I was a fan of Cosby back to the Sixties, we used to listen to his albums. I thought he was great.
As I got older, into the decades of the Sixties and Seventies and saw more interviews with him, there was something about him that registered as...bad, maybe just the kind of person who treated hired help poorly, or was demanding for things like service in a restaurant, just because of who he was. Something along those lines is what I thought. I wasn’t thinking he was a rapist or anything like that.
I remember watching him during a televised interview, and thinking he would be unpleasant in some way if you knew him in person. As if he were wearing a mask for the public to hide something, I didn’t know what. I think it was around that time he had that family sitcom on TV.
Then before any of this was widely known, I remember having a conversation with someone who had once met him socially who said he was kind of a jerk in person. Part of me wrote that off as possible hearsay and if true, a celebrity related thing.
But a gut feeling also told me that he was not the nice person he was trying to come across as.
To be fair, I have been wrong about that kind of gut feeling. But I have been right, too.
The fact that he was serial philanderer made me see him in a new light. And that he still tried to perpetuate his family man persona was the icing on the cake.
It was the claims of Cosby’s behavior on his TV show set that made me doubt his nice-guy persona.