By VennerRoad, 28th Nov 2014
An examination of the evidence against Bill Cosby in light of the Frank Scotti revelations, and some comment about a witch-hunt in the UK.
Bill Cosby, 1969.
The Bill Cosby rape scandal continues to make headlines, but these allegations are far from the most controversial of that nature currently in the news. On this side of the Atlantic, historical allegations of sexual abuse include not only rape but murder.
For those – apparently the bulk of the population – who have been taken in by the claims about Cosby, ask yourselves this, does the fact that 13, 130 or 13 hundred women might have made broadly similar claims mean that even one of them must be true? If all these claims were indeed emanating from dissimilar sources independently of each other and being reported only to law enforcement, they would constitute impressive evidence of serial rape, but the fact is they are not. Claims of a sexual nature against any celebrity from whatever source must be suspect however sincere the alleged victims may sound; this is a media driven frenzy, not a criminal investigation.
It looked as though there would be no satisfactory resolution to this case, because there was no forensic evidence and no paper trial. Now though in a surprising development there does appear to be a paper trail of sorts. Former NBC employee Frank Scotti has come forward and claimed that he paid off numerous women with whom Cosby had been having sex. Furthermore, he has documentation that appears to back up his claims. What does this tend to indicate? That Cosby had indeed have been engaging in illicit sex. Illicit, but not illegal.
The Scotti testimony leaves us with three mutually exclusive narratives:
1) All or most of the claims made by this ever-widening circle of women are true, and Cosby is indeed a serial rapist of the worst possible sort, a man who incapacitates women with drugs –that might just kill them – then forces himself upon them, a sort of John Worboys without the black cab.
2) That they are all making it up, and he is pure as driven snow.
3) That Cosby was a man who used, and probably on many occasions abused, his celebrity status to entice women into his bedroom where after having his way with one he moved on to the next, reneging on any promises to “make me a star”.
The second of the above is currently being peddled by at least one conspiracy crank with the angle that the White Establishment built Cosby up, and has now decided to knock him down. We need not consider this here; doubtless at some point the Illuminati and the World Zionist Conspiracy will also be dragged into the plot, if they haven’t already.
The third of these is the one that best fits the facts, primarily because of the paper trail. Now let’s put some meat on the bone. In a 1969 comedy routine, Cosby talked about drugging a woman with Spanish fly. In 2000, he came on to a woman young enough to be his grand-daughter. She reported it to the police, and the DA decided (rightly) that no criminal offence had been committed. Let’s be clear about this, sometimes men misread the signals – as do women – sometimes they try it on, but nothing ventured, nothing gained. If someone didn’t make the first move at some point there would be no sexual assaults because there would be no human species. You can argue that a married man should not have done what he did, and that a man of his age should not have tried it on with such a young woman, you can argue both those things, and you would be right to, but at the end of the day, no crime was committed.
Some five years later, Andrea Constand made the first documented serious allegation against Cosby, claiming she had been drugged and sexually assaulted. Because she made this allegation late, there was no evidence she had been drugged. In the absence of special circumstances, the late reporting of any allegation of sexual assault should be treated with extreme reserve, but clearly drugging a victim does constitute special circumstances.
Among other things incapacitating drugs may cause memory loss – temporary or permanent – especially of the short term memory. Furthermore, this is true not simply of drugs administered illegally but of alcohol, as Ched Evans discovered to his cost. It is arguable that the police should have carried out a more extensive investigation than they appear to have, certainly they would have in the UK, but in the event, Cosby faced no charges, and Miss Constand was not prepared to allow matters to rest there. She brought a civil action, and surprise, surprise, no fewer than thirteen other women came forward with similar allegations, including Tamara Green, who said Cosby drugged and assaulted her in 1969, the same year he recorded that Spanish fly comedy routine, which begs an obvious question. Incidentally, this joke appears to be grounded in fact, which is probably another reason why it has been used against him.
Why did Cosby settle this case against Constand? The reasons are obvious, firstly it was a serious embarrassment to a man who by this time was one of the biggest celebrities in America. The other reason is that it is a lot more difficult to fend off thirteen accusers than one. Can they all have been mistaken, deranged or simply evil? The answer to that question is yes, otherwise anytime someone is accused by multiple parties, why bother with a trial?
Be that as it may, jurors are human, and the tendency is to think that at least some of the accusations must be true. Dave Lee Travis faced not only multiple accusers but two trials; it took only one conviction for his reputation to be trashed.
At one time, the criminal courts recognised the unfairness of multiple charging; in England, a man who was charged with more than one murder would be tried for one at a time. This was the case with Dr Bodkin Adams who although charged with murdering only two of his patients was rumoured to have murdered many more. Fortunately for him, the defence was able to show that the evidence against him – such as it was – was contrived, and after he was cleared of the first murder, the prosecution threw in the towel. Over the past few decades this doctrine of intrinsic fairness has given way to the desire to secure convictions at any cost, especially in cases of alleged sexual assault.
The stakes were not so high in the civil case against Cosby, but like Michael Jackson he was advised to settle, and did so.
While Cosby’s accusers make much of these other women who came forward in the Constand case, it must be stressed again that these were not women who had all pressed charges individually each with no knowledge of the other; if they appeared to be singing from the same hymn sheet, it was because they were. The fact that these allegations have been reignited nearly a decade on with more alleged victims coming forward does not make them any more credible.
The testimony of Frank Scotti, which is more credible than all the testimonies of Cosby’s accusers and of the blanket denial of the man himself (issued through his lawyer) suggests that the man who told black Americans to pull their trousers up couldn’t keep his own buttoned, that women had sexual encounters with Cosby, who promised more, in particular to assist them with their careers. He may have done after a fashion, and he certainly paid them off, but one of them turned on him, and an avalanche of allegations followed.
We will probably never know the whole truth because none of those involved including Cosby himself can be trusted to tell it, suffice it to say that his reputation has now been permanently trashed, but the great American public should not have been so dumb as to believe what they saw on The Cosby Show was anything but showbiz.
One point that is worth stressing again, no one should allow the allegations against Cosby or historical allegations against anyone to be used to argue for the repeal of the statute of limitations. In the UK where there is no such statute (in criminal cases) we have witnessed some truly horrendous miscarriages of justice. In a case where no credible evidence can be adduced, a jury is left to decide to believe either an accuser or an accused; the absence of corroboration leads to the phenomenon of corroboration by volume, which is the very antithesis of justice.
From the Cosby scandal we turn now to a non-scandal in the UK media. Like Cosby, these claims have been all over the mainstream media as well as the tabloid press, although to a lesser degree. They appeared on the Exaro website, which claims to investigate “issues that are important to business in particular and to the public in general, but which are being inadequately covered – or ignored – by the mainstream media.”
And these allegations are that in the 1980s, MPs were involved in the murders of young boys as part of a paedophile ring. This is all part of the great Westminster Paedophile Ring (which obviously did not exist, although it makes good copy).
The deaths of boys at the hands of paedophiles is of course a horrible and well-documented fact, and very occasionally these unsavoury creatures have been known to hunt in packs. In 1985, a 14 year old was killed during an orgy. The body of Jason Swift was found in a shallow grave; this led to the perpetrators being convicted of manslaughter. The most notorious of these is Sidney Cooke. Cooke was gaoled for life, but in 1989 his sentence was reduced to 16 years. Paroled in 1998, he was soon back behind bars and has been there ever since.
Scandalous and depraved though the activities of Cooke and his fellow paedophiles were, it is a gigantic leap from the claim that those on the fringes of society killed boys to the claim that those at the highest levels of the establishment did so, using their power and influence to prevent their crimes from being investigated.
The reader can judge for himself how much credence to give such claims, but as has been pointed out before, although those making such allegations may sound convincing, no one should be taken in by them. Occasionally the authorities will step in to quash the more outrageous calumnies especially when they are made against ordinary members of the public – this is what happened in the Hollie Greig case. They are unlikely to do so here though because of the perception that this would be just another arm of the cover-up, but unless and until someone produces hard evidence, like a body buried under the floorboards at the House of Lords, no half-skeptical person should give such allegations the time of day, no matter what detectives working on the case believe or more likely are said to believe.
To Wikinut Articles Page