Barbara Bowman, a woman who claims that she was raped by Bill Cosby during the 1980s, has come forward to tell her story once again. Bowman struggles with the fact that the allegations didn’t get noticed until a male comedian brought them up.
In a Washington Post op-ed, Bowman wrote that she has tried to get people to take her story seriously. She almost had the chance to bring it out in court in 2004, when Andrea Constand filed her lawsuit against Cosby for secxual assault. However, Constand and Cosby reached a deal out of court.
Bowman recently told her story to the Daily Mail, following Hannibal Buress’ comments on Cosby. She claims that in 1985, when she was 17 and hoping to break into acting, she met Cosby and once viewed him as a mentor. However, he began assaulting her in New York.
In one incident, she woke up wearing only her panties and a man’s shirt. She now believes that she was raped and drugged by Cosby. She also recalled another incident in Atlantic City. After she escaped, he sent her back to Denver.
No one she told would take the story seriously. “I was a teenager from Denver acting in McDonald’s commercials,” she wrote. “He was Bill Cosby: consummate American dad Cliff Huxtable and the Jell-O spokesman. Eventually, I had to move on with my life and my career.”
Bowman has told her story to several magazines and TV stations before, but she noticed that nothing she said was really getting attention until Buress called Cosby a “rapist” on stage. That eventually led to Cosby’s social media experiment gone wrong with people making memes that brought up the rape allegations.
“While I am grateful for the new attention to Cosby’s crimes, I must ask my own questions: Why wasn’t I believed? Why didn’t I get the same reaction of shock and revulsion when I originally reported it?” Bowman wrote. “Why was I, a victim of sexual assault, further wronged by victim blaming when I came forward? The women victimized by Bill Cosby have been talking about his crimes for more than a decade. Why didn’t our stories go viral?”
Bowman concluded her piece by noting that the entertainment industry has continued to ignore the allegations. Indeed, Cosby is developing a new sitcom with NBC and Netflix gave him a comedy special.
Cosby has denied Bowman’s allegations in the past, but his reps didn’t specifically respond to her Post piece.
image via INFphoto.com
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