Update: The magazine’s site is still down, but they have transferred the story (minute video clips) to their Tumblr.
New York magazine’s cover package compiling the testimony of 35 of the 46 women who have accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault is the kind of thing that gives one hope for the future of journalism. Combining interviews by Noreen Malone with a staggeringly powerful series of portraits and video interviews by Amanda Demme, it ought to be, at long last, the final nail in the coffin of Bill Cosby’s reputation, defining him as a serial rapist first and a formerly beloved entertainer second.
Unfortunately, this is the moment that a hacker has chosen to attack New York’s website, allegedly because of a bad experience he had on a trip to New York, taking the magazine offline just as the awareness of the article was peaking. The main text has been archived here, and even on its own it’s an overwhelming read, presenting independently gathered testimony that details an uncannily similar pattern of behavior on Cosby’s part that stretches back decades. The other, equally disturbing pattern, is of women being effectively fed to Cosby by people they considered friends, and of knowing after the fact that if they accused him, they would not be believed.
“At 17, my agent introduced me to Bill Cosby, who was going to mentor me and take me to the next level of my career. Over the course of the next year, I was drugged half the time when I was with him and would come out of a delusional experience going, ‘Whoa, what was that?’ He would say, ‘Well, I needed to undress you and wash your clothes because you got drunk and made a fool of yourself.’ Do you remember the Jaycee Dugard story? She pretty much could have climbed over the fence any time she wanted to but was just so broken down and couldn’t think straight. I felt like a prisoner; I felt I was kidnapped and hiding in plain sight. I could have walked down any street of Manhattan at any time and said, ‘I’m being raped and drugged by Bill Cosby,’ but who the hell would have believed me? Nobody, nobody. I was invited down to Atlantic City to see his show and had a very confusing night where I was completely drugged and my luggage was missing. When I called the concierge to find out where my luggage was, Cosby went ballistic. He slammed the phone down and said, ‘What the hell are you doing, letting the whole hotel know I have a 19-year-old girl in my hotel suite?’ The next morning, he summoned me down to his room and yelled at me that I needed to have discretion. He threw me down on the bed and he put his forearm under my throat. He straddled me, and he took his belt buckle off. The clanking of the belt buckle, I’ll never forget.” —Barbara Bowman
The archived article does not allow you to click through to the women’s individual stories, nor does it contain the video clips. But clips from audio interviews are being posted to Instagram. Listen to them now, and be sure to return to New York’s site later for the full package. Investigations like this one, which was conducted over a period of six months, take an enormous amount of time and resources, and New York deserves both the credit and the traffic.
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