UNITED STATES
New York Magazine
By
Marin Cogan
Last month, the Washington Post made what was, for a newspaper anyway, an unusual decision: They would publish Barbara Bowman’s rape allegations against Bill Cosby in a first-person essay, despite the fact that Bowman had never pressed charges. When reporters outside the paper started asking about their decision, executive editor Marty Baron drafted a long statement defending their choice.
“The investigation of sexual abuse by priests within the Catholic Church was based on many allegations in which no criminal charges or lawsuits had been filed,” he wrote. “In fact, that was a major point of the investigation: How society, including its legal system, served to suppress disclosure of a pattern of abuse.”
In the end, Baron’s statement was never published (a spokesperson for the Post shared it with me when I asked them about it last week). Three days after Bowman’s piece appeared, another woman named Joan Tarshis said Cosby assaulted her in 1969. The next day, another woman, Linda Joy Traitz, said Cosby tried to assault her. Then model Janice Dickinson said Cosby raped her. Two days later, three more women stepped forward. Then three more. By the time the Washington Post published its own deeply reported investigation into the claim — which included multiple accounts of assault and multiple denials from Cosby’s legal team — no one could reasonably doubt their decision to publish Bowman’s story.
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