Posted on 12/04/2014 8:02:52 AM PST by SteveH
As the number of sexual assault allegations against Bill Cosby grows, the comedian is now facing a lawsuit from a woman who claims Cosby molested her when she was 15. In a suit filed at Los Angeles County Superior Court on Tuesday, Judy Huth states that Cosby sexually assaulted her at the Playboy Mansion in 1974, the Los Angeles Times reports. The lawsuit marks the first time the latest wave of accusations against Cosby has resulted in legal action.
While the state of California can only pursue criminal charges against Cosby had the incident occurred in 1988 or after due to the statute of limitations, a civil trial could proceed if Huth can prove that she has developed "psychological injuries and illnesses" in the past three years as a result of the decades-old alleged assault.
(Excerpt) Read more at rollingstone.com ...
**”You’re ACTUAL position is, “They do it to us all the time and get away with it. Now they are doing it to one of their own, and as such, he deserves what he gets.”**
Wow, you sure missed the boat with that strange claim.
It does seem to be a version of what you believe though, that this is just a conspiracy to get your man, so you have to choose his side in a larger war and defend him on those grounds.
It would serve you to look into the story more and actually learn something about it.
Yes, due process is CRITICAL.
But the US Navy stripped Cosby of his honorary position because the ALLEQATIONS were aqainst the core values of the Navy. No evidence or due process necessary. All that was needed was ALLEQATIONS.
I say we need to come up with ALLEQATIONS aqainst Obama, and then the Navy can strip him of his position as Commander-in-Chief. No impeachment necessary, because the Navy has already established the precedent that evidence and due process are not necessary as lonq as there are ALLEQATIONS that contradict the core values of the Navy.
While we were all waitinq on the Ferquson Qrand Jury to do “due process” Obama’s lawless reqime was already institutinq precedent that due process and evidence are totally unnecessary.
And everybody who supposedly supports the rule of law cheers alonq with their pitchforks.
Pathetic.
Your attempt to reason with the poster on this thread is valiant and you’re makinq critical, well-stated points, but I think both of us are wastinq our time on him/her. Evidence and reason not needed or welcomed by some seqments of the population.
“It would serve you to look into the story more and actually learn something about it.”
No it wouldn’t serve me, or you. That’s what the press wants from you. They do this because:
1. You’ll click to read the story.
2. You’ll leave comments on the order of ‘hanging is too good for him.”
3. This gets other people reading the story.
4. The publisher gets to raise the CPM rate of his ads from $4.00 per 1000 to $5.00 per 1000.
If these stories could be ignored, then they wouldn’t publish them. I’m not naïve to think that would happen, but then again me learning more about the story is me subsidizing this sort of cowardice too.
By cowardice, I mean the sort of act one resorts to if your ideas can’t prevail in the marketplace. Democrats haven’t been able to win because their ideas are better since LBJ. This sort of press is the only thing propping them up.
The funny thing to watch, of late, is seeing the press have to take Obama behind close doors and tell them, “Look, we understand the business model. We help you and you help us, but we aren’t magicians. You keep doing this sort of thing, at some point our ability to spin it decreases to the point that we have to decide whether to go down with you or recover what shred of credibility we still have.”
I can very well see how whacking Cosby became the consolation gift. Obama just whacked a very carefully negotiated tax bill Reid put together with the GOP because Reid’s staff threw Obama under the bus after the massacre.
I also recall what happened to Tiger Woods. Tiger’s not the first golfer that has slept around prodigiously on his wife on tour. He got on the wrong side of somebody and the press took him out. Full stop. If Phil farted in the wrong key, the press could have a field day with him too.
There are traditions to be honored. There aren’t rules in all of this, but there are traditions. You don’t violate them or it all falls apart.
In the mafia, you don’t sleep with another made guy’s wife. You don’t do it. That’s the tradition.
It’s there because history has shown if you do it will cause the sort of collateral damage that can upend carefully cultivated arrangements that allow for loads of money to be made with the very least amount of effort and investment.
The above is the ONLY THING IN THE WORLD that can explain why someone with Lena Dunham’s diminutive talent is allowed to get away with leveling a rape charge, IN PUBLIC, IN A PUBLISHED MAINSTREAM BOOK, on a guy who may not actually exist, and still get rich and be the toast of hollywood.
You want information that is ACTUALLY going to benefit the press folks on our side AND do something for you as well, check out that story on Breitbart. At least when we click on his stories, its our friends that benefit, not the left’s.
I stayed away from the Lena Dunham story but checked out the Breitbart link yesterday. Blood spattered on the wall from a rape? This isn’t even qood science fiction. What a pathetic piece of drivel.
But it’s the media-political complex. It’s a mockery of intelliqent life wherever it may be found.
When you look at the trend, what I see is this: the reqime realized from Ferquson that normal people in a Qrand Jury will still process evidence. With that disclosure imminent they realized they were qoinq to need the ability to qet rid of people in the “court of public opinion”, where evidence doesn’t matter.
Cosby was the perfect person to try this experiment on, because he’s a known adulterer who had been hit by the media riqht after his “pound cake” speech in 2005, and because he is one of the few voices who would address the lawless thuqs in Ferquson.
And just like that, we’ve found that not only private businesses like Netflix but also QOVERNMENT ENTITIES LIKE THE US NAVY were totally willinq to throw out any pretense of evidentiary standards and due process, and throw somebody away just because of unprovable ALLEQATIONS.
It sure looks like a deliberate proqression AWAY from the need for evidence, riqht after the evidence in the Wilson/Brown case didn’t work the way the reqime/media wanted it to work, in SPITE of all their “court of public opinion” lies and manipulations.
Well stated, and exactly why folks on our side of things like Ansel need to hear what we have to say.
They want us to hang folks on no evidence. If they can get conservatives to willfully wipe their keesters with the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th amendments, then they don’t need to be the ones tearing up the constitution - WE WILL DO IT FOR THEM.
That’s why I look at Tiger Woods stories, and Bill Cosby stories, and I see an opportunity. The GOP has the opportunity to show the black community that the only ones who give a fig about them are conservatives. We want their families to succeed. We want their children in good, safe schools, free of drugs and full of teachers that actually care whether they are learning anything.
We want them to find good jobs, or be able to come up with good ideas to start their own businesses and find banks willing to lend them the money to start those businesses.
We then want them to have grandkids, and great grandkids, and we want them, every generation, to know that LBJ was the last massa. He was the guy who kept us high, drunk, and stupid. He had them believing that it was better to murder their own kids than to raise them on the government plantation where they had freely chosen to enslave themselves.
We then want to teach them that it was people who actually read and understood the Constitution that understood what MLK had to say, which is that one day they’d be judged not by the color of their skin, but BY THE CONTENT OF THEIR CHARACTER. Those people happened to be conservatives.
Exactly. In a cynical world there are those who still believe in truth, in family, in justice, in real opportunity. Those people are conservatives.
There are some liberals also who are able to see where this society is headed. A conservative is a liberal who’s been muqqed. Those who say that conservatives need to qive in to the cynicism and qive up on truth, family, justice, and opportunity don’t realize that we are on the verqe of an awakeninq, as more and more liberals see the reality of this experiment in liberalism. It doesn’t work.
And more and more people are realizinq that, in spite of a media and other saboteurs who would like to silence real processinq of information and arquments.
Sometimes that is what happens just afterward too. Witness the Rolling Stone apology.
"On Oct. 16 during a performance in Cosby’s hometown of Philadelphia, Buress uttered the words “when you leave here, Google ‘Bill Cosby rape.’ … That [expletive] has more results than Hannibal Buress.”
I don't know what changed. I don't know why now. I can only guess as to what took so long. But I know none of this happens without Constand. She was the first to tell police that Cosby drugged and raped her. It was her case that made Ferrier, Green, and Bowman decide to talk. It's her court filings that still get cited over and over when setting the framework for everything Cosby is accused of doing.
http://deadspin.com/the-former-basketball-player-who-brought-down-bill-cosb-1661203971
To me on the outside looking in it seems to be a tag team effort, and a tag team effort is the one of the types of siege tactics that one might expect to be required to take down a rich and powerful legal adversary.
Is food also served, in which case could it be classified as a restaurant. (etc.)
Well good for them then.
The Rolling Stone story was about allegations that were 2 years old so the physical evidence was gone, and you’re right - even that much time was enough to make it easy to pull the wool over the public’s eyes until specific checking of minute details revealed the deceptions. There were still records and people with knowledge of events 2 years earlier so that minute checking could happen.
When the alleged event was 40 years earlier even that kind of checking can’t happen. There is NO RISK in making a false claim that is that old.
And even with an accusation that is 2 years old, if the accuser hadn’t fabricated the whole event the basic fact-checking would have checked out and there would have been little to no way to refute the allegations. If she had really been at a party that night with a guy fitting that description, nobody would be apologizing for believing her story now. In the case of Cosby, as lonq as there are women who were actually alone with him at some point, they have NO RISK of their story ever being disproven at this late date. They have nothing to lose by making the accusations.
So he drugs them and then waits until they’re alert to attack them - but then none of them remembered any of this until decades later?
This woman says at the time this happened she was living with the man she later married - yet she said nothing to him about this incident until 2005, when Constand’s lawyer was looking for other women. Like so many of the stories, totally unbelievable. To believe yourself drugged and an attempted rape - coming home after 5am when invited to an evening “party”, wearing pantyhose with the feet torn to shreds because you were aimlessly wandering around a swimming pool - and yet neither the live-in boyfriend nor you bothers to talk about what happened?
Unbelievable. Literally. Unless he was used to her not coming home at night, this is totally unbelievable. If I didn’t come home at night you better believe that my husband would want to know what had happened. And if somebody had drugged and tried to rape me, you better believe I would tell him. And if I didn’t he would be livid.
My adult recollections do not go back as far as 1965 but my parents’ recollections do. i have gathered a very general and hazy impression that sexual matters were not often talked about face to face. you raise a good point but there are still plausible explanations such as that she was ashamed and worried that her boyfriend would get dragged into a situation resulting in the end of her career. they were not married at the time so this would potentially leave her without a job and without a home as well if her boyfriend subsequently decided to end the relationship for any reason. she could have covered it up by saying that she stayed over at a girl friend’s place for a while and got sick.
here is the video of the interview. while you have a right to believe what you want about the woman, you might as well check the demeanor in which she delivers the contemporaneous answers. you can, incidentally, hear her husband occasionally making a supportive comment from behind the camera.
the woman seems totally calm and collected, and not on an agenda other than to tell the truth. if this is some kind of conspiracy to bring down cosby, then why would this woman tell about not telling her future husband until later? —i suspect it is because to some degree it fits in with the time period. remember my warning about presentism. if you contend she is not telling the truth, are you saying that she permitted cosby to seduce her? because she is giving specific details about cosby’s residence. oh, and she does not even bother to mesh her story with reports that cosby bought his wife a home back east and that cosby’s LA place was in fact a bachelor pad without the regular presence of his wife there. you would expect that the woman would indicate awareness of this if she had an agenda. i suppose one could argue that the woman deliberately left a couple of loose ends but then you are left with all the other potentially checkable information, and the lack of personal gain as an agenda, plus that the woman can reasonably be expected to have her name and reputation dragged into the mud by cosby’s legal/publicity pitbull team. at this point, perhaps, she could still be an attention whore, but she does not seem to have that need either. she seems like an upper middle class retired solid citizen type.
Yeah, at the point that this woman spoke out Cosby had shown such willingness to attack the credibility of the women who accused him so of course she would be scared of that. Not.
I’d have to read that article again, which is a difficult thing given my computer mess, but seems like she said she woke up around 5 and Cosby was there but then she got really sick. Then she recovered enough to drive herself home, drove herself home, but then she wasn’t sick enough to miss work, and she never said boo to her live-in about why she was sick, why she was dead on her feet, why there were pantyhose in shreds, and why she hadn’t come home that night.
She says she isn’t telling her story for the sake of money, since she’s already rich. But how many of her friends are Hollywood leftists? Money isn’t the only motivation. It sure didn’t seem to be the motivation of the “comedian” who broke off into his rant about Cosby to start this subject up again... His concern was to make sure that people think of Cosby as a hypocrite if he says that Blacks should pull up their pants...
Ruehli addresses the reason Cosby is not speaking out herself— she says, it is because he would be lying if he denies it. in a way, this is a prediction. she is predicting Cosby (himself) won’t come after her because he knows it is true and cannot disprove it. so far, i have not seen where her prediction is false. that is a bit risky, but it offers a semi-scientific test of her credibility, and so far she appears to have passed. what would you do if someone claimed you raped someone else? would you remain silent about it or defend your good name and reputation by denouncing that person? compare your response with what cosby is doing.
anywhere you want to work, you need to show up every day, on time, or have a good reason, and make your sick days few and far between. was she sick the week before? we don’t know. would she be sick the next week? she would not know herself since that would be in her future and unpredictable. so she naturally has to minimize her sick days. was the next day of her attendance at work critical to the company’s success? again we don’t know but if it was, then she would probably have wanted to do her best to show up rather than have some big project postponed or canceled because of her absence.
as to why she did not tell her bf, i thought i had gone over that in a previous response but let me try again. the woman is single and working in what is basically an entertainment related job in LA. Have you lived and worked in LA? I have. \In case you have not, let me tell you about LA. LA is a small town for the entertainment industry people who work there. If you work in the entertainment industry in LA, and you badmouth an important entertainment person, you are blacklisted. That means, you lose your job and you never work in the entertainment industry in LA again. So if an entertainment bigshot abuses you, your options are to say something about it to someone, and then lose your career, or move away, or be silent about it. The woman chose to be silent about it, even to her boyfriend. Let’s say she mentioned it to her boyfriend. Then she would have had to deal with the possibility that the boyfriend would go to BC, or BC’s bosses at NBC, or the police. Either way, she would have risked losing her remaining control over the situation, and for a guy who is not even her husband yet. What would you do in that situation, since you are so critical of her, and why? Why would you place control over the situation in someone else’s hands and risk losing your career? The woman was not permanently physically harmed, and her career subsequently bloomed. I think she exercised good judgment. I am surprised that you would feel otherwise and not choose to support a woman who is a victim take and retain control over the situation, evaluate her options in a calm manner, and move on with her life successfully as she apparently did.
Pantyhose in shreds— no, just the bottoms of the pantyhose torn as if from walking over a rough surface, which she guessed was due to walking around the outdoor pool area on some concrete. That can be fixed either by removing the pantyhose or putting on shoes until she can replace the pantyhose. She could have done either at any point after the incident. You’ve made this point twice. The first time I did not address it because it seemed like a stretch. (In fact, most of your arguments seem like stretching to me. But whatever.)
How many of her friends are Hollywood leftists? We don’t know for certain. I would not be surprised if she had some. But is that guilt by association? She says she moved to NYC and made a career there. That does not sound to me at all like a typical Hollywood leftist entertainment industry worker. This woman moved on, far beyond the LA entertainment scene. Her Hollywood leftist friends, if any, would hardly be people that she wanted or needed or depended on much in NYC, which has its own bruising work culture.
The other comedian’s name is Hannibal Buress. He was a scriptwriter for 30 Rock before the incident where he stood up in a comedy club and asked people to google cosby and rape. That’s all he did. It was pretty brave imho, considering that he is also in the entertainment industry. I suspect he is close to if not part of the Tina Fey nexus who is responsible for the 2005 30 Rock episode allegedly pointing a finger at Cosby for sexual abuse.
Cosby says blacks should pull up their pants. Yeah, he said that in 2004. I recall it being a big shock since everyone presumed Cosby to be a liberal. I wonder if he was feeling heat for the sexual abuse allegations coming down the pike at him, and so maybe (?) as an alternative way of looking at it, he needed to supply the media with a counterbalancing optic (the so-called Pound Cake speech, May 2004) so he could wipe away the other headlines coming his way. Is it a far stretch? The guy has been in show biz almost all of his adult life, and has lots of money to mount a PR campaign. Accounts tell of him blocking a National Enquirer expose on him by offering it an exclusive interview with him, burying the expose. So it sounds like Cosby had means, motive, and opportunity to do a head fake to the media for his own benefit. He could have told kids to pull their pants up a decade or two earlier, but he waited until May 2004. Courand’s lawsuit started in January 2004. Which event sticks in your mind? In my recollection, it is the Pound Cake speech and not the lawsuit (fooey on me). And it was not a rant. He said “You leave here and google ‘bill cosby’ rape.” 8 words is not a rant, at least in my book, and he did not specifically say that bill cosby raped anyone. he simply asked (I paraphrase) that audience attendees inform themselves about bill cosby concerning rape by using google. Anything wrong with that? —Right, I thought not.
Back to Kristina Ruehli, what exactly would you say to her in person? That she is a slut or a bimbo? That anything and everything that happened to her concerning alleged sexual abuse by BC is her fault? That she should never retain control over her own destiny and always rely on a boyfriend or husband to do amy heavy lifting for her? That she should be a mind-reader or fortune teller and figure out that BC’s wife was not at the LA home when she would be there?
Please keep in mind the dangers of presentism as I explained a few responses ago. Sexual abuse is a very painful topic for the victim, even if (and perhaps especially if) one is a spouse of the victim. Enough said. :-(
There were no abuse claims coming down the pike for Cosby in 2004 when he made his speech. That’s one of my points. According to the stories he had been abusing everybody and their dog over the past 30 years and nobody had said a peep. So then he decides to anger the leftists in Hollywood to distract them? Makes no sense. At all.
You of all people should realize that Cosby HAS NO DEFENSE HE COULD QIVE. Just like you had no evidence you could produce to prove neither you nor your father had raped me in 1972 in Norfolk, NE. It is a true “he said, she said” situation, where the accusers don’t even claim to have told ANYBODY what had happened at the time, except in one instance where one said she talked to her attorney, IIRC.
But even that makes no sense. She spoke to an attorney and the attorney didn’t even realize she just captured the goose that lays the golden eggs? How many ambulance chasers are there in Hollywood, who would easily have seen that her “blue dress” was her (and her attorney’s) ticket to riches?
And this woman believes that the man drugged her with the intent to rape her - and yet he is such an honorable man that he won’t deny it because that would be a lie? That makes no sense. If he’s this monster, then why would he care about lying to cover his own arse? By saying he wouldn’t lie she is admitting she does NOT think he is a monster. Which is a strange way of thinking about somebody you’re accusing of attempted rape.
These women were from all stations of life over decades - that’s the claim. Yet NONE of them told any of their friends, spouses, boyfriends, etc that they had been drugged and raped because the power of Hollywood is so overwhelming in ALL those walks of life, places, and decades? Those arguments refute themselves.
Two other points:
1. You can see what Buress actually said at http://www.vulture.com/2014/10/hannibal-buress-called-bill-cosby-a-rapist.html It is far more than 8 words, and it specifically talks about Cosby havinq no riqht to criticize Black culture.
2. You talk about the trauma of sexual assault. But the woman with the shredded pantyhose feet said there was no danqer of a lawsuit from her because she had not suffered harm. She’s listed as a “victim” in all the lists because she was in the Constand lawsuit documents, but she herself says she is NOT a victim. That fits with her apparent belief that Cosby is honorable enouqh to not lie...
no abuse claims coming down the pike for Cosby in 2004
yes, there were. see my previous response in which i give the chronology. to quote the church lady, well, that’s conveeenient.
no defense he could give.
yes, he could stand up and tell people they are wrong about him. see my previous response about your hypothetical example.
blue dress
most if not all this behavior was before DNA testing. again presentism, blaming victim— you seem a little desperate in your argument. the attorney represented her
but was not hers in the sense that she was a plaintiff in the suit. she was just a witness to stand forward and the plaintiff’s lawyer paid for her lawyer. she stated that in the interview.
prediction
she made the prediction and he fulfilled it by remaining silent. it’s not a big deal and it is not absolute proof, but it does fit the parameters of a test. one danger of him denying it is that he would call her a liar, which gives her cause to sue. another danger would be if he is caught in a lie in public while attempting to give himself an alibi. she is probably keeping some details private. now what are you saying exactly? that she made up the encounter after 40 years and would have been willing to perjure herself for the benefit of a stranger she had likely never met? or that she had had a lapse of judgment and did a ONS with BC 40 years before the lawsuit, but decided to risk perjuring herself by changing the details into non-consensual sexual abuse? if you had to choose, which is more likely? his general MO up until recently seems to have been to have his legal/PR machine say that these women all totally made up their stories. Yet this woman gives details of his house’s interior and a date that could be figured out to the day with some effort in court or at a library. She also refers to a person who came with her, and the reaction of her co workers the next morning. These are specifics that could be chased down in a court setting. BC could state that she came to his place, had drinks, and left right afterwards without any contact. Why does he even not say that? Because he is afraid he will be caught in a lie in public? I think it is perhaps more likely because it would be even more unlikely that this woman would come forward on behalf of another stranger to offer corroborating testimony about BC’s MO. It would be her background versus his background, his credibility versus hers, and right now his credibility does not look so good relative to hers IMHO, especially considering all the other witnesses ready to step forward, and that at least one case has now been settled out of court with prejudice against BC (meaning, he had to pay something to the plaintiff and probably had to sign an agreement not to disparage the plaintiff’s reputation in public, etc. as part of the settlement). This is one of the witnesses that helped produce that settlement, so she is one of the witnesses that he never challenged in court, even though he had plenty of money to defend himself and if he were innocent the preponderance of evidence would presumably been in his favor, rendering an outcome prejudicial against him unnecessary. So there was some allegorical fire somewhere— we just did not get to see it because the details and settlement were sealed.
by saying he would not lie she thinks he is not a monster.
i don’t understand your point there. maybe i am missing something.
these women told others nothing.
that does not seem to be the case in general. listen to the playboy bunny interview. they have an online forum and the woman says they have been talking in private. Look what happened to the woman who stepped forward for the NE expose that was squashed by BC’s legal/PR machine. Part of the problem is the media itself.
And part of the problem, no doubt, would also be self proclaimed BC apologists who refuse to comprehend that they’ve been suckered and brainwashed by the BC legal/PR machine, hook line and sinker, and are gleefully willing to throw each and every possible BC sexual abuse victim under the bus as soon as they come out.
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