Mark Ebner revisits his 2007 warning about Bill Cosby

LA journalist Mark Ebner interviewed Hollywood publicist Joan Tarshis in 2007 about her claim that Bill Cosby had raped her. After talking to other women who made the same charge, he posted a piece at his website, Hollywood, Interrupted, and that was pretty much it. With Tarshis and other women going public with allegations about Cosby (denied by his lawyer), Ebner digs out his old post and makes some updates to look at why the Cosby story has not gotten more play. An excerpt from his new introduction at the Daily Beast:

In my interviews with several of the women back then, I found the tale they told disturbingly similar: All were young and impressionable, beautiful, and talented. Cosby had taken a keen interest in their careers, and had offered to mentor them or otherwise open the fabled doors to the glistening kingdom of show business, for which he was a principal emissary. All were given spiked drinks—or drugs misrepresented as medicine—and became incapacitated, the women charged. And all allegedly awoke with the unshakable sense that something wrong had occurred. People magazine even ran an article on the lawsuits that were settled with several of the women, but never followed up on it. And from my own experience, I can confirm that the story shook people to the core: Even more than Woody Allen, Bill Cosby was a beloved figure and civil-rights pioneer; hardened editors were horrified at the prospect of taking him down. I might as well have pitched a story about Martin Luther King, Jr. philandering with white women. The story went nowhere.

But with the recent onslaught of similar allegations—many from women on whose charges the statute of limitations has long since passed, so they have no financial incentive or clear reason to cloud their reputations well into middle age—it’s important to track the history of this story, and the media complicity that has enabled it to remain untold for so long. Heroes always fall hard. But their suffering and anguish is nothing compared to that of their victims.