//embed.wbur.org/player/onpoint/2014/12/16/bill-cosby-beverly-johnson-assault
The panel segment starts after the interview with Johnson, about halfway in. You can also listen on the WBUR website, here.
My comments regarding the discussion are here.
rape
The Michel Martin Question I Didn’t Answer This Morning, and More On The Bill Cosby Scandal
In the segment on “Beverly Johnson And The Bill Cosby Scandal” I just completed for NPR’s “On Point” program, out of Boston with the magnificent Michel Martin hosting, I emulated the Sunday morning talk show guests I so revile for answering questions by making their own points that have little or no relevance to what was asked. Michel asked me, as the time left in the hour-long program was ticking down, what ethical obligations consumers—that is, the audience for his concerts, TV shows and albums—have regarding Cosby, in light of the rape allegations against him.
I was still stunned by the comments made by three callers, encompassing several ethically confused assertions that you know I would find annoying:
- That the victims should not be coming forward so late;
- That Cosby is “innocent until proven guilty” (GRRRRR…);
- That it’s “easy” for women to make unsubstantiated allegations against celebrities, and
- That there is a parallel between the allegations against Cosby and the Rolling Stone campus rape story.
That last one especially had my head threatening to explode, which would not be good for my relationship with NPR, so I think I can be forgiven for missing Michel’s query. Yes, the UVA rape allegation is exactly like the Cosby scandal, other than the fact that the accusers in Cosby’s case have come forward publicly while “Jackie” has not; that its two dozen (so far) alleged victims for Cosby and one in the UVA case; that one situation is a classic example of abuse of power, wealth and influence and the other is not; that Cosby settled one claim rather than air the allegations in a court of law; and that virtually every part of “Jackie” claim has failed to hold up under scrutiny and investigation, whereas Cosby, the one individual who could offer evidence to counter the allegations against him, has done nothing but have spokesmen and lawyers issue blanket protests and denials.
Yup. Identical.
My answer to Michel should have been this:
“It’s up to Cosby fans, If they still can still laugh and cheer at Cosby’s nice guy schtick and “America’s Dad” persona knowing that he’s a serial rapist, fine: laughter is good, get it where you can. Personally, I can’t laugh at someone whom I know has engaged in horrific acts, hurt women who admired and trusted them, and by his own conduct left another cultural hero lying face-down in the mud. I can’t forgive it, I can’t get past it, and I’m certainly not going to keep laughing. this is no different from the NFL fans who keep wearing Ray Rice jerseys, or for that matter, Democratic women who continue to swoon over Bill Clinton. If they do, they either:
- Can’t get over their cognitive dissonance, and at some level refuse to believe what cannot be rationally denied, or…
- Don’t think the conduct involved—punching women, exploiting women, raping women—is worth getting upset about, or…
- Buy the absurd personal/public dichotomy, and can still cheer wife-beatering athletes, star-struck intern-exploiting leaders, and raping comedians.
All of these are sad and impossible to justify, but they are common. Does the continued support of a Cosby ratify his conduct? Not in the eyes of his undeterred fans, but in the culture? Of course it does. If Bill Cosby’s career escapes relatively unscathed by this, and he is not held accountable by society, the verdict of the culture will be a particularly extreme version of The King’s Pass: if you are rich enough, powerful enough and seen as contributing enough to society, then you will be held to a lower standard, and can get away with, if not murder, serial rape.”
Scheduling Note: Cosby, Michel Martin, NPR, and Me
Beverly Johnson
Beverly Johnson, the super-model whose Vanity Fair article about being drugged by Bill Cosby decades ago when she was summoned for an “audition,” will be a guest on the Boston NPR station, WBUR, as former “Tell Me More” host Michel Martin stands in. After Johnson, a panel will discuss various issues legal, ethical and cultural about the Cosby allegations, and I’m on it, along with Renee Graham, music and pop culture critic for NPR’s Here & Now. Op-ed contributor at the Boston Globe, and Debra Katz, partner at the law firm Katz, Marshall and Banks. You can catch up on some of the ethical implications of the Cosby mess here, and some more details about the show here. If you can get the show on the radio or web, you’ll hear it at 10 AM, E.S.T., this morning.
Continue reading
Signature Significance Verdict: Lena Dunham Is An Awful Human Being
UPDATED!
Yechh.
If her boasting about abusing her little sister in her memoir wasn’t enough, Lena Dunham’s revealed conduct regarding “Barry” in the same tome rings the signature significance bell. No human being with a sufficient amount of decency would do something like this, even once.
In case you have not followed the latest ethics scandal involving the over-praised creator and star of HBO’s “Girls,” what occurred is this:
In one chapter of Dunham’s memoir “Not That Kind of Girl,” the feminist actress describes as factual an episode of sexual assault or rape that she says she experienced while an undergraduate at Oberlin. Her assailant was a well-known campus “Republican,” she says, a conservative whom she refers to as Barry—without the conventional quotes that would indicate a pseudonym.
There was, as it happens, a real Oberlin college graduate from the same period named Barry, then well-known as a conservative, which then as now, is a species about as common at Oberlin as velociraptors. Besides his name and campus reputation, Barry fit some of the other details given by Dunham, such as wearing cowboy boots and sporting a flamboyant mustache. Now the 28-year-old man (the same age as Dunham) is being tarred as a rapist, and has been forced to take down his social media accounts. He has hired a lawyer named Aaron Minc, with the help of donations from GoFundMe to help pay his legal fees, and has promised that any money he receives from the suit exceeding legal fees will go to charities assisting survivors of rape and sexual assault.
Dunham has not had the courage or decency to say anything, to or about Barry. But yesterday Random House did, in an extraordinary statement and admission: Continue reading
Journalism Ethics Reality Check: What The Entire News Media Did To Darren Wilson With Dorian Johnson’s “Hands Up” Story Is EXACTLY Like What Rolling Stone Did To UVA With “Jackie’s” Rape Account, Just Worse.
Am I the only one who sees this?
Two train wrecks, same track…
I discern that I was too subtle—imagine that!— when I wrote,
In light of all this, it seems that women really have done a relatively poor job at intimidating the left-biased media as well as its progressive pundits and elected officials. If they had sufficiently pressured journalists into believing that to challenge their accounts of rape, substantiated or not, was proof positive of malicious animus, like the civil rights machine has regarding narratives of police racism, they could depend on much of the media continuing to repeat the Rolling Stone account as truth even if it is completely discredited. This is, after all, what we are witnessing right now, as the recent grand jury decision in the Eric Garner death has allowed columnists, reporters, and broadcasters—and thus protesters and politicians—to continue to represent what happened to Michael Brown as if Dorian Johnson’s discredited description of his friend’s death was fair, accurate and unbiased.
So let me be clear….
We are told the the news media is furious with Rolling Stone over its discredited and anonymously sourced gang rape accusation against the University of Virginia’s chapter of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. Why is it not similarly critical of itself for publicly and far more widely accusing a single, named Ferguson police officer, Darren Wilson, of a race-motivated, cold-blooded execution of an unarmed man based on the allegations of Dorian Johnson? They are, from a journalism ethics perspective, equally irresponsible and unprofessional, and predictably more harmful. It is, we can stipulate, worse for a police officer to be accused of first degree murder than for unnamed members of a fraternity to be accused of rape.
Note:
1. Both Rolling Stone and the mainstream media were eager to accept the stories being told as fact because of their own ideological biases.
Rolling Stone is committed to the current campaign of the left to portray college campuses as perpetuating a “rape culture.” The mainstream media, as it had already proved in its slanted and incompetent coverage of Trayvon Martin’s death and the trial of George Zimmerman, is a shameless ally of the cynical Democratic Party’s tactic of representing the nation as racist. Continue reading
Unethical Tweet Of The Month (Or Eternity?), “Jackie’s” UVA Gang Rape Ethics Train Wreck Division: Melissa McEwan
Melissa McEwan’s profile photo. I’m not going to say a thing. No, really. Not a thing.
“I can’t state this more emphatically: If Jackie’s story is partially or wholly untrue, it doesn’t validate the reasons for disbelieving her.”
— Melissa McEwan, feminist proprietor of @Shakestweetz, an-all tweet blog, responding to the meltdown of the Rolling Stone story accusing a University of Virginia fraternity of gang rape.
Look, I’m not going to insult you by explaining what’s wrong with the assertion that those accusing others of horrific crimes shouldn’t be held to strict standards of credibility.
What is more significant than McEwan or her tweet is that this frightening and dangerous state of denial is moving from the status of self-evidently insane to acceptable. As I suggested in the previous post about the Rolling Stone retraction of its explosive story by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the Ferguson demonstrators, the “Hands up!” protestors, the Congressional Black Caucus, and pundits like Eugene Robinosn who are still arguing that Officer Wilson should be indicted are doing essentially the same thing. Having decided that the Ferguson narrative pressed by civil rights activists communicated a deep truth about America, they refuse to accept that it was false even in the face of overwhelming evidence because they are intellectually and emotionally committed to that “truth.”
The tweet also forces me to upgrade the Rolling Stone fiasco to Ethics Train Wreck status. Continue reading
The “Rolling Stone” UVA Gang Rape Botch
Student protest against campus rape at UVA. And if the rape didn’t happen? Take a cue from the “Hands up!” crowd: keep protesting! The news media won’t notice.
Hardly making it to the headlines (except where I live) is the latest example of 1) irresponsible journalism and 2) the results of the Obama administration threatening colleges with sanctions of they don’t presume every male student accused of sexual assault is guilty.
On Nov. 19, Rolling Stone published a sensational report—sensational, mind you—by reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely, telling the tale of a vicious gang rape at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity at the University of Virginia. The victim and the source of the story, a young woman called “Jackie,” said that in 2012 she was forced into a room in the fraternity and raped by seven men, as her date and another man cheered her assailants on.
In response to the uproar triggered by the story, the university, which was loathe to be a target of investigations and sanctions by the Obama administration if they did not act with appropriate haste and severity, suspended all the campus fraternities until January as the media went into a feeding frenzy. Meanwhile, the alleged crime is under investigation by local police. [UPDATE: Here is a call to suspend the UVA President Teresa A. Sullivan: “Her decision was arbitrary, rash and wrong. Even Delta House got some semblance of a trial in the movie, ‘Animal House.'” I do not disagree.]
Several journalists diplomatically raised questions about the account, especially the fact that the story was often phrased in terms that left no hint that these were allegations only. In an environment where the party in control of the White House maintains that any hesitation to regard a rape accusation as inherently reliable is proof of a “war on women,” one unnamed woman’s unconfirmed accusation presented as truth by a female reporter was sufficient to trigger adverse consequences for male UVA students with remarkably little reflection: this was unfair, an example of punishing all the horses because someone said that one of them left the barn.
It should be no surprise that the other shoe has dropped. Continue reading
Are His Accusers’ Lawyers Blackmailing Poor Bill Cosby?
Poor Bill!
From ABC, as the Bill Cosby horror continues:
The 77-year-old comedian filed a lawsuit today against Judy Huth, who claims Cosby forced her to perform a sex act in 1974 at the Playboy Mansion, when she was 15.
In documents obtained by ABC News, Cosby alleges that not only is Huth lying but that she filed the lawsuit after failing to extort money from him. Cosby is asking a judge to dismiss the lawsuit and is seeking monetary damages from Huth and her attorney.
In his filing today, Cosby says Huth’s lawyer approached the comedian’s attorney, Marty Singer, last month and made “ominous references” to ‘criminal penalties.'” According to the lawsuit, Huth’s lawyer demanded $100,000 for her silence, and later increased the amount to $250,000 as additional women came forward.
“Through her lawyer, Plaintiff made extortionate claims to Mr. Cosby (through his counsel) about criminal penalties, coupled with ever-increasing demands for a six-figure payday to keep quiet about her long-since-expired claims,” the documents state.
The suit claims that after Cosby’s attorney rejected Huth’s claims and accused her of extortion, her attorney filed a lawsuit two days ago against the comedian.
In relation to this development, my indispensable story scout, Fred, asks:
“The legal profession must have some ancient and passionately held standards for how to offer a confidential settlement without sliding into blackmail, which Cosby’s lawyers accuse the plaintiff of doing. How do those work, and which side’s lawyers (if either) are most likely to be acting ethically?”
The issue is pretty ancient, all right, but it’s also murky, and has become murkier with passing years. Once upon a time, the American Bar Association had an ethics rule that said, “A lawyer shall not present, participate in presenting, or threaten to present criminal charges solely to obtain an advantage in a civil matter.” Later the provision was dropped, on the theory that it was too vague and could constrain legitimate negotiation. Some jurisdictions, like the District of Columbia, New York and Connecticut, retained it, but they also emphasize the word “solely.” That means that a lawyer who says, “Pay my client $25,000 or we’ll get you charged for rape, and that will ruin you!” has probably breached the rule, while one who says, “Look, we want to handle this as quietly as possible, but if you won’t be fair, you’ll leave us no choice but to seek a criminal indictment. Just thought you should know” has tiptoed within the rule’s bounds. What’s the difference? Not much. Continue reading
If Bill Cosby Were An Incredibly Unethical Lawyer…
“Hypnotism 101” isn’t required in law school, but it’s recommended…
…he might be Michael Fine, 57, a Sheffield, Ohio attorney who has an even more effective method for raping women that the Cos’s drug-and-drink trick. Police say that Fine convinced female clients to let him hypnotize them, and then had sex with them while instructing them to forget everything but their legal discussions. He agreed to have his law license suspended temporarily while the Lorain County Bar Association and the Ohio Supreme Court deal with the results of the police investigation, or perhaps until he can hypnotize all of them and make them forget the whole thing. Or believe they are chickens or something.
Fine allegedly told the women that his hypnotic machinations were a meditation and relaxation technique that he used to help his clients. Bear with me: I don’t want to make light of rape, but this whole story sounds like a really silly Charlie Chan movie. Unfortunately, it appears to be true. Continue reading
Comment of the Day: On Cosby, Clinton, And An Ethics Dunce Convention In Melbourne, Florida
Why can’t a serial rapist be funny and cute?
Frequent commenter aaronpaschal weighed in with this rich post on the Bill Cosby matter. I will hold my response to the end, because there is much to consider here, and much I disagree with. However, aaron has articulated well the thoughts many are having about the Cos, and I am grateful for the exposition. Here is his Comment of the Day regarding the post, On Cosby, Clinton, And An Ethics Dunce Convention In Melbourne, Florida.
I don’t know if I fully believe the allegations. I don’t know if the girls and women involved should bear some responsibility for choosing to become impaired. I don’t know if Cosby’s career will long survive this uproar – Netflix is dropping all of Cosby’s works in response, and that’ll cost someone a pretty penny.
But I do know that I don’t feel completely at ease with the notion that he faces ruin. That there is no evidence, no words, nothing he could present in his own defense. No courtroom, no trial, no lawyers. That the man who allegedly committed these acts did so a lifetime ago. I’ll admit that the women who have come out don’t have much tangibly to gain – but I also know all too well that revenge, hatred, defending existent lies, even merely time in the spotlight can be powerful motivators for some people (bearing in mind that pursuing justice, speaking the truth, and protecting the innocent are well – it could be any of them, all of them, or more.) There must, however, be SOME motive somewhere, or they would not be stepping forward – if there was truly nothing to gain.
But I do know that his works have always made me laugh, and I will appreciate them for years to come. I know I’ve heard wisdom from him, and these crimes don’t change the wisdom, either. I might not choose to leave my daughter alone with him. And I know that the court of public opinion makes very few wise choices, it is a terrible thing to be tried by it, guilty or innocent, and true justice is rarely found there.
