Now that Phylicia Rashad has spoken, I am absolutely convinced that Bill Cosby cannot be a rapist. If she wasn't raped or molested by Cosby, surely he cannot be a rapist. Let's get real here. If a rapist doesn't rape everyone he works with or know, he must not be a rapist. Men who commit rape are these uncontrollable monsters who must violate every person that they come into contact with, or so Ms. Rashad implies in her defense of Cosby.
Aren't you taking liberties and and an extreme view of Rashad's statement? No, I don't think so, and if you think about it, this is not the first time that anyone has utilized this twist of logic to defend a powerful man accused of a sexual crime. Anyone remember the Catholic Church's pedophile scandal? I remember reading that there were kids who swore that Father so and so never touched them: therefore, Father so and so cannot be guilty of rape because we have kids saying they were not touched. And there are politicians who have had women testify that in no way shape or form did politician X ever touch them, so those other women accusers must be lying.
I am going to call this the Phylicia Rashad defense. Rapists are uncontrollable and MUST rape any woman or child that they know. Those women who know the accused rapist and are not raped must be proof that the accused rapist can control his criminal urges. Therefore, he cannot be a rapist. Remember, rapists cannot control themselves.
Yes, it is stupid and taking the implications to the extremes, but why is the media and Cosby defenders latching on to women who worked with Cosby and say what a lovely man he is? Why should Rashad and Pulliam get such billing for their statements? It is all part of some caricature of who is a rapist and how they operate.
First off, society does not want to deal with the fact that women and other rape survivors get raped by men they know. The rapist is supposed to be some hulking stranger that is a mixture of Quasimodo and the Incredible Hulk. A rapist is not supposed to be a family member or friend.
Rapists are supposed to be easy to spot because they are uncontrollable. Their sexual urges forces them to grab any woman, child, or even man and have at him, so you can spot one right away because he should be doing it out in the open. This is the canard that sexual urges override all inhibitions in the rapist - he is uncontrollable.
What people like Rashad don't want to deal with is that she worked with a man who was capable of picking and choosing his victims, which is what some of the worst sexual predators are capable of. Rapists are more than capable of planning a rape, and more than a few gain practice at perfecting ways to rape and get away with it. There are methods devised that work for the rapist such as drugging his victims, or the rapist possesses enough power to intimidate his victims into silence. The allegations against Cosby is that he used both to his advantage.
So the Rashad defense implies that Father Huxtable could never have been a rapist because, well, it never happened to her or she didn't see it. Otherwise, we have to entertain the idea that someone who portrayed a loving father on TV is a calculating sexual predator. While the last sounds like a plot out of Hollywood, it has nevertheless happened before in homes across America.