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We Thought Bill Cosby Couldn't Be Any More Despicable. We Were Wrong

By Vivian Kane | Miscellaneous | December 22, 2015 |

By Vivian Kane | Miscellaneous | December 22, 2015 |



Some people are monsters. We know this. They are just simply not good people and that’s unfortunate, and while it’s also unfortunate that they sometimes get so much of our public attention, that exposure is also important because it allows us to point to them and say “Look, this is what a monster looks like. Do not be one, do not talk to one, do not give one your money when you’re looking for comedy tickets or investment opportunities or whathaveyou.”

Lately, though, it seems like more and more of these atrocities incarnate are not satisfied to be regular mid-level demons. They instead insist on waving their evilness and their denial in our regular human faces. Like when Martin Shkreli recently made sure to let us know that not only is he a fiery fart formed into something somewhat resembling a man, but that he also has exactly zero self awareness.

That’s now what’s happening with Bill Cosby. Even though accusations had been out there for a long time already, most of us hadn’t heard them or ignored them, and spent our lives seeing him as a comedy or sitcom father figure. Then last fall, that all got turned upside down when we all collectively (with a push in the right direction from Hannibal Burress and a whole bunch of subsequent statements from 50 different women) accepted him as a monster wearing a previously very convincing human costume.

He took his horribleness a step further last week when he filed countersuits against seven women taking legal action against him. Not all the women who have come forward with their stories of Cosby’s abuse can press charges against him now because of various states’ statutes of limitations, but for those who can, Cosby is making it clear he refuses to admit what he has spent his life doing.

And now he’s taken this to a new level but ">straight up suing former supermodel Beverly Johnson for defamation, after she wrote her full account in Vanity Fair last November. And even more— and this is truly baffling— he’s insisting on a jury trial. Now, I admit to knowing pretty much nothing about how laws and trials work, so maybe there’s some legal nuance or loophole or whatever here that explains it. Because otherwise, this means that Bill Cosby is so far removed from reality, our perception of him, and his own horrific existence, that he actually believes he will do better here if he relies on a jury of his peers. He actually thinks he can find 12 other humans who don’t want to see him thrown into a well made of fire and feces. How can a person live in a world and really have such little sense of it? How do you get to that point? Is it pure sociopathy or something more?