We Need to Talk About Cosby, BBC 2, BBC iPlayer, Writer and Director W Kamau Bell.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001jw7l/we-need-to-talk-about-cosby-series-1-episode-1

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0f50h4m/we-need-to-talk-about-cosby-series-1-episode-2

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0f50jqx/we-need-to-talk-about-cosby-series-1-episode-3

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0f50n4g/we-need-to-talk-about-cosby-series-1-episode-4

We Need to Talk About Cosby is a play on the title of Lionel Shriver’s novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin. Kevin was a precocious child that turned into a Columbine-type mass murderer of his classmates. His mum was the narrator. She had to reassess everything she knew, or thought she knew, about Kevin. W Kamau Bell tries to create a similar intimate portrait.

I don’t know a great deal about Bill Cosby. I figured him to be another celebrity rapist. Shades of grey here. Harvey Weinstein, for example, claimed he wasn’t a real rapist because he wasn’t like Cosby. He didn’t drug his victims. He wasn’t a pussy grabber like the moron’s moron and former 42^nd United States President. Nor did he befriend his pre-teen victims and bring him into the heart of his celebrity cocoon like Michael Jackson. He didn’t hit them in the back of the head with a hammer like the Yorkshire Ripper. We know the statistics about stranger danger. Around ninety-five percent of victims know their rapists. Justice delayed is justice denied. But the chance of a conviction of a known rapist—I’d guess running—around  1 in 100 in British Courts, and getting higher. There was a nod to this kind of reality when it was reported Bill Cosby got out on prison on appeal. Laws don’t apply when money and power coalesce. Even Jeffrey Epstein was let out of prison every morning to return to his important work as long as he agreed to return to his cell at night, and serve some part of his two-year sentence.

At the end of this four-part, four-hour series, we’ll certainly know more about Bill Cosby. In other words, we’ll have more data. In placing him in his time and context, we’ll be able to go beyond our current understanding of Bill Cosby. What started as a trickle of discoveries will turn into a flood. We’ll understand how Bill Cosby was able to get away with raping women for so long. But here I feel a bit like my neighbour’s kid, who at six told me she didn’t need to go to school, because she already knew everything. Why bother?

I don’t have skin in the game. Bonnie Garmus’s heroine Elizabeth Zott is raped by her academic advisor in Lessons in Chemistry. Set in 1955 suburban America, the policeman that responded to her call, asked if she wanted to make a formal note of apology to her attacker, because she stabbed him with a pencil. The officer suggested it would work out better for her that way. Her lab work is routinely denigrated and stolen. A women’s work is to be a good housewife.

In sixties America, of course, Hugh Hefner’s Bunny Girls were asking for it. Bill Cosby, who was friends with Hefner, was never going to miss that opportunity. A black Bunny Girl translated that into dollars. Normal working girls would average around $50 a week in shops or secretarial. Bunny Girls could hit $1000 or $2000 for a few days’ work. Cosby also sold himself as ‘a raceless comedian’ in the same way as Uncle Tom’s and British Home Secretaries, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman market themselves as hard-line Conservative politicians and refugees as things, or ‘swarms’ and not real people like us. Working women are fair game and things for Cosby to use, because they are things with breasts and a vagina.

Much was made of hiding in plain sight. Bill Cosby’s monologues on a ‘Spanish’ narcotic he used on women. A former Playboy model told how she’s lost her son in a swimming pool accident and had been out to dinner with a friend. Cosby had drugged both of them, while joking around, and had dropped them off an office complex and raped her. She’d said she’d asked Cosby how they’d get home. He said they should take a taxi. Her manners had kicked in and she’d thanked him for that information. Cosby’s high-priced lawyers would have murdered her on the stand for that slip-up.

In the carousel of famous men on trial, it’s really women who are asking for it on trial. Rapists portray themselves as victims. Women they rape are portrayed as low-lives looking for another payday. Standard fare for the moron’s moron, who has also been accused of multiple rapes. ‘Fake News’.

Bill Cosby wasn’t all black and white, Jekyll or Hyde. He wasn’t my American Dad. But I’m not black, nor am I American. Did he do it? Absolutely. How do I know that? Listen to the stories and you decide. When you write stories, it’s that bit at the end that gives it resonance. A woman in mourning for her son, she’s been raped, but thanking her attacker for telling her how to get home. Or worse, giving her the cab fare. We tend to stick to what we believe and the stories we know best. We live our prejudices.