"This is not about providing deterrence. A blind 88-year-old man can’t leave his house."

Said the lawyer for Bill Cosby, arguing against punitive damages, in "Bill Cosby Loses Sex Assault Lawsuit and Faces a $59 Million Judgment A California jury found that Mr. Cosby had abused Donna Motsinger in 1972 after inviting her to attend one of his comedy shows" (NYT).

The jury awarded $19.25 million in compensatory damages and $40 million in punitive damages.

Motsinger testified that Cosby gave her "a pill that had left her incapacitated." Cosby did not testify.

"I am so pro separating the art and the artist... The one I can't do is Cosby...."

"I loved his sitcom.... I always thought it was weird though that his job was a gynecologist who worked out of his basement.... In his home!... He would walk up and take gloves off in the living room.... And you'd be like, wait, were those gloves just inside a woman? You're supposed to take them off, I think, like, right away.... I get obsessed with people that hide in plain sight. You're like, yeah, his job was, I think, obstetrician, they give women anesthesia in a basement. That means when you walked up the stairs, she was still passed out. In his basement...."

Said Whitney Cummings, on Bill Maher's podcast.

I like this comment over at YouTube: "Bill has been beat at his own game. Whitney is the supreme lord of interrupting and not letting people talk."

I didn't watch the Cosby show. I know the Cosby character was a doctor but did he work out of his basement and take the gloves off in the living room? Where does the comic exaggeration begin and end? I ask Grok.

"Once European fashion houses stopped pretending that they were ignorant of Black culture, they began to openly feed on it."

"Sagging had made young Black men objects of scorn, particularly by the paternalists—Bill Cosby, the father; Barack Obama, the politician; and Eric Adams, the cop—who had each done their separate campaigns admonishing the brothers for not pulling up their pants. The derision was predicated on protection. Black man, make them respect you by your dress. Black man, hold yourself high. Legislation against sagging—modern morality ordinances, passed in municipalities in states such as New Jersey, Illinois, and Michigan, and across the South—became a possible pretense for arrests. In February, 2019, in Shreveport, Louisiana, Anthony Childs died while being chased by police, who pursued him for a 'saggy pants' violation. They engaged in gunfire, and although the coroner ruled Childs’s death the result of a self-inflicted wound, he was killed in a confrontation that never should have happened in the first place. Did Balenciaga care? The brand’s sweatpants, looked at through the prism of death and disrespect, were a real problem and a sort of social evil, conjuring bodies in effigy."

Writes Doreen St. Félix, in "Girl, What Waist? How the waist became the site of enduring race panic" (The New Yorker).

How does this go on for 16 years?

I'm reading "Charges against Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs allege 16 years of abuse and crimes/The music mogul was arrested on charges of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking. He is being held without bail" (WaPo).

The crimes Combs and his associates are accused of committing and covering up include sex trafficking, narcotics distribution, arson and kidnapping. Many of these alleged crimes took place at illegal sex parties that Combs referred to as “freak offs.” During these parties, Combs allegedly threw objects at the victims and dragged them by their hair.

It's one of those rare mornings when — quite by chance — a theme appears on the blog.

I've written 2 posts: 1. "The strongest case for noncitizen voting today is representation: The more voters show up to the polls, the more accurately elections reflect peoples’ desires," and 2. "'People get very wrapped up in the idea of spontaneously desiring sex,' Dr. Nagoski said, but, especially in women, it’s fairly rare." 

In the presence of this blessed convergence of the Forces of Blog, I perform the ritual of deliberately searching for more manifestations of the day's theme. You see what it is, don't you? 

"The past year has been very good to Howard University. One of its alumna — Kamala D. Harris — ascended to the vice presidency.... And last week, the university scored a coup..."

"... announcing Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates as new faculty.... Long-standing concerns over the way the school treats survivors of sexual assault were put on display when College of Fine Arts dean and actress Phylicia Rashad — another recent high-profile hire — shared her support for 'The Cosby Show' co-star Bill Cosby after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court vacated his sexual assault conviction.... The backlash — from students and others outside the Howard community — was swift. The issue was personal for Aliya J’mari, a 2016 graduate who said she had trouble getting help from school officials when a professor physically assaulted her during her senior year.... 'I just felt a little sad for the students that are at Howard now that are going to be up under her leadership,' J’mari said...."

Writes Lauren Lumpkin in "Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ta-Nehisi Coates appointments signal new era for Howard University/The recent growth at Howard University comes a few years after students waged a nine-day protest over conditions at the school and called for their president’s resignation" (WaPo). 

The highest-rated comment over there is: "As long as Howard continues to focus on celebrity over intellect, and to foster the concept of racial segregation for its student body, the university is doomed to a destiny of mediocrity. As proof, take a look at the SAT scores of incoming freshman at Howard versus the Ivy League schools — no comparison."

"Among Cosby’s most high-profile supporters on Wednesday was actress Phylicia Rashad, his former co-star and incoming dean of Howard University’s College of Fine Arts."

"Rashad applauded the overturned conviction, tweeting that 'a miscarriage of justice is corrected' alongside an image of Cosby. After a flurry of criticism over her tweet, Rashad later added, 'I fully support survivors of sexual assault coming forward. My post was in no way intended to be insensitive to their truth.' Nylah Burton, a writer and former student of Howard University, called Rashad’s initial comments 'obscene.' Burton said she was raped while attending the university. Last year, she set up a GoFundMe to help support current and former Howard University students who have experienced sexual violence on the HBCU campus. The 26-year-old said she’s still processing the news about Cosby, which was 'triggering,' but it was Rashad’s comment that she found immediately chilling. 'To see random people celebrating Bill Cosby is always hurtful, of course, but to see people with so much institutional and cultural power … so firmly against you, it makes you feel hopeless,' Burton said."

From "Sexual assault survivors are devastated by Bill Cosby’s release: ‘It makes you feel hopeless’/Cosby was released from prison Wednesday after his sexual-assault conviction was overturned" (The Lily (at WaPo).

Why is Phylicia Rashad a dean at Howard? I see at her Wikipedia page that her highest degree is a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Here's Howard's official announcement, dated May 12, 2021. Excerpt:

“I can think of no individual better suited to take on this role than Ms. Phylicia Rashad,” said Howard University President Wayne A. I. Frederick, M.D., MBA. “As we reintroduce our campus community and the world at large to Howard’s College of Fine Arts, the dean will play an instrumental role in ensuring an auspicious beginning for this reestablished institution. Given Ms. Rashad’s reputation as well as her capabilities and impressive list of accomplishments, she will undoubtedly empower the college to transcend even our incredibly high expectations.”

What did they think they were getting? Image? Now, they need to distance themselves from her and they say — sensitively! — that she lacked "sensitivity." 

This would have been a good time for Howard to say that the rights of the criminally accused are just as important as enforcing the criminal law, but Howard's statement asserts "Survivors of sexual assault will always be our priority."

"The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has overturned Bill Cosby’s 2019 sexual assault conviction..."

".... ruling that a 'non-prosecution agreement' with a previous prosecutor should have prevented him from being charged in the case..... The case had a complicated history that began in 2005 when [Temple University employee Andrea] Constand first reported the alleged assault to then-Montgomery County District Attorney Bruce L. Castor Jr., who ultimately declined to file charges in this case. But Castor’s successors reopened the case and charged Cosby in 2015, just days before the 12-year statute of limitations expired and amid a barrage of new accusations from women across the country. At the time, Castor objected to the new prosecution, saying he’d struck a deal with Cosby and his lawyers not to prosecute him for Constand’s assault if Cosby agreed to sit for a deposition in a civil case she had filed against him..... He was charged in late 2015, when a prosecutor armed with newly unsealed evidence — Cosby’s damaging deposition from her lawsuit — arrested him days before the 12-year statute of limitations expired."

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports.

"One would think that Mr. Murphy was given his freedom to leave the plantation, so that he could make his own decisions; but he decided to sell himself back to being a Hollywood Slave."

"[Stepin Fetchit plus cooning equals the destruction of Black Men in Hollywood.] Remember, Mr. Murphy, that Bill Cosby became legendary because he used comedy to humanize all races, religions and genders; but your attacking Mr. Cosby helps you embark on just becoming click bait," instagrammed Bill Cosby's spokesman, quoted in "Bill Cosby’s spokesman rips Eddie Murphy as ‘Hollywood Slave’ over ‘SNL’ jab" (NY Post)

The bracketed sentence is in the original Instagram but sanitized out of the NY Post story. The spokesman's quote reads like a garbled mess without that extra line. With it, I can remember Cosby's criticism of Murphy. If I hadn't dug a little deeper and seen the elided sentence, I'd have said that the statement was worse than saying nothing, because Murphy's joke was mild and contained no factual imperfections or even nastiness, and to criticize it is to make us read it again:

“If you would have told me 30 years ago that I would be this boring, stay-at-home house dad and Bill Cosby would be in jail, even I would have took that bet,” Murphy said.

“Who is America’s dad now?”

But with that extra line, I remember Cosby's old argument against black comedians continuing to use old racist stereotypes to amuse white people. And that is a good description of Murphy's old "SNL" characters, which he reprised unapologetically on last Saturday's show. (I blogged: "[The] Eddie Murphy material was full of racist stereotypes — Mr. Robinson, the criminal; Buckwheat, whose one joke is that he cannot articulate words; Gumby, the angry one; Velvet Jones, the pimp — and yet because these were reprisals of supposedly beloved characters by the show's biggest star from the distant past, they were apparently considered okay to present today.")

Here's Eddie Murphy in 1987 describing how Cosby criticized him, back when Cosby was "America's dad":

The perils of futurism in the world of Donald Trump.

I ran into this April 1991 New York Magazine article "Star Bores/Too Much Madonna? Too Much Nancy, Teddy, Cher? Or Is There Never Enough?"

This was purely by accident, as I was searching for something that I never found — a common saying from the past that was something like: Americans can't understand any message that won't fit on a T-shirt. Or: Any political philosophy that can't fit on a T-shirt might as well not exist because Americans are not terribly intellectual and have a short attention span.

That question came up in the context of writing a post this morning that contained the quoted sentence: "Intellectual curiosity has been replaced by ostentatious consumption, quality by quantity and political activism by slogans that fit on baseball caps."

In the comments Fernandistein reacted to that quote:

That is a standard and ageless "I'm better than most people" statement, but I wonder if the emitter of those words was intellectually curious enough to know that baseball caps didn't exist until around 1900, and that acronyms were almost non-existent until the 1940s, and that the slogan he refers to is actually more complicated and effective than the slogan of his probable hero.

The link on "probable hero" goes to the "F" section of Wikipedia's list of political slogans, so I'm not positive which "F" slogan is being pointed at, but I believe it is "Forward," and the "probable hero" is Barack Obama.

And samanthasmom said:

Baseball caps are better than campaign buttons. They keep your head warm or cool and shade your eyes from the sun. We've just become more practical with how we wear our slogans.

That got me thinking about the old T-shirt line, which was itself something that would fit on a T-shirt, but I guess it wasn't snappy enough to remember verbatim. And the internet won't help me. I found a huge page of "T-shirt Quotes" at BrainyQuote and they all seem to be somebody saying it's stylish to wear a T-shirt.

"I've always thought of the T-shirt as the Alpha and Omega of the fashion alphabet," said Giorgio Armani, which can't possibly be true, though it might be "true" within the fashion designer mentality, which is ridiculously nonliteral.

But I stumbled into "Star Bores." Who was everyone sick of in 1991? Of course, I did the normal 2019 thing and searched the text for "Trump." I scored:



Remember Faith Popcorn — the futurist? Remember futurists? "Donald Trump had no business in the spotlight." That's great. Especially the "had"... all the way back in 1991.The futurist we barely remember was talking about a man whose stardom seemed to be in the past. She had no inkling that 3 decades later he would be the biggest star in the world. Futurism ain't what it used to be. Or maybe it is, because futurism used to be wrong. I can see that now. Hindsight is 2019... and quite hilarious:

"The suit alleges that The Post 'targeted and bullied' 16-year-old Nicholas Sandmann in order to embarrass President Trump."

I'm reading about the lawsuit against The Washington Post in The Washington Post.

“In a span of three days in January of this year commencing on January 19, the Post engaged in a modern-day form of McCarthyism by competing with CNN and NBC, among others, to claim leadership of a mainstream and social media mob of bullies which attacked, vilified, and threatened Nicholas Sandmann, an innocent secondary school child,” reads the complaint.

It added, “The Post ignored basic journalist standards because it wanted to advance its well-known and easily documented, biased agenda against President Donald J. Trump by impugning individuals perceived to be supporters of the President.”

The suit was filed by Sandmann’s parents, Ted and Julie, on Nicholas’s behalf in U.S. District Court in Covington. It seeks $250 million because Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos paid that amount for the newspaper when he bought it in 2013....

An interesting basis for the claim of damages. When I just saw the headlines I guessed that $250 million was the estimated value of the life Sandmann would have had if the media hadn't ruined his reputation.

The Sandmanns’ lead attorney is L. Lin Wood, who represented Richard Jewell, the security guard falsely accused in the bombing of Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta in 1996. He also represented John and Patsy Ramsey in pursuing defamation claims against media outlets in connection with reports on the death of their young daughter, JonBenet....

Did Richard Jewell win his lawsuits? According to Wikipedia, it looks like there were 5 lawsuits, 4 of which were settled (with the amount of the settlement only known for the one against NBC ($500,000)). The Atlanta-Journal Constitution fought and won — with the court saying, "because the articles in their entirety were substantially true at the time they were published—even though the investigators' suspicions were ultimately deemed unfounded—they cannot form the basis of a defamation action."

Back to the new WaPo article. Here's an interesting juxtaposition of paragraphs:

The Sandmanns’ suit asserts that the newspaper “bullied” Sandmann in its reporting “because he was the white, Catholic student wearing a red ‘Make America Great Again’ souvenir cap.”

It calls Phillips “a phony war hero [who] was too intimidated by the unruly Hebrew Israelites to approach them, the true troublemakers, and instead chose to focus on a group of innocent children.”

I read between the lines: If we're going to be sensitive about "bullying," this lawsuit is bullying the Native American man ("phony war hero") and the black men ("unruly"). WaPo's argument might be that there are a lot of colorful characterizations that get expressed, but they're not really falsehoods in the sense that ought to matter. That is, it shouldn't be so hard to report the news with vivid prose, and courts should refrain from delving into the motivations of the various speakers and judging who's got a "bullying" mentality. I'm not choosing sides at the moment, just trying to picture how the lawsuit might play out.

The WaPo article ends with the assertion that "A plaintiff must show that a defendant acted with 'reckless disregard' to sustain a defamation action." I don't think that's right. Sandmann was a private citizen. You on have to show "reckless disregard" ("actual malice") when you're suing a public figure. That's the First Amendment standard dating back to New York Times v. Sullivan.

Interestingly enough, it was just yesterday that Clarence Thomas wrote an opinion (concurring in the denial of certiorari) arguing that the U.S. Supreme Court ought to reconsider New York Times v. Sullivan. This was a defamation case brought against Bill Cosby by a woman who accused him of rape. The court below had decided that the woman, Kathrine McKee, was a "limited person public figure" who would have to show that Cosby had "reckless disregard" for the truth when he said defamatory things about her. She "thrust" herself into the public debate by talking about Cosby.

McKee asks us to review her classification as a limited-purpose public figure. I agree with the Court’s decision not to take up that factbound question. I write to explain why, in an appropriate case, we should reconsider the precedents that require courts to ask it in the first place.

Thomas wants to take up the entire question of the higher standard rather than to tinker with the scope of what it takes to trigger the standard, what it means to be a "public figure."

We should not continue to reflexively apply this policy-driven approach to the Constitution. Instead, we should carefully examine the original meaning of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. If the Constitution does not require public figures to satisfy an actual-malice standard in state-law defamation suits, then neither should we.

Well, that's a big deal! But it's only Clarence Thomas. And yet, who knows? President Trump, who's been appointing Justices lately, has said he wants it to be easy to sue for defamation. Maybe things are moving in that direction.

But in any case, Nick Sandmann wasn't a public figure when the media jumped on him and mauled him!

"At the time of the assault, I was 30 years old, and a fit confident athlete. I was strong, and skilled, with great reflexes, agility and speed."

"Instead of being able to run, jump, and pretty must do anything I wanted physically, during the assault I was paralyzed and completely helpless. I couldn't move my arms or legs. I couldn't speak or even remain conscious. I was completely vulnerable, and powerless to protect myself... After the assault, I wasn’t sure what had actually happened but the pain spoke volumes. The shame was overwhelming. Self-doubt and confusion kept me from turning to my family or friends as I normally did. I felt completely alone, unable to trust anyone, including myself.... Bill Cosby took my beautiful, healthy young spirit and crushed it. He robbed me of my health and vitality, my open nature, and my trust in myself and others."

Today, at the sentencing hearing, reported in The Daily Beast.

ADDED: The judge has sentenced Cosby to 3 to 10 years in prison. And he "must undergo monthly counseling for the rest of his life and report quarterly to authorities. He'll be in the sex offender registry. The LA Times reports.

Let's remember that Cosby had gotten away with it until a comedian named Hannibal Burress made some jokes in 2014:

“Bill Cosby has the fuckin’ smuggest old black man public persona that I hate,” Buress said at the time. “He gets on TV, ‘Pull your pants up black people, I was on TV in the ‘80s! I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom!’ Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby, so turn the crazy down a couple notches.” Buress also asked members of the audience to “Google ‘Bill Cosby rape’” when they got home, joking that it would have a whole lot more results than a search for his name, “Hannibal Buress.”

“I don’t think people pay money to see a guy speak precisely and carefully. I don’t think they want to pay to see somebody worried about the repercussions of what they say."

"They just want to see someone try to get at something honest or maybe something relatable, to have some fun with something."

Said Dave Chappelle, appearing on the supremely unfunny TV show "PBS NewsHour." Here, watch the whole thing:



I found that via Matt Wilstein at The Daily Beast:

There is nothing inherently wrong with using stand-up comedy to comment on the #MeToo movement... But it of course depends on the nature of that material and whether it serves to downplay the severity of systematic sexual abuse.

Before Chappelle started talking about Louis C.K. in his act, he was telling jokes about Bill Cosby, a man he always considered to be a personal “hero.” In his 2017 special The Age of Spin, he attempted to weigh Cosby’s then “alleged” rapes against his otherwise positive legacy. “My God, you can’t imagine,” Chappelle joked, grappling with his own feelings. “It’d be as if you heard that chocolate ice cream itself had raped 54 people.”...

In the PBS interview, he recalled watching one of Cosby’s victims sobbing outside the courtroom after he was found guilty. “Justice was meted out for this woman. And it didn’t look gleeful. You know what I mean?” he said. “Like, it’s tough to see your heroes fall, let alone be a villain. I was explaining to some of my younger family members, like, who he was at one point, juxtaposed to what’s happened now. It’s astounding. And it’s sad, for everybody.”

ALSO: The PBS segment included a portion of an old Chappelle sketch, "The Racial Draft." It made me want to see the whole thing, so here it is:

An old TV Guide cover.

pic.twitter.com/5zwpijfFTx

— Ricky Gervais (@rickygervais) May 30, 2018

“His robe opened... He smelled like cigar and espresso and his body odor.”

"Here was America’s Dad on top of me... a happily married man with five children, on top of me.”

Said Janice Dickerson, yesterday at the Cosby trial.

Today at the trial (also NYT), Andrea Costand testified:

“I was kind of jolted awake and felt Mr. Cosby on the couch beside me, behind me, and my vagina was being penetrated quite forcefully, and I felt my breast being touched,” Ms. Constand said. “I was limp, and I could not fight him off.”

Bill Cosby's lawyer gets aggressive in his opening statement at the retrial.

The NYT reports:

Thomas A. Mesereau Jr., one of Mr. Cosby’s lawyers, shredded any sense that the defense would be cowed by the #MeToo moment. He presented Mr. Cosby’s accuser, Andrea Constand, in his opening remarks to the jury as a willful, greedy woman who ran a “pyramid scheme” and took advantage of a man who had lost a son.

“You are going to be asking yourself during this trial, ‘What does she want from Bill Cosby?’ And you already know the answer: ‘Money, money and lots more money,’” he said. “She has a history of financial problems until she hits the jackpot with Bill Cosby,” he added....

Erykah Badu expresses empathy for Hitler, the human being, and creates a stir.

It's worse that that time Donald Trump said something that made it sound as though there could be a good person in there amongst the neo-Nazis.*

WaPo reports:

Badu hasn’t released a record since 2010, but she gave the interview in advance of the tentative reissue of “Baduizm” in February.

And maybe that says it all, but let's continue:

Badu said she’s hesitant to pass judgment on people such as Cosby, who was accused of rape, sexual assault or sexual harassment by at least 60 women.... Badu added, “if he’s sick, why would I be angry with him?” She admitted that her viewpoint might be poorly received, saying “I could be crucified for saying that,” but that “the rush to get mad doesn’t make sense to me.”

Then she added: "I see good in everybody... I saw something good in Hitler."

Questioned, she blurted out, “Hitler was a wonderful painter,” but of course he was a rotten painter. The interviewer informed her of the noncontroversial, no ambiguity possible, black-and-white fact that Hitler was a terrible painter, and she saw her opening to feel sorry for him for being a terrible painter — "Poor thing" — and took a stab at another basis for empathy, that he had a "terrible childhood" (though there's no reason to think she knew anything about Hitler's childhood).

One thing we know for sure: Erykah Badu exists.

____________________

* What did Trump actually say last August, after the Charlottesville protests? We all have our mental notes on the subject, but here's the transcript:

“The #Metoo movement... and the highly visible cases that are similar to Cosby (powerful men, similar patterns of behavior, multiple victims) make the environment one that is more supportive of the prosecution’s case."

Said Cornell Law School professor Valerie Hans, quoted in "Will the #MeToo Moment Shape the Cosby Case?" (NYT).

Also:

There has long been a debate on just how much judges are, or should be, swayed by public opinion. Justice Stephen G. Breyer of the United States Supreme Court said that listening to public opinion is “a road to perdition” for judges.

“We’re not there to be popular,” he added in a video that was posted on a public policy website, bigthink.com “We’re not there to decide according to the majority; we’re not there to decide according to what the press is going to write.”

Others, such as the Harvard law professor Michael Klarman have argued that certain landmark rulings like Brown v. Board of Education would never have been possible if judges had not been reflecting shifting social mores.

"Can I have some of the queen’s waters? Precious waters?——Where’s that Bill Cosby pill I brought with me?"

That's January 5, 2016, and Chris Matthews is about to interview Hillary Clinton and yukking it up about "Bill Cosby pills."

"Hollywood’s de facto governing body, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, voted overwhelmingly on Saturday to 'immediately expel' Harvey Weinstein..."

"... breaking with 90 years of precedent and turning one of the biggest Oscar players in history into a hall-of-fame pariah. The academy’s 54-member board of governors made the decision at an emergency session after investigations by The New York Times and The New Yorker that revealed sexual harassment and rape allegations against him going back decades...."

The NYT reports.

The Board sought distance from the monster:

“We do so not simply to separate ourselves from someone who does not merit the respect of his colleagues but also to send a message that the era of willful ignorance and shameful complicity in sexually predatory behavior and workplace harassment in our industry is over. What’s at issue here is a deeply troubling problem that has no place in our society.”

But that doesn't mean there are not other monsters. Getting rid of the one who's been outed doesn't send a message that you'll do anything about sexually predatory behavior and workplace harassment in your industry that hasn't been the subject of a big exposé. You'll have to do a lot more to convince me that the "era... is over." Message not yet received.

As the NYT points out, Roman Polanski and Bill Cosby are still members of the Academy.

One member of the Academy's board, Lucasfilm chief Kathleen Kennedy "told fellow board members that she was outraged by the allegations... [but] was also said to be aware that pushing him out could put the academy on a slippery slope."

If the slope is slippery, the era is not over.