ReviewBook World: how Bill Cosby was first investigated by a lone reporter

Chasing Cosby: The Downfall of America’s Dad, by Nicole Weisensee Egan, Seal Press, 4/5 stars Bill Cosby was raised in a North Philadelphia public housing estate, spent the prime of his life as one of the most admired and adored performers in Hollywood and currently lives in SCI Phoenix, a Pennsylvania state prison, where he is serving three to 10 years for aggravated indecent assault. Both of Cosby’s criminal trials (the first of which ended in a mistrial) saw a true rarity in American life: a man being brought to justice for an act of sexual violence. That Cosby was an exceptionally famous and wealthy man only made this more extraordinary. A dozen or so of Cosby’s accusers also attended the trials, six of whom testified for the prosecution. It was surreal to see them all so physically close together, to think that the last time Cosby was anywhere near these women, he allegedly had been assaulting them. He probably thought he would never see or hear from them again. During interviews with several of these survivors, a recurring theme is that they each know at least one other victim who has chosen not to speak publicly. There’s another chilling theory to consider: there may be victims who haven’t come forward because they’re dead. Nicole Weisensee Egan raises the possibility near the end of her new book, Chasing Cosby: The Downfall of America’s Dad, that Cosby could have unintentionally killed someone: “Could someone have got in a car accident and died after he drugged them, too intoxicated to be at the wheel? Both Becky Cooper and Tamara Green aren’t quite sure how they escaped that fate. Could someone have accidentally overdosed? We’ll likely never know.” Egan’s book is worthwhile for anyone hoping to understand the Cosby case in full. She was an investigative reporter at the Philadelphia Daily News when the first abuse allegations made by Andrea Constand broke in 2005, and she continued to cover Cosby at People and The Daily Beast. It seems there is no relevant document she hasn’t read, no critical character she neglected to interview. How Donald Trump became president and can America be great again? A look at the history Chasing Cosby chronicles her experience following a case that, for years, most people preferred to ignore. In clear, vivid prose, she illuminates how a beloved star was exposed as a violent predator, and how Cosby’s conviction became the first of the #MeToo era. Egan deftly balances a play-by-play of the criminal proceedings with a methodical explanation of her reporting, gamely sharing her personal relationship to both. Specialists on everything from victim behaviour to forensic toxicology give context to Egan’s findings. She raises questions that Cosby’s conviction alone doesn’t answer, about wealth, race (“Did our nation’s shameful history of false sexual assault accusations against African American men become a cloak he wrapped around himself so he wouldn’t get caught?”), the criminal justice system and “the dangers of deifying celebrities”. And far from feeling self-indulgent or distracting, Egan’s willingness to share her human connection to her professional endeavour makes her writing resonate with a greater power. Egan came to the case as a fan of Cliff Huxtable, the character played by Cosby on The Cosby Show. The sitcom made its debut when she was a high school senior, the same year her older brother died, “and watching the show gave me an escape out of my own, fraught home and into the cosy normalcy of a family not traumatised by death.” But the more she dug into Constand’s allegation that Cosby – a man Constand considered a mentor, not to mention a major donor and member of the Board of Trustees at Temple University, her employer – had drugged and sexually assaulted her at his home in a Philadelphia suburb, the more “the validity of the charges came to light”. Egan’s was a lonely reporting effort. Until October 2014, when Hannibal Buress’ stand-up set mentioning Cosby rape allegations went viral, Egan practically had the Cosby beat to herself. Nobody wanted to believe Cosby could be a serial abuser, even though his predilection for drugging women was apparently an open secret in the entertainment industry. Constand’s, too, was an isolating journey: Of the 60-plus women who would eventually come forward to accuse Cosby of sexual misconduct, only Constand had a claim that was within her state’s statute of limitations, not only when she first reported it to the police but when the Montgomery County District Attorney’s office approached her about reopening the case in 2015. Who is Kim Ji-young, the symbol of South Korea’s Me Too era? As Egan pursued the Cosby story, she found enemies in unexpected places. That she faced threats from Cosby’s camp is alarming if not surprising; that other journalists undermined her work is a more disconcerting matter. She details her infuriating struggle to get journalism experts to see the accounts of Cosby’s accusers as “legitimate” enough to merit news coverage, and she is undermined by media professors and pundits who say stories about allegations only witnessed by the two involved parties (so, the vast majority of sex crimes) could never pass journalistic muster. In some ways, the pre-2017 world Egan describes already feels dated. Constand went to the police a year before Tarana Burke began the Me Too movement and 12 years before Burke’s rallying cry became a hashtag that galvanised an unprecedented and ongoing reckoning with sexual violence. In Chasing Cosby, Egan reminds readers how new, unusual and remarkable it is that the Me Too movement is happening at all. Her reporting is a reminder that we’re living through a historical anomaly that, without the courage and fortitude of Constand and her sister survivors, may not have come to pass.