Nov 25, 2014 4 min read

It surely can do nothing to lift the darkly cynical national mood as we move into the holiday season to discover that cuddly Dr. Cliff Huxtable, he of the colorful sweaters and stern ways, has allegedly been a serial rapist.

Well, not the character himself, who was the sturdy, loving paterfamilias on “The Cosby Show,” the top-rated NBC-TV sitcom which aired from 1984 to 1992, but his creator, Bill Cosby. Despite having been whispered about and alluded to here and there over the last decade or so, the last month has seen a cascade of allegations that Cosby, one of the most recognizable figures in American entertainment, has assaulted women throughout much of his time in the spotlight. It is said he plied them first with drink and pills, then had his way with them when they were unconscious or semi-conscious and could not consent.

Cosby and his team of lawyers have denied all the allegations, and no criminal charges have ever been brought, though he did reach a settlement with one of his accusers in a civil case in 2006. Not unlike Jerry Sandusky and his legal team, Cosby and his representatives have suggested that all the women who have emerged in recent days to describe grossly inappropriate behavior by Cosby are lying, and the accusers are motivated by impulses other than simple honesty. Unlike Sandusky, it seems improbable that any criminal charges will ever be brought against Cosby, given the time that has elapsed since most of the alleged incidents. But, again, in comparison to Sandusky, the sheer number of such allegations, and the pattern that they all follow, make them awfully hard to dismiss.

It’s not an edifying spectacle to see someone who had once been revered – Cosby has a Presidential Medal of Freedom to his credit, and his shelves surely groan under the weight of the honorary degrees that have been bestowed upon him – taken down several, career-demolishing notches, particularly when that career was already advancing into its twilight. But there are some silver linings to be had for the rest of us in the dark cloud that is currently hanging over Cosby.

First, there’s the fact that women who said they were victimized by Cosby felt they could come forward without being labeled a “slut” or “whore” by the wider public, or being accused of somehow “asking for it.” Even though a portion of Cosby’s alleged victims encountered him in the 1960s and 1970s, when sexual liberation and a supposedly more open-minded attitude about relations between men and women took hold, had any of Cosby’s alleged unsavory antics been revealed in those days, they might well have been disregarded with a “boys will be boys” shrug, or evidence that with star power comes an overactive libido. Not today. We understand now that hijinks you would expect to see on “Mad Men” have no place in a civilized society.

Larger media outlets have also been asking important questions about why the claims were ignored for so many years – particularly in light of the fact that Cosby has taken to delivering lectures to the African-American community on proper behavior that some feel are smothered in glib self-righteousness.

As David Carr, the New York Times’ media critic, put it, “No one wanted to disturb the Natural Order of Things, which was that Cosby was beloved; he was as generous and paternal as his public image; and that his approach to life and work represented a bracing corrective to the coarse, self-defeating urban black ethos. Only the first of those things was actually true.”

And here’s something else that is true – we’ll never be able to watch “Cosby Show” reruns in quite the same way again.