Bill Cosby has put on a one-night public performance at a Philadelphia club. Based on what was said by the marketing blurb that went out with the news, the performance was supposed to honor his fans. However, considering the current concern over sexual misconduct in the entertainment industries as well as other places, one cannot help but suspect that this was ill-timed.
For people who are unfamiliar with the exact details, Cosby has been accused of a great deal of sexual misconduct by numerous women over the course of decades and decades. There were two women who spoke out about what had happened to them in the 1980s and the 1990s, but their stories were never published. As a result, it was not until 2005 that a number of women started speaking out, which happened because Cosby was not tried because of what the DA claimed to be insufficient evidence after a woman named Andrea Constand spoke out about how she had been drugged and then fondled in 2004. In 2014, a comedy stand-up routine convinced a second wave of women to speak out about what had happened to them, with the result that their numbers are now close to 60 in total. Moreover, it should be noted that their stories of what had happened to them tend to share a great deal of similarities, so it is no wonder that there are a lot of people who now see Cosby as a serial rapist who has managed to get away with a lot of heinous deeds for a long, long time.
In 2015, Cosby was charged in Montgomery County in relation to what had happened to Andrea Constand. Other police departments in other counties considered charging him as well, but a number of them were unable to do so either because the statute of limitations had run out, the statute of limitations had not been removed at the time of the incident, or there was insufficient evidence to move forward.
Unfortunately, the trail resulted in a deadlocked jury that could not agree on any of the three charges that had been laid against Cosby. There was a 10-to-2 deadlock in favor of convicting Cosby on two of the charges as well as a 11-to-1 deadlock in favor of acquitting Cosby on the third charge, though there have been reports that there were shifts in the numbers over time. Regardless, the result is that Cosby will be going through a second trial, which has been postponed until March of 2018 at the very earliest.
With that said, there are a lot of people who are outraged at Cosby, not least because Cosby admitted in 2005 that he had gotten Quaaludes so that he could give them to women for the purpose of having sex with them. This is bad enough on its own, but it should be mentioned that Quaaludes have been banned in the United States ever since President Reagan signed the relevant piece of legislation in 1984. As a result, it is no wonder that numerous social media users reacted with fury to the announcement of Cosby’s public performance.
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