Bill Cosby has dominated headlines for much of the last month as accusations of sexual assault pile up.<\/p>\n
More than a dozen women have accused Cosby, many of whom say he drugged them first.<\/p>\n
Their stories paint a starkly different picture of the black father\u00a0beloved by millions as Dr. Huxtable — the sweet, sweater-wearing dad\u00a0on the sitcom, “The Cosby Show.”<\/p>\n
New York Times columnist David Carr meanwhile has taken a number of writers and mediates \u2014 including himself \u2014 to task for turning a blind eye to the numerous allegations of sexual assault leveled against Bill Cosby, and he\u2019s already elicited one mea culpa in response.<\/p>\n
In addition to admitting his own accountability, Carr called out Ta-Nehisi Coates, who penned a lengthy essay on the comedian in The Atlantic in 2008; Kelefa Sanneh, who wrote a New Yorker profile on Cosby in September; and Mark Whitaker, who wrote an extensive biography on Cosby published just two months ago; noting that they all failed to properly address the accusations, despite the fact that they were \u201ccarefully and thoroughly reported\u201d in Philadelphia magazine, People magazine and Today in 2005 and 2006.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe all have our excuses, but in ignoring these claims, we let down the women who were brave enough to speak out publicly against a powerful entertainer,\u201d Carr wrote in a Monday column. \u201cMr. Whitaker has said he didn\u2019t want to put anything in the book, which he wrote with Mr. Cosby\u2019s cooperation, that wasn\u2019t confirmed \u2014 which of course raises the question of why he wouldn\u2019t have done the work to knock down the accusations or make them stand up. And given that the accusations had already been carefully and thoroughly reported in Philadelphia magazine and elsewhere, any book of the size and scope of Mr. Whitaker\u2019s should have gone there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Whitaker took to Twitter on Monday afternoon to respond to Carr\u2019s column, admitting that he should\u2019ve investigated the allegations more thoroughly.<\/p>\n
Carr noted that Coates also revisited his Cosby coverage on The Atlantic\u2019s website and admitted that at the time he wrote the piece, he \u201cbelieved that Bill Cosby was a rapist,\u201d but included only \u201ca brief and limp mention of the accusations against Cosby.\u201d Coates went on to write, \u201cI regret not saying what I thought of the accusations, and then pursuing those thoughts. I regret it because the lack of pursuit puts me in league with people who either looked away, or did not look hard enough. I take it as a personal admonition to always go there, to never flinch, to never look away.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sanneh does not seem to be active on Twitter, but appeared on an MSNBC segment over the weekend to discuss the Cosby allegations, telling host Melissa Harris-Perry, \u201cIt\u2019s easy to look at the Huxtable family and say \u2018oh, that must be what Bill Cosby is like\u2019 \u2026 Just because a comedian has politics we agree with, just because a comedian makes work we agree with, doesn\u2019t mean, necessarily, they\u2019re not capable of what Bill Cosby\u2019s accused of.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bill Cosby has dominated headlines for much of the last month as accusations of sexual assault pile up. More than a dozen women have accused Cosby, many of whom say he drugged them first. Their stories paint a starkly different picture of the black father\u00a0beloved by millions as Dr. Huxtable — the sweet, sweater-wearing dad\u00a0on … Continue reading “From America’s black father to accused sexual predator”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2961,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,10],"tags":[10613,157,36,10614],"class_list":["post-16995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-united-states","tag-bill-cosby","tag-racism","tag-rape","tag-sexual-abuse"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2961"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16995"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16995\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16996,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16995\/revisions\/16996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}