How Junk Science, Rape Myths And Gloria Allred Convicted Bill Cosby And Harvey Weinstein – Part 1

In February this year, former movie mogul Harvey Weinstein was convicted of two counts of rape and sentenced to 23 years in prison. That conviction in a New York courtroom did not signal the end of his troubles; he was already awaiting extradition to California to be tried on similar charges when late last month, four more women came forward with rape allegations.

In 2018, veteran comedian Bill Cosby was convicted of sexually assaulting former basketball coach Andrea Constand, and is currently serving a sentence that could very likely see a man of his age dying behind bars.

Both men have been accused of multiple sex offenses going back decades; the violation of Constand is alleged to have happened way back in 2004, but allegations that Cosby raped women go back a lot further than that. Similarly, Harvey Weinstein has been accused of multiple sex offenses, and in a less politically correct climate might be stereotyped as the overweight Jew film producer lusting over and deflowering young Aryan ingénues.

The conviction of first Cosby and then Weinstein has been hailed by the #MeToo Movement and its supporters as a watershed, vulnerable and at times helpless women fighting back against powerful men and holding them to account. This is largely the way the media sees it, but a closer look reveals a much more nuanced picture, one that contains not only blurred lines of consent but easily provable lies.

In 2015, the comedian Jay Leno asked only half-jokingly why was it so difficult to believe women when at that time Cosby was facing 25 accusers. That number has more than doubled, reaching 60 by last December. Like Cosby, Weinstein has been accused of a spectrum of offenses from non-crimes like sexual harassment – which can mean virtually anything – to aggravated rape. Between them, the two men have been accused of raping dozens of women, including on multiple occasions, yet both continue to protest their innocence. Again, in the spirit of Jay Leno, most people tend to ask how can there be that much fire with no smoke at all? An apparently entirely reasonable question, but the wrong one. The real question that needs to be asked and which has not been satisfactorily answered is who has been creating all this smoke, to wit, if Cosby and Weinstein really did rape dozens of women over a period of decades, why is there not one contemporaneous police report or medical report? In other words, why did none of these women cry rape at the time? The blindingly obvious reason is these rapes did not happen at the time.

So who or what is behind all these allegations? The simply answer is it was a media driven feeding frenzy engineered principally by one corrupt lawyer: Gloria Allred.

Cosby was first accused of having wandering hands in January 2000 when he came on to Lachelle Covington, an actress young enough to be his granddaughter. She told him to stop, and he stopped. No crime committed. In 2004 though, he was accused of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand. Constand did not file a police report until months later, and it is now clear that a) she was drinking alcohol at the time and b) had taken the drugs concerned from Cosby voluntarily. False allegations of rape are made for many reasons, but the factors that figure in them most heavily are the three D’s: drink, drugs, delay. Constand’s allegation contains all three.

Without going too far afield, alcohol is a factor in many allegations of rape – real ones as well as false ones. The effects alcohol can have on people’s inhibitions and behaviour needs no documenting here, but there is another effect on women especially. Women have less capacity for the “safe” consumption of alcohol than men, in particular it may block the transfer of short term memory into long term memory. A woman can appear to be and act as though she is totally sober, but wake up the next morning without remembering a thing, or over a period of time she may develop blurred, perhaps incorrect recollections of what actually happened. Or didn’t happen, as the case may be.

A striking case of this is Amanda Barrow, who was photographed performing a sexual act on a total stranger. When she appeared in court she admitted it was her on the film but denied (truthfully) remembering what she had done.

A far more serious case was that of American football player Rodney Anderson who was accused of something very similar to Cosby in broadly similar circumstances.

This is where the delay comes in. A rape is a violent act that often leaves physical evidence that is difficult to refute. As pointed out in a previous article, this evidence can be fabricated when a false allegation is reported promptly, but it is much safer for a false accuser to delay the report, to get her story straight, and to reduce it to a she said/he said situation. In some cases a false accuser who delays reporting for a very long time may drop hints, subliminal messages or outright lies to third parties in order to bolster her claim. This is undoubtedly what Christine Blasey Ford did in the Brett Kavanaugh case, and Tara Reade when she falsely accused Joe Biden.

To Part 2

To Part 3

To Part 4