Last month, comedian Hannibal Buress called Bill Cosby a rapist in a video that quickly went viral. "Google 'Bill Cosby rape,'" Buress told an audience during a standup routine—and suddenly, Cosby's name and the accusations that he raped several women in the 1980s were everywhere. But why now? asks Barbara Bowman, who says Cosby "drugged and raped" her after winning her trust as a mentor when she was a 17-year-old aspiring actress three decades ago. On another occasion, at an industry event in Atlantic City, "he pinned me down ... while I screamed for help," she writes in the Washington Post. "I'll never forget the clinking of his belt buckle as he struggled to pull his pants off."
"I first told my agent, who did nothing," then told a lawyer, who "accused me of making the story up," Bowman writes. But that didn't stop her from speaking out publicly, which she has done numerous times. Other women, including Tamara Green, Beth Ferrier, and Andrea Constand have done the same, CNN reports. "Why didn't our stories go viral?" Bowman asks, noting that the public outcry began "only after a man" called Cosby a rapist. That's "a very valid question," but "we know why, and that's part of the tragedy," Alanna Bennett writes at Bustle. She says Cosby, who has a new NBC show on the way, "is the kind of figure in American cultural history whom it is very uncomfortable to confront in the context of what's been accused." Click for her full column, or Bowman's. (More Bill Cosby stories.)
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