of all, military justice.

African-Americans don’t usually get to be the beneficiaries of that third system of justice – the one that protects the rich and powerful from answering to their misdeeds. Usually they’re on the receiving end of system two – like Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri, Eric Garner and Amadou Diallo of New York, and George Floyd of Minneapolis, all executed by police (or, in the case of Trayvon Martin in Florida, a Neighborhood Watch activist and police wanna-be) who are usually protected by white judges and juries. (The actual conviction of Floyd’s principal killer, Derek Chauvin, was a genuine surprise despite the nationwide protest movement Floyd’s murder sparked – and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Chauvin’s conviction is reversed on appeal because in the U.S. cops usually don’t get punished for killing Black people.)

But sometimes it happens that a Black American reaches the stratified heights of wealth and celebrity that enable them to avoid suffering for their crimes. O. J. Simpson amassed enough money to hire the greatest defense lawyers in America – there were so many high-powered attorneys working for him they became known as the “Dream Team” – that he escaped conviction for two murders he almost certainly committed. Likewise Bill Cosby could afford the attorneys who managed to persuade the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, against all considerations of right and justice, that he should be released because a former Philadelphia district attorney had promised not to prosecute him for his assault on Constand and the current D.A. was bound by that, like a blood oath.

The initial coverage of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision freeing Cosby seems like a pathetic parody of legalese that turned justice on its head to free a well-to-do, well-connected defendant with enough money to hire lawyers to think up this sort of bullshit on his behalf. According to Justice David Wecht (a name which should live in infamy), who wrote the court’s opinion, “an affront to fundamental fairness, particularly when it results in a criminal prosecution that was foregone for more than a decade.” It said justice and “fair play and decency” required that district attorney Kevin Steele, who brought the case against Cosby for assaulting Constand, stand by the decision of the previous district attorney (Bruce Castor, whose other contribution to criminal justice in the U.S. was representing former President Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial) not to prosecute.

The problem was that after Castor chose not to prosecute Cosby for assaulting Constant, but before Steele reopened the case, Constand had sued Cosby in civil court. Under oath, Cosby had given a deposition containing that weird and frankly unbelievable account of their interaction that, when I read about it in the media, convinced me he was guilty. The four (out of seven) Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices who backed Cosby argued that if he had thought he still might be criminally prosecuted, he could have taken the Fifth Amendment and avoided giving that testimony. The Court said that overturning the conviction and barring any further prosecution “is the only remedy that comports with society’s reasonable expectations of its elected prosecutors and our criminal justice system.”

Never mind the “fair play and decency” Cosby should have shown towards Andrea Constand and all the other women he drugged and had his way with while they were helpless to resist. (My understanding of how date-rape drugs like Rohypnol work is they keep you conscious but incapacitate you, so you know what is being done to you but you’re powerless to stop it.) Aside from the sheer sickness of the crime – raping a drugged partner, like raping a child, is so far from my ken I can’t imagine why anyone would want to do it – and its Mr. Hyde-like opposition to everything Bill Cosby had told us he was and used his powerful gifts as an entertainer to make us believe it, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision to free him on the ground of “fair play and decency” is an insult to any person who has been sexually assaulted and gone to the police in the vain hope that justice would result.

In the past I’ve been critical of certain aspects of the #MeToo movement. I’ve questioned the temptation to believe that mere allegations constitute proof, and I’ve been even more critical of how people have been effectively blacklisted on the basis of unproven accusations. I was appalled when people who thought they were being politically progressive started campaigns like “#Mute R. Kelly” that aimed to take his songs off streaming services. It should be your decision – not that of a corporation or of political groups pressuring a corporation to censor him – whether you still want to listen to R. Kelly or not based on the charges against him. He should have a fair trial, and if he’s convicted he should be punished like anyone else, but organizing pressure groups to take away his livelihood smacks too much of the 1950’s Hollywood blacklist, in which liberals and Leftists were tarred with the brush of “Communism,” became unemployable and had their names taken off films they’d written.

But Bill Cosby had his fair trial. Indeed, as a rich man he had more of a chance to prove his innocence than most Black men accused of crime in America. He was duly tried and sentenced – and then his attorneys figured out a way they could persuade the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to let him off the hook. They earned whatever Cosby paid them, but justice suffered. And so did the overall task of holding powerful people accountable for their sexual abuse and exploitation of non-powerful people.I can’t help but wonder if Harvey Weinstein and the other #MeToo targets will also be able to weasel out of accountability for exploiting people and using them as animate sex dolls – just as I can’t help but wonder if an appeals court will let Derek Chauvin off the hook after his righteous conviction for killing George Floyd.

Sometimes appeals courts are necessary protections against judicial abuses. Other times, as in the Cosby case, they are second bites of the apple given to rich, powerful and influential defendants even after trial courts and juries have proven their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Erwin Chermerinsky, legal columnist for the Los Angeles Times whose writings I generally admire, took Cosby’s side in a June 30 column (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-06-30/bill-cosby-case-overturned-fifth-amendment-court) that read, “The Pennsylvania court’s ruling is disturbing in allowing Cosby to go free notwithstanding his sexual assault convictions, but it is correct in applying a crucial constitutional right.” I couldn’t disagree more: just because a previous Pennsylvania district attorney decided not to prosecute him, that shouldn’t have given a rapist a perpetual get-out-of-jail-free card.