Bill Cosby Is a Free Man and That is a Very Bad Thing
When I saw the headline for the first time I did not believe it. It couldn’t be true, could it? It had to be a bad taste bit from Babylon Bee or a loathsome exercise in defiantly fictional clickbait like those fake articles about how Clint Eastwood is now aggressively promoting the wonders of boner pills.
I didn’t believe the headline because it seemed so far-fetched and preposterous but also because I did not WANT to believe it. After all, the world’s most famous rapist, a man who drugged and assaulted dozens of women over a period of decades while positing himself as the conscience of black America can’t just strut out of jail a free man due to some manner of technicality.
But it was, in fact, horribly, horribly true. To my abject horror and mortification, Bill Cosby’s conviction for sexual assault had been overturned and a man who experienced perhaps the greatest fall from grace in the history of American entertainment was released to resume his life of wealth and privilege as a free man.
Cosby’s release from prison felt like the awful culmination of a ferocious backlash to the #MeToo movement that had been building over a period of years and seemed to be gaining more terrible momentum every day.
#MeToo was a long overdue moral, professional and legal reckoning that held powerful men accountable for an endless array of terrible transgressions. It was inevitable that it would engender a ferocious backlash, if only because if there’s one thing the powerful men of the world hate it’s being held accountable for their actions.
That’s what all of the invective on the right, and occasionally on the left, about the insidious evil of “Cancel Culture” is fundamentally about. It’s an angry, brittle, reactionary response to the notion that men who were protected for decades by money, wealth, power and connections were now being “cancelled”, or rendered unemployable pariahs because of their past misdeeds.
A consensus began to build that #MeToo started out with good intentions and noble goals but had gone too far and become a destructive force that empowered the wrong people and destroyed the lives of innocent men guilty of the most minor of transgressions.
It wasn’t just a matter of “cancelling” people guilty of awful crimes, like the universally despised Harvey Weinstein. The right transformed the phrase “Cancel Culture” into a ubiquitous pejorative catchphrase the same way they did “Liberal”, “political correctness” and “critical race theory.”
The right uses “Cancel Culture” as an all-purpose bogeyman. Consequently when Matt Gaetz was credibly accused of trafficking underage girls he could yell to anyone who would listen that he was a victim of Cancel Culture and not the consequences of his own criminal actions.
CPAC could similarly bill last year’s soiree as “America Uncancelled”, confident that Trump super-fans would see cancellation as leftists destroying everyone who displeases them and doesn’t fit into their narrow, judgmental worldview rather than a matter of people like R. Kelly, Bill Cosby, Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein going to jail for all of the horrible sex crimes they committed.
One of the many depressing aspects of Cosby’s release from prison is that it provides useful talking points for every man accused of abusing his power in shameful and criminal ways.
Men, and occasionally women, accused of sexual harassment or sexual assault or sexual impropriety will now be able to say that if the legal system could get something as massive as Bill Cosby being a serial rapist wrong then who’s to say they didn’t also get a raw deal?
Of course society didn’t get Cosby wrong. He was being released on a technicality, not because he was innocent. Yet distinctions like that don’t seem to matter to the distressingly sizable contingent of folks who think Cosby was framed by the white establishment because he had gotten too rich and powerful and was going to buy NBC and was guilty of nothing more serious than being a womanizing playboy and hypocrite.
All that matters to Cosby’s defenders and apologists is that they said he was innocent and in their minds at least, the judicial system agreed with them, which is why his conviction was overturned and he became a free man.
It’s easy to imagine Donald Trump getting false hope from Cosby’s conviction being overturned. After all, if the nice black man from the TV who told the thugs to pull up their pants and stop listening to that potty-mouthed rap music could wrongly be accused of drugging and raping over sixty women with nearly identical stories then why couldn’t the results of the 2020 presidential election also be overturned?
Bill Cosby being let out of prison, a free man, is awful enough in itself. What’s even worse is the precedent it sets in the warped minds of other predators who similarly would love to commit unspeakable crimes and get away with them in the end.
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