Generation Y Media (Gen Y Media for short) is a non profit news organization aimed towards informing audiences worldwide on current events and breaking headlines through the eyes of the younger generation.
Creator: Ana Larasati Established: June 2014 Theme: claraosmin
DISCLAIMER
Our site claims no credit for any videos posted on this site unless stated otherwise. information on this blog are copyright to their respectful owners. If there is any content appearing on this blog that belongs to you and do not wish for it appear on this site, please message us with a link to say which post and it will be promptly removed.
‘I’m No Longer Afraid’: 35 Women Tell Their Stories About Being Assaulted by Bill Cosby, and the Culture That Wouldn’t Listen
By Noreen Malone and Portfolio By Amanda Demme
More has changed in the past few years for women who allege rape than in all the decades since the women’s movement began. Consider the evidence of October 2014, when an audience member at a Hannibal Buress show in Philadelphia uploaded a clip of the comedian talking about Bill Cosby: “He gets on TV, ‘Pull your pants up, black people … I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom.’ Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby, so turn the crazy down a couple notches … I guess I want to just at least make it weird for you to watch Cosby Showreruns. Dude’s image, for the most part, it’s fucking public Teflon image. I’ve done this bit onstage and people think I’m making it up … That shit is upsetting.” The bit went viral swiftly, with irreversible, calamitous consequences for Cosby’s reputation.
Perhaps the most shocking thing wasn’t that Buress had called Cosby a rapist; it was that the world had actually heard him. A decade earlier, 14 women had accused Cosby of rape. In 2005, a former basketball star named Andrea Constand, who met Cosby when she was working in the athletic department at Temple University, where he served on the board of trustees, alleged to authorities that he had drugged her to a state of semi-consciousness and then groped and digitally penetrated her. After her allegations were made public, a California lawyer named Tamara Green appeared on the Today show and said that, 30 years earlier, Cosby had drugged and assaulted her as well. Eventually, 12 Jane Does signed up to tell their own stories of being assaulted by Cosby in support of Constand’s case. Several of them eventually made their names public. But they were met, mostly, with skepticism, threats, and attacks on their character.
In Cosby’s deposition for the Constand case, revealed to the public just last week, the comedian admitted pursuing sex with young women with the aid of Quaaludes, which can render a person functionally immobile. “I used them,” he said, “the same as a person would say, ‘Have a drink.’ ” He asked a modeling agent to connect him with young women who were new in town and “financially not doing well.” In the deposition, Cosby seemed confident that his behavior did not constitute rape; he apparently saw little difference between buying someone dinner in pursuit of sex and drugging them to reach the same goal. As for consent, he said, “I think that I’m a pretty decent reader of people and their emotions in these romantic sexual things.” If these women agreed to meet up, his deposition suggested, he felt that he had a right to them. And part of what took the accusations against Cosby so long to surface is that this belief extended to many of the women themselves (as well as the staff and lawyers and friends and others who helped keep the incidents secret).
Months after his depositions, Cosby settled the case with Constand. The accusations quickly faded from the public’s memory, if they registered at all. No one wanted to believe the TV dad in a cardigan was capable of such things, and so they didn’t. The National Enquirer had planned to run a big story detailing one of the women’s accounts, but the magazine pulled it when Cosby agreed to give them a two-page exclusive telling his side (essentially that these were instances that had been “misinterpreted”).People ran a story alleging that several of the women had taken money in exchange for their silence, implying that this was nothing more than an elaborate shakedown. Cosby’s career rolled on: In 2014 alone, there was a stand-up special, plans for a new family comedy on NBC, and a high-profile biography by Mark Whitaker that glossed over the accusations.
The group of women Cosby allegedly assaulted functions almost as a longitudinal study — both for how an individual woman, on her own, deals with such trauma over the decades and for how the culture at large has grappled with rape over the same time period. In the ’60s, when the first alleged assault by Cosby occurred, rape was considered to be something violent committed by a stranger; acquaintance rape didn’t register as such, even for the women experiencing it. A few of Cosby’s accusers claim that he molested or raped them multiple times; one remained in his orbit, in and out of a drugged state, for years. In the ’70s and ’80s, campus movements like Take Back the Night and “No Means No” helped raise awareness of the reality that 80 to 90 percent of victims know their attacker. Still, the culture of silence and shame lingered, especially when the men accused had any kind of status. The first assumption was that women who accused famous men were after money or attention. As Cosby allegedly told some of his victims: No one would believe you. So why speak up?
But among younger women, and particularly online, there is a strong sense now that speaking up is the only thing to do, that a woman claiming her own victimhood is more powerful than any other weapon in the fight against rape. Emma Sulkowicz, carrying her mattress around Columbia in a performance-art protest of her alleged rape, is an extreme practitioner of this idea. This is a generation that’s been radicalized, in just the past few years, by horrific examples of rape and reactions to rape — like the 2012 Steubenville incident, in which high-school football players brutally violated a passed-out teenage girl at a party and photographed and braggingly circulated the evidence. That same year, when a 14-year-old Missouri cheerleader accused a popular older boy at her school of sexual assault, her classmates shamed her on social media and the family’s house was burned down. The whole world watched online. How could this kind of thing still be happening? These cases felt unignorable, unforgettable, Old Testament biblical. Would anyone have believed the girls, or cared, had the evidence not been digitizable? And: How could you be a young woman and not care deeply about trying to fix this?
This generation will probably be further galvanized by the allegations that a national cultural icon may have been allowed to drug and rape women for decades, with no repercussions. But these younger women have given something to Cosby’s accusers as well: a model for how to speak up, and a megaphone in the form of social media.
Facebook and Twitter, the forums that helped circulate the Buress clip, were full of rage at Cosby’s perceived cruelty. Barbara Bowman, who’d come forward during the Constand case, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Postabout her frustration that no one had believed her for all those years. Three days after Bowman’s op-ed, another woman, Joan Tarshis, came forward to say Cosby had drugged and raped her in 1969. By the end of November, 16 more women had come forward. Cosby resigned from Temple’s board of trustees and sought monetary damages from one of his accusers; he also told “Page Six” that he wanted “the black media to uphold the standards of excellence in journalism [and] go in with a neutral mind.” (Cosby, through representatives, has consistently denied any wrongdoing, and hasn’t been charged with any crimes. Emails to four of his lawyers and press reps went unanswered, although his team has begun a media tour to deny that his admission of offering Quaaludes to women was tantamount to admitting he’d raped anyone.) By February, there were another 12 accusers. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler joked about it at the Golden Globes: “Sleeping Beauty just thought she was getting coffee with Bill Cosby.” Attorney Gloria Allred got involved, representing more than a dozen of the women. Even President Obama said it was clear to him: “If you give a woman — or a man, for that matter — without his or her knowledge a drug, and then have sex with that person without consent, that’s rape.”
There are now 46 women who have come forward publicly to accuse Cosby of rape or sexual assault; the 35 women here are the accusers who were willing to be photographed and interviewed by New York. The group, at present, ranges in age from early 20s to 80 and includes supermodels Beverly Johnson and Janice Dickinson alongside waitresses and Playboy bunnies and journalists and a host of women who formerly worked in show business. Many of the women say they know of others still out there who’ve chosen to remain silent.
This project began six months ago, when we started contacting the then-30 women who had publicly claimed Cosby assaulted them, and it snowballed in the same way that the initial accusations did: First two women signed on, then others heard about it and joined in, and so on. Just a few days before the story was published, we photographed the final two women, bringing our total to 35. “I’m no longer afraid,” said Chelan Lasha, who came forward late last year to say that Cosby had drugged her when she was 17. “I feel more powerful than him.”
Accompanying this photo essay is a compilation of the interviews with these women, a record of trauma and survival — the memories that remain of the decades-old incidents. All 35 were interviewed separately, and yet their stories have remarkable similarities, in everything from their descriptions of the incidents to the way they felt in the aftermath. Each story is awful in its own right. But the horror is multiplied by the sheer volume of seeing them together, reading them together, considering their shared experience. The women have found solace in their number — discovering that they hadn’t been alone, that there were others out there who believed them implicitly, with whom they didn’t need to be afraid of sharing the darkest details of their lives. They are scattered all over the country — ten different states are represented — and most of them had no contact with their fellow accusers until recently. But since reading about each other’s stories in the news, or finding one another on social media, or meeting in person at the photo shoots arranged by New York, many of the women have forged a bond. It is, as Tarshis calls it, “a sorrowful sisterhood.” ■
Police are claiming that Sandra took the trash bag out and tied it to the partition on her shower, and then used it to hang herself with.
Problems with this explanation:
Trash bags/cans are not allowed in jail cells because any lose items are considered a danger to the inmates. If it’s not bolted down to the floor, it’s basically not allowed in a cell
If the police are right and the picture was “taken right after the body was found with no changes made to the scene” then why did they replace the trash bag?
The bag she allegedly used was a “black industrial sized” trash bag, which was not only unlike the white one shown above, but it wouldn’t have been strong enough to hold up her body
The partition she “hung herself” from is shorter than her. Sandra was a little over 6 ft, and the partition was about 5 ft.
There were no lacerations or bruises on her neck consistent with a hanging.
Incredible author, activist and media personality Janet Mock responded so well to the consistent misogynoir (anti-Black misogyny; term coined by the brilliant Moya Bailey) in the media yesterday when she replied toEntertainment Weekly and their poor depiction of Nicki Minaj’s critique of the music industry and Taylor Swift’s response (and EW wasn’t the only outlet to do this either). This came about because Nicki specifically mentioned MTV not nominating “Anaconda” for Video of The Year. This video is an important expression of Black women’s bodies reclaimed as a site of beauty, sensuality, pleasure and in the control of Black women, diverting thin Eurocentric beauty norms and White perceptions of sexuality. It’s also incredibly artistic and playful in a way rarely acceptable for Black women to express ourselves in. In her tweets, Nicki also alluded to misogynoir in the industry in general, and in relation to Black women’s bodies, cultural production and influence. When Nicki tweeted that she is “tired,” it spoke to something really specific in Black women’s experiences with marginalization and erasure.
Taylor Swift wrongly dived into the conversation in true White feminist fashion. However, I am not overly interested in discussing Taylor Swift doing the typical White woman, White feminist four step, though I sent one tweet about it. I have plenty of past writing on derailment, gaslighting, erasure, misogynoir, racism and anti-Blackness from mainstream White feminism and White women, in general. I feel like if people really cared about Black women, this tweet wouldn’t seem like such a revelation or surprise (as some people acted this way). It means that they’re not engaging with the reality that Black women in the media and Black women in our daily lives deal with.
What I am interested in is how some fellow Black people are using this moment for what has been called #TwitterComparisons, where a false equalization is created to silence one topic in place of another, and usually by fellow Black people who exhibit few opinions on either topic presented, outside of baiting other Black people who may express opinions on both. Some Black people are using this conversation about Nicki Minaj to pretend that no Black people are discussing State violence and the suspicious death of Sandra Bland, which I believe was in fact an extrajudicial execution. Her death deeply pains me and is difficult for me to discuss. And this idea that I must discuss it all day is actually quite violent. Further, I still resent what amounts to trading lynching post cards when endless visuals of police harm on her and Black people in general are hyperconsumed and it is virtually impossible to find an article where this is not standard practice. I elaborated on this in yearsof work on what I call “post-mortem media violence.” And to be clear, for the 1,342,338 time, my discussions of post-mortem media violence are NOT solely about my personal mental health care and my psychological response to being expected to endlessly consume visuals of Black death (usually without my consent; the content is usually forced on me) or about self-care/trigger warnings. It is about the dehumanization of Black life, the consumption of the harm on Black bodies as bodies supposedly not truly susceptible to pain, and the lie that the sheer consumption of the hypervisibility of Black death is equal to activism against State violence. (I mention the latter because some people–primarily Whites and Black men–have been willfully misconstruing my work or not even willing to engage it as honestly and as thoroughly as they would if I were White/male.)
Thus, when some Black people suggest that no one should discuss Nicki Minaj and instead discuss Sandra Bland, I have a problem. They are not critiquing the problem with post-mortem media violence being construed as awareness and activism. They are also erasing the amount of activist labor–usually lead by Black women at that–that already exists for Sandra Bland. They are erasing how people responded in sheer pain to further revelations on the case today, such as video footage of Sandra’s encounter with the police that award-winning film director Ava DuVernay alluded to; it may have been tampered with. (I have no issue with specific analysis like this; thoughtful and truthful engagement with my writing on post-mortem media violence would reveal such.) But a larger form of erasure is occurring in three key ways. One way is that this juxtaposition rests on respectability politics. Because some people demonize Nicki for her presentation, her “value” is deemed below someone they view as “respectable” like Sandra Bland was. But see, this same respectability politics issue is why people are more likely to recognize Sandra Bland’s name than Kindra Chapman’s. The second way is the performance for the White Gaze. One of the reasons why some Black people demand silence of joy (beyond both Black and non-Black people being invested in denying Black women joy in general, which I discussed in Misogynoir and The Concerted Effort To Deny Black Women Joy) is the idea that our joy and our pleasure are irresponsible. Or shouldn’t happen anywhere Whites can see. Thus, the idea is that Black people who make jokes about Taylor Swift (or Meek Mill’s odd “expose” tweets last night on rappers who don’t write their own lyrics; which I have thoughts on as well) are not “performing” Black humanity properly and won’t be viewed by White people properly. The trouble with the White Gaze. But…they oppress us and kill us regardless. Regardless. The humanity of Blackness is denied. This anti-Blackness is something that incredible Black thinkers and writers such as Frank Wilderson, Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Jared Sexton and @so_treu elaborate on with a specificity and genius unmatched.
The third way is that some Black people (and society at large actually; Black people do not “solely/uniquely” engage in misogynoir and the notion of such is anti-Black) do not examine the connections between misogynoir in pop culture and misogynoir at the root of State violence against Black women. In response to Janet Mock’s tweet of a video clip of her show So POPular and her guest Tamara Winfrey Harris, who discussed the “angry Black woman” archetype (something that I’ve discussed before myself) in her book that I am currently reading, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women In America, I tweeted the following, in summary:
The “Angry Black Woman” archetype that the national media uses to harm Nicki Minaj is also used to justify Sandra Bland’s death. Discussing Nicki isn’t frivolous. People say discuss State violence, not pop culture. As if they are not connected via misogynoir. #SayHerName exists because once State violence is discussed, people center Black men. Thus, I already know the “discuss Sandra not Nicki” rebuttal is about erasure of both, actually. “Ignore famous Black woman!” “Focus on Black men for State violence!”
The reason why I am interested in this among us Black people is because this is my focus when I write. Our thoughts. Our feelings. Our healing. Our activism. Our pain. Our pleasure. Especially so for Black women. Thus, I am not interested in arbitrarily pathologizing Black people here. I am interested in how these forced comparisons function as erasure of Black women in our own community. Whether we are trying to live and unknown, whether famous and used as media/public punching bags in ways that impact non-famous Black women let alone those famous ones, whether we are killed via intraracial gender violence or by the State. Thus, there is no service to Sandra Bland that happens by ignoring the very same misogynoir that killed her being used to demonize Black women in the media like Nicki Minaj. Until people understand what anti-Blackness and misogyny actual entail for Black women, we and everyone else will continue to pretend that pop culture and State violence do not operate in the same spheres. The same media that degrades Nicki is the same media engaging in post-mortem media violence of Sandra Bland. This does not mean that Nicki’s fame, platform size and her first generation of wealth should be ignored. Of course Black women–especially womanists and Black feminists–discuss nuances of privilege intraracially and among Black women. See, if able to, we can truly hold multiple ideas and viewpoints in our consciousness simultaneously. The anti-Black ableist lies about inherent inferior Black intelligence are ones that I reject. I don’t think that Nicki should be paid attention to because fame matters more than non-famous people; rich Black celebrities don’t exactly need the same type of defense non-rich non-famous Black people need. Nicki’s situation matters because it is the same misogynoir as to why Sandra Bland is viewed as angry and deserving of death by many in the public, the media and the State itself. Angry. Black. Woman. Archetype.
Certainly someone can choose to focus on Sandra Bland and not comment on Nicki Minaj at all. Certainly someone else can choose to focus on misogynoir in pop culture and allow other womanists, Black feminists, and activists in general to focus on State violence. I personally discuss both. Our emotion is not only conveyed through measurable outputs of labor. I am not just the work that I do. I am a person. This idea that Black people have to shut up about one thing to care about another reduces our humanity into a falsely equalized stance where Black women have to pick and choose between the violence we face daily–partly the responsibility of the media–and the violence that we are at risk for in our own communities and at the hands of the State. All of these impact us. Black women matter as whole people. Fellow Black people–especially ones that assert that Black Lives Matter–would do best to understand this. Black women are whole people with whole lives. And the same reduction into controlling images (i.e. Jezebel, mammy, Sapphire), stereotypes (i.e. welfare queen, welfare mother, emasculating matriarch, mule, gold digger), archetypes (i.e. Angry Black Woman, Strong Black Woman) and labor output that happens to us via non-Black people, especially via Whites, is not something that I want to experience from fellow Black people, especially ones who suggest that they’re activists. Activism that doesn’t center the full humanity of Black women (and Black LGBTQIA people regardless of gender) is activism that is of no interest to me. Black people truly can choose what to discuss and consider the wholeness and humanity of Black women in these discussions.
On Sunday night, Twitter users shared their experiences with how their names influenced the way they’ve been treated with #GrowingUpWithMyName. While some posts revolved around skeptics, pronunciation mishaps or celebrity comparisons, plenty revealed the way in which certain names hold weight in our society — and how others are erased completely. This isn’t a small problem.
Women scientists made up 25% of the Pluto fly-by New Horizon team. Make sure you share this, because erasing women’s achievements in science and history is a tradition. Happens every day.
During her ESPYs speech, Jenner went out of her way not only to talk about the struggling, bullied transgender youth every where but the challenges facing transgender women of color specifically. She mentioned advocates like Laverne Cox and Janet Mock, but also those whose lives we’ve lost like Mercedes Williamson.
