They’re no longer afraid.
And why should these 35 women who appeared on the latest cover of New York Magazine be? The publication is running a cover story listing the silenced accounts of Bill Cosby’s alleged sexual assaults. This time, the girls do the talking.
With incidents dating as far back as the ’60s—the earliest record, for now, belonging to Sunni Welles—the story compiles anecdotes where Bill is far from the loving TV daddy he once was. The allegations involve numerous drugging incidents (he had a thing for Quaaludes as if they were an energy drink), threats, and whirlwind rape acts that had girls not knowing where their underwear went.
We find out that these women weren’t exactly afraid of Bill, but were more terrified of what the incident could bring upon themselves. Since a number of them were modeling aspirants and starry-eyed actresses (such as America’s Top Model judge Janice Dickinson), most kept mum because really, in the ’70s, who would’ve thought America’s sellout comedian could be capable of date rape?
In the age where the masses disapproved racism more, Jewel Allison explains the difficulty of suing and telling back then: “I had a few moments when I tried to come forward. But I was just too scared and also I had the extra burden of not really wanting to take an African-American man down.”
Today, things are a lot different. More and more women are telling their stories in an age where we’d care to listen. Obviously, the masses are listening, enough to make the main site crash for half a day. Now if only the rule starts lending an ear, too.
Photo courtesy of New York Magazine
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