Washington - In late November, while a cascade of accusers publicly portrayed Bill Cosby as a serial, decades-long rapist, the Grammy-winning R&B star Jill Scott took to social media to defend him.
“u know Bill Cosby?” Scott said on Twitter. “I do child and this is insane. Proof. Period.”
Scott struck a different tone on Tuesday, after the unsealing of documents from a 2005 court case in which Cosby admitted to obtaining seven prescriptions for Quaaludes, a powerful sedative, to give to women with whom he wanted to have sex.
“About Bill Cosby,” the singer wrote to her 1.1 million Twitter followers. “Sadly his own testimony offers PROOF of terrible deeds, which is ALL I have ever required to believe the accusations.”
Just as Scott was reconsidering her support of Cosby, the comedian's own words, once securely buried in the files of a Philadelphia courthouse, yet now exhumed, are forcing a reckoning for one of America's most-beloved entertainment icons. It remains to be seen how the unsealed documents, part of a lawsuit filed against Cosby a decade ago by one of his accusers, will have any tangible effect on ongoing civil cases brought against the comedian by women who have alleged that he drugged and raped them. But the disclosures are giving the comedian's alleged victims — who number more than 40 — a sense of vindication after years of intense efforts by Cosby's team to discredit them, as well as hardening an impression that the comedian's brand is irretrievably damaged and his career decimated.
“Just the fact that this man finally in his own words blew his own cover, isn't that fantastic?” said Victoria Valentino, who has accused Cosby of drugging and raping her in 1970 at a Hollywood apartment. “All of the people who have been saying terrible things about us on Twitter, now they have to believe. Silence is a rapist's biggest weapon.”
Adam Epstein, a Chicago-based promoter who was under fire for handling six of Cosby's recent shows, predicted that Cosby's performing career is over.
“It would be virtually impossible to recover from something like this,” Epstein said Tuesday. “The admissions are frightening.”
Cosby's attorney, Martin Singer, did not respond to requests for comment. Singer has called recent allegations against his client “ridiculous,” and he said in a statement in November that it is “completely illogical that so many people would have said nothing, done nothing, and made no reports to law enforcement.”
Cosby's admission about Quaaludes came to light Monday because of a legal request filed by the Associated Press, which had sought to unseal records in a case involving Andrea Constand, an operations manager for Temple University's women's basketball team. Constand, whose case was settled, had accused Cosby of drugging her with pills, then touching her breasts and vagina before she passed out. Her legal team assembled more than a dozen “Jane Doe” accusers who also alleged that they had been sexually assaulted by Cosby.
In federal court filings, which included portions of transcribed depositions from 2005, a portrait emerges of a ferocious legal battle that exposed Cosby's sexual behavior, as well as payments he funneled to an accuser via a talent agency.
“When you got the Quaaludes, was it in your mind that you were going to use these Quaaludes for young women that you wanted to have sex with?” one of Constand's attorneys asked during a September 2005 deposition.
“Yes,” Cosby responded.
Cosby's attorneys instructed him not to answer when the comedian was asked whether he gave women Quaaludes without their knowledge.
In the deposition, Cosby also described meeting a woman backstage in Las Vegas. “I give her Quaaludes. We then have sex,” he said.
The revelations go “a long way to validate the claims these women have with Mr. Cosby,” said Joseph Cammarata, a Washington attorney for Therese Serignese, Tamara Green and Linda Traitz, who have filed a defamation lawsuit in Massachusetts for unspecified damages against Cosby, claiming their reputations were tarnished when his representative branded them “liars” after they accused Cosby of sexually assaulting them.
In an interview with the AP, Gloria Allred — who represents several Cosby accusers — said the cache of documents “confirms the allegations of numerous victims who have alleged that he had used drugs to sexually assault them.”
“This admission is one that Mr. Cosby has attempted to hide from the public for many years,” she added.
The revelations felt all too familiar — almost an “of course moment,” as she put it — to Joan Tarshis, who accused Cosby of drugging and assaulting her in a New York hotel room in 1969.
“I thought he would have continued to lie. Why admit the truth?” Tarshis said. “Honestly, if I were him, I would have continued to lie. There's nothing in it for him to be honest and to tell the truth.”
She, too, says she believes that Cosby, who starred on the mega-hit 1980s program “The Cosby Show” and made millions selling comedy records and touring, can never return to the stage.
“I don't think he's going to say anything ever again,” she said. “He can't continue to say that everything he did was all consensual. Who's going to believe that?”
The implications for the career of the 77-year-old comedian — one of the wealthiest entertainers in the world — have already been felt. NBC and Netflix scrapped high-profile projects considered linchpins of his comeback plans this past winter after dozens of women accused him of rape.
Even as the accusations piled up, Cosby made the unorthodox decision to stay on tour. His shows developed a surreal quality. When he was heckled during a routine, he refused to acknowledge that anything had changed.
Cosby could no longer sell out two shows a night — once an easily attained standard for him — but he did find thousands of fans, across the country, who felt that he deserved to perform. Susan Raimondi was one of them. In November, she sat outside the King Center for the Performing Arts in Melbourne, Florida, with a group of friends and suggested that Cosby's accusers had financial motives
“Dinero,” Raimondi, 71, said, invoking the Spanish word for money.
But on Tuesday night, reached at home, Raimondi said that the deposition had changed her mind.
“It find it very, very upsetting,” she said. “And I always liked him, but I don't plan on doing anything with Bill Cosby again.”
Troy Siebels, president of the 2,300-seat Hanover Theatre in Worcester, Massachussetts, which canceled a Cosby performance in February, said the court documents could have shifted attitudes about the comedian the other way.
“If there was something in these documents that seems to in any way vindicate him,” Siebels said, “at least we would strongly consider bringing him in. But this certainly doesn't do that.”
The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African Art has no plans to close an exhibition of artwork owned by Cosby and his wife, Camille. The exhibition, which opened Nov. 9 and is set to be on view until Jan. 24, was billed as a “major part of the museum's 50th anniversary” but has not been a blockbuster in terms of visitors, drawing 114 000 in the first six months of 2015.
“The National Museum of African Art is aware of the recent revelations about Bill Cosby's behavior. The museum in no way condones this behavior,” the museum's spokesman said in a statement on Tuesday. “Our current 'Conversations' exhibition, which includes works of African art from our permanent collection and African American art from the collection of Camille and Bill Cosby, is fundamentally about the artworks and the artists who created them, not the owners of the collection.”
After months of accusations and counter-accusations, some of Cosby's accusers saw the unsealing of documents in Philadelphia as a signal moment with implications for the future of the wider entertainment industry.
“When I reported my incident to my agent, I was met with silence,” said Barbara Bowman, who wrote a widely read commentary on The Washington Post's website in November headlined “Bill Cosby raped me. Why did it take 30 years for people to believe my story?” “Either they were culpable, they were turning the other cheek or they had no idea what to do with the information.”
Bowman, who says Cosby sexually assaulted her when she was a 17-year-old aspiring actress, now works with a group called PAVE — Promoting Awareness of Victim Empowerment — and is focused on changing the casting-couch culture in Hollywood
“The talent, they are young, vulnerable,” Bowman said. “They get themselves into a great job and all of a sudden, they may be faced with someone sexually harassing them, and the actors are conditioned to tolerate it. Actors and actresses are a dime a dozen, and they are in a very compromising position.”
Cosby has had few vocal supporters, but the revelations in the court documents did not dissuade one of his most prominent defenders: actress Whoopi Goldberg.
“I don't like snap judgments because I've had snap judgments made on me. . . . Save your texts, save your nasty comments. I don't care,” Goldberg said on “The View,” the talk show she co-hosts on ABC. “In America, still — I know it's a shock — but you actually were innocent until proven guilty. He has not been proven a rapist.”
Goldberg's view had been well established since the early days of the controversy, but it was the stark shift voiced by R&B singer Scott that underscored the significance of what happened this week in Philadelphia. Posting on Twitter, Scott delivered a sweeping assessment that placed the Cosby saga in the context of a nation grappling with painful issues of race, class and justice.
“We live in America,” she told her followers in a series of tweets. “Many African-Amierican men are detained &/or imprisoned for crimes without evidence. I will never jump on bandwagons based on social media or hearsay. Proof will always matter more than public opinion. The sworn testimony is proof. Completely disgusted.”
She closed on a regretful note: “I stood by a man I respected and loved. I was wrong. It HURTS!!!”
Washington Post staff writers Scott Higham, Mary Pat Flaherty and Peggy McGlone contributed to this report.
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