Last week, New York magazine ran a front-cover photo of 35 of the 46 women who have accused actor Bill Cosby of sexual assault. The feature inside includes individual interviews with each woman, but argues that ‘the horror is multiplied by the sheer volume of seeing them together, reading them together, considering their shared experience’.
The collation of these women’s accusations follows intense public interest in Cosby’s alleged misconduct, triggered last year when the comedian Hannibal Buress declared ‘you raped women, Bill Cosby’ during a routine. The New York feature is not an attempt to bring Cosby to justice, or even to challenge the statute of limitations that impedes any potential legal process against him. Instead, it’s about creating a kind of sorrowful sisterhood, a gathering of alleged victims, and in the process it, like so much Cosby commentary over the past year, runs the risk of denting a key principle of all democratic societies: innocent until proven guilty.
In recent months, Cosby has become a global figure of suspicion and contempt.
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