Bill Cosby – Biographer Regrets Not Mentioning Sexual Abuse Claims Though ‘Believing Bill Cosby Was A Rapist’
In regards to the Bill Cosby sexual abuse claims scandal, David Carr, a columnist for the New York Times, blames not only himself, but a number of other writers for essentially enabling Bill Cosby’s alleged behavior towards women by not writing about it in the past. Carr says that the numerous allegations of sexual assault pointed at Bill Cosby have been around for some time, but writers like him turned a “blind eye” to the problem.
In addition to his own fault, Carr points out the work if Ta-Nehisi Coates, who wrote a lengthy essay on Bill Cosby for The Atlantic in 2008. Carr also called out Kelefa Sanneh, who just wrote a profile on Cosby for the New Yorker in September, and Mark Whitaker, who wrote a lengthy biography on Bill, a biography that was published only two months ago.
According to Carr, all these writers, including himself, failed to properly mention and/or address the accusations of sexual assault, despite the fact that the accusations were “carefully and thoroughly reported” in Philadelphia magazine, People magazine and Today as far back as 2005.
Carr addressed the negligence by Cosby biographer’s in his New York Times column yesterday.
“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. Mr. Whitaker has said he didn’t want to put anything in the book, which he wrote with Mr. Cosby’s cooperation, that wasn’t confirmed – which of course raises the question of why he wouldn’t have done the work to knock down the accusations or make them stand up. And given that the accusations had already been carefully and thoroughly reported in Philadelphia magazine and elsewhere, any book of the size and scope of Mr. Whitaker’s should have gone there.”
Whitaker responded to Carr yesterday on Twitter. In the tweet, he admitted that he should have examed the allegations more thoroughly.
Calling Out Bill Cosby’s Media Enablers, Including Myself http://t.co/9gl5YmeZpN
— david carr (@carr2n) November 24, 2014
@carr2n David you are right. I was wrong to not deal with the sexual assault charges against Cosby and pursue them more aggressively.
— Mark Whitaker (@Marktwhitaker) November 24, 2014
Whitaker went one step further to say that he was following “new developments.” He said that if they are true, they are “shocking and horrible.”
@carr2n I am following new developments and will address them at the appropriate time. If true the stories are shocking and horrible.
— Mark Whitaker (@Marktwhitaker) November 24, 2014
In his column, Carr noted that Coates revisted his coverage on the Atlantic’s website and admitted that, at the time he wrote his pieces on Cosby, he believed “that Bill Cosby was a rapist.” Coates said that his piece on the entertainer included only “a brief and limp mention of the accusations against Cosby.”
“I regret not saying what I thought of the accusations, and then pursuing those thoughts. I regret it because the lack of pursuit puts me in league with people who either looked away, or did not look hard enough. I take it as a personal admonition to always go there, to never flinch, to never look away.”
Last weekend, Kelefa Sanneh, another writer called out by Carr, appeared on MSNBC to discuss why the Cosby allegations may have been buried in the past.
“It’s easy to look at the Huxtable family and say ‘oh, that must be what Bill Cosby is like…’ Just because a comedian has politics we agree with, just because a comedian makes work we agree with, doesn’t mean, necessarily, they’re not capable of what Bill Cosby’s accused of.”
[Image via North Country Public Radio]
