A guy I never heard of before named Roger Friedman wrote an article, here, in which he adoringly defends Phylicia Rashad’s adoring defense of Bill Cosby.
“Someone is determined to keep Bill Cosby off TV,” said Rashad, according to Friedman. “And it’s worked. All his contracts have been cancelled.”
Phylicia Rashad seems like a neat person, and I don’t blame this Friedman guy for being enamored of her. And I don’t blame Rashad, for that matter, for being enamored of Cosby. But the conspiracy theory stuff is complete crap. The time for hero worship is over. Now is the time for a reality check. The person who orchestrated Cosby’s troubles is Cosby himself, by raping at least twenty women.
“Forget these women,” Rashad said…
Rashad dismisses claims from both Beverly Johnson and Janice Dickinson. “Oh, please,” she said when their names came up.
For Rashad to be so dismissive of the victims is cruel, not to mention deeply anti-feminist. The idea that women commonly accuse men of rape falsely is a myth. Only around 2% of rape accusations turn out to be false. The statistical probability of twenty women falsely claiming rape against the same man is, for all practical purposes, zero.
Cosby selected his victims carefully. He chose women he thought wouldn’t dare report him, or who wouldn’t be believed if they did. This is common behavior for serial rapists. They target “party girls” because they assume (correctly, as it turns out) people won’t listen to them.
Other interesting statistics: Around 68% of rapes are never reported. And only about 2% of men who commit rapes ever serve time in jail.
People who bash or dismiss the victims (like Rashad, and like Friedman, who chose to report Rashad’s opinions in an unbalanced way) are adding to the problem. As long as we’re willing to let guys like Cosby off the hook, we’ll continue to have a misogynistic, rape-friendly culture.