In 1985, Billy Cosby was becoming known as "America's favorite dad" as the affable patriarch of a successful African-American family Cliff Huxtable to the more than 20 million people who watched “The Cosby Show” every Thursday night.
Cosby’s persona as Huxtable, the dutiful husband and father of five, led to Cosby developing a public reputation as a moralist and family man that blinded both the media and public to the rape and abuse allegations the 78-year-old comedian now faces. But the shift in Cosby's image over the past year portends a likely change in the national conversation and media coverage of sexual assault.
The case is an important moment for Americans to realize that sexual assault isn’t always a leering stranger with a knife, but an all too familiar face, said Maryland-based activist and sexual consent advocate Hannah Brancato.
SEE MORE: Dads with dark sides: Bill Cosby is the latest TV father to fall
“The Cosby case speaks to the larger implications of what one individual covering up these serial incidents reveals: the fear of what it would mean to believe the survivors,” she said. “The (public) fear of the magnitude of sexual violence in our country in that if you have to confront someone like Bill Cosby, you might have to confront someone in your own life.”
Mounting disapproval
Until now, it seems few were immune to the public perception of Cosby as a model parent as is evident from the iconic cover story from New York Magazine this month, in which 35 women said Cosby assaulted them.
One of them is 48-year-old Barbara Bowman, who said she trusted Cosby to be her mentor as she transitioned from a model to an actress at age 17 in 1985. Bowman said Cosby's reputation led her to trust him, a common refrain in the New York Magazine piece.
“I went into this thinking he was going to be my dad. He zoned right in on my insecurities,” Bowman told the magazine. “He convinced me that he was going to take care of me like a father, that he loved me like a daughter. To wake up half-dressed and raped by the man that said he was going to love me like a father? That’s pretty sick.”
Last year, Cosby’s grip on his public image began to slip as dozens of women came forward with claims that Cosby had drugged and assaulted them over the course of decades. The allegations recently led to a judge unsealing deposition records in a 2005 civil case against Cosby, in which Temple University basketball team director Andrea Constand charged Cosby with assault and battery.
Documents from the case, which was settled out of court in 2006, detailed how Cosby admitted using his fame to drug and seduce women like Constand and Bowman, whom he claimed to be mentoring.
While Cosby has repeatedly denied the allegations against him, when The New York Times published the damning deposition followed by the New York Magazine cover seemed to erased any doubt that “America’s favorite dad” was a notorious alleged rapist.
Media motives
Bowman and the other women who shared their gut-wrenching accounts in the pages of New York Magazine aren’t alone in their shock that “America’s favorite dad” could be capable of such crimes. Cosby’s reputation and public position of high esteem also influenced media coverage of the controversy.
“The story of Bill Cosby is a story of someone in a position of power who used it to take advantage of women and avoid being held accountable,” Poynter Institute media ethicist Kelly McBride said. “For the longest time, (Cosby’s public persona) played a huge role in people not believing the allegations against him.”
While it makes sense that the media would cover the allegations more closely as more evidence mounted, McBride says the journalistic approach to covering sexual assault has changed dramatically, as has public assumptions about rape.
“The motives of reporters have changed. It used to be that they covered (sexual assault) as a public safety issue, but gradually they realized that sexual assault is a systemic issue in society,” McBride said. “We’re realizing now that (a person of esteem committing this kind of crime) is completely plausible whereas, even 20 years ago, when someone would accuse a doctor or a teacher or a Scout leader of sexual assault, it seemed like we would defer to that person’s authority.”
And some respected journalists admitted to deferring to Cosby’s public image over the years. In November 2014, both New York Times columnist David Carr and The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote essays about how, as reporters who covered Cosby, they enabled a cover-up of sorts by not cornering the comedian about the crimes.
“No one wanted to disturb the Natural Order of Things, which was that Mr. Cosby was beloved; that he was as generous and paternal as his public image,” Carr wrote. “We all have our excuses, but in ignoring these claims, we let down the women who were brave enough to speak out publicly against a powerful entertainer.”
In the same month that Carr and Coates admitted that they’d been Cosby’s “media enablers,” as Carr put it, public confidence in Cosby’s innocence was badly damaged in a series of damning interviews.
Cosby continued using his power to try to sway the press, as is evident in a taped interview with the Associated Press that same month. After being asked for comment about the allegations, Cosby declined and asked that the video be "scuttled” on the grounds of the reporter’s “integrity.”
“I think if you want to consider yourself to be serious that (sic) it will not appear anywhere,” Cosby told the reporter.
The AP later published the video after NBC and Netflix both dropped planned projects with Cosby. In another interview with NPR that month, Cosby declined to utter a single word to “Weekend Edition” host Scott Simon in response to the allegations.
“This may be the first time in a long while that Bill Cosby can't control the public conversation about Bill Cosby,” NPR’s Eric Deggans later wrote.
That media outlets began to directly question Cosby and admit fault in coverage speaks to the level of Cosby’s past media influence, says Brancato.
“In 2005, when the legal case came out (charging Cosby with sexual assault), Bill Cosby still had a singular control of the media,” she said. “The fact that he had the credibility of a family man, of a father figure literally representing male leadership and family values impacted the fact that people didn’t believe the survivors when they came forward.”
New lessons
While the allegations against Cosby shocked the country, experts say the case might signal a new day for how Americans think about sexual assault.
McBride thinks the case may work as a sea change for how journalists cover rape allegations.
“This will be a learning experience for all of those journalists who had a piece of the story to tell and let it go and for younger journalists to learn by example,” McBride said. “The lesson being, when you get a piece of a story like this, you don’t let it go easily.”
Penn State sexual assault researcher Megan Maas says one good outcome of the case could be that sexual assault becomes a more open topic of discussion among American citizens and policy makers.
“We’re at a really exciting time where people are starting to acknowledge that this is a huge issue,” Maas said. “This case illustrates the gradual change over time where we’re taking it more seriously. Many of the women were abused in the '70s, a time when in many states, sexual assault wasn’t illegal.”
Minnesota State University Moorehead director of gender studies Kandace Creel Falcon said she hopes that the shattered perception of Cosby as a beacon of family morals will make people examine their own definitions of sexual assault.
“With the increase of talk about sexual assault on campus and in cases like this one, it allows us to have this educational moment to thinking about perpetrators as members of our community, not strangers lurking in the bushes,” Falcon said. “It’s not just a question of how we protect survivors, but how we release our notions around masculinity that are connected to aggression and violence.”
Related links
Can role model dads hurt women too? Bill Cosby controversy begs the question
Bill Cosby chews out Jon Stewart for swearing
Do families seen on the small screen reflect the families of today?
Email: chjohnson@deseretnews.com
Twitter: ChandraMJohnson