TV legend Bill Cosby has denounced the sexual assault allegations against him as “innuendo,” but the claims keep coming, amid talk of the fall of an icon.
“He’s trying to go on with the show, but the damage may be irrevocable,” said celebrity bible People magazine, in a cover story Monday on the 77-year-old long known as the nation’s favourite dad.
“It is not like he will never work again. But this has seriously compromised his future in entertainment,” Robert Thompson, a professor of pop culture at Syracuse University in New York state, told AFP.
People noted that Cosby survived a civil lawsuit brought by 13 women in 2005, but renewed claims by those alleged victims have been joined by fresh allegations from other women in the last few weeks.
“The accusations keep coming, one disturbingly similar allegation after another,” said the magazine under the strapline, “The Fall of Bill Cosby.”
There does indeed appear to be a pattern to the claims: since the first accuser Andrea Constand in 2004, they have involved the alleged victim being drugged and then forced into having sex with Cosby.
Although he has not been charged with any crime, in all some 20 women have now made on-the-record claims of sexual assault dating back to the 1960s, including when Cosby was at the height of his fame.
While most of the accusers have been women, they were joined Monday by a male former TV worker who claimed he arranged payments for eight women when Cosby was working on landmark TV series “The Cosby Show.”
Frank Scotti, 90, was a facilities manager for the New York studio where the show was filmed, and said he organized payments of up to $2,000 at a time for the women on the show, which ran from 1984-1992.
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