Eric the Deep State Operative (Lying Echo) joins Adventures in Hell World to dissect Bill Cosby’s 2005–2015 legal battles—from Andrea Constand’s sealed $3M settlement to 25+ accusers—while debating Blizzard’s infamous "Cosby Suite" at BlizzCon 2013, a booze-filled networking room where executives like Alex Afrocabi allegedly made predatory remarks. Kotaku’s 2021 report linked the nickname to toxic culture, but the episode questions whether the naming was evidence of wrongdoing or just a darkly ironic nod to Cosby’s then-widespread fame. Ultimately, it explores how PR manipulation, viral jokes (like Hannibal Burris’ Twitter roast), and shifting public narratives—from "lovable TV dad" to convicted predator—reveal how collective memory can distort reality, even in high-profile scandals. [Automatically generated summary]
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I'm Spencer, your host, and I have a guest, a special guest today.
Never been on the podcast before.
Why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself?
Hi.
I'm lying echo as Eric the Deep State Operative.
It's basically a long running gag that I decided to just run with.
I'm not actually affiliated with the Deep State, so I don't get any ideas.
Wait, what?
The whole reason you're here.
Oh, my God.
Never meet your heroes, I guess.
Yeah, really.
Yeah, I'm on the podcast, Adventures in Hell World.
I joined that fairly recently, less than a year ago.
But yeah, you can also find me on Twitter under the handle Not Badgers, which is another running gag that I'm running with.
Great.
Yeah.
So you're here because I invited you, but also because we had a little short conversation that I thought was interesting.
And then it reminded me of some other interesting things.
And I thought, well, why don't I have you on the podcast and we can talk about it?
So as a disclaimer, right at the start of the podcast, some part of what we're going to talk about today is Bill Cosby.
And of course, you can't talk about Bill Cosby without also talking about the allegations of sexual assault made against him.
And so we're not going to get into like gory details, but I just want to give people a heads up.
If anyone wants to not participate in that conversation, you can duck out now.
That's fine.
There's no requirement to listen to every episode of this podcast, if you listen to any at all.
But yeah.
So, Eric, did you play World of Warcraft?
I had friends who play World of Warcraft, but I didn't personally play it.
I have played other games by that company, though, Blizzard Entertainment.
Right, yeah.
Like the actual Warcraft game, StarCraft, stuff like that.
Yeah, right.
It's a big company.
They make Diablo also.
Yeah, they have a string of not misses, essentially, which is odd for gaming companies.
Usually gaming companies make 20 games and three of them are hits.
But this one is like just about every game is a hit, which is, yeah.
Yeah, I remember a friend of mine many years ago saying that.
He's like, you know, he went on to like a website for this company called Sierra, which I don't even know if they're still around, but I remember.
But he's like, I went on their site and they have like 100 games and I've heard of like four of them.
But Blizzard only comes out with maybe one game every four years and it's a huge hit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
So Blizzard, I played World of Warcraft for probably 15-ish years.
Played very, very a lot.
I met my wife there.
We're together now, happily married.
That's another story.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
But I was playing World of Warcraft when a thing happened at Blizzard, which is that Blizzard executives were charged, were it's a civil suit, but it's odd.
Like it's a civil suit that's filed by the state related to working conditions.
So, and the working conditions that were at issue were that it was an environment that was not conducive for female employees to work comfortably and to properly, you know, move up the ladder according to their skill and all that because of the working environment they had.
It was a real frat boy environment.
And I was playing the game at the time when this occurred, this lawsuit came out, and the allegations were happening.
And some of them were pretty dark.
There was, I think the inciting incident that led to a lot of eyeballs looking at this and it all coming out was, very sadly, a woman at Blizzard committed suicide.
And it was felt that she was being pressured to do things that she should never have been pressured to do.
But that was of the things we're going to go through that isn't actually mentioned.
But I did want to touch on that is that there was some things happening there, definitely, and it's needed to be looked at and needed to be dealt with.
Most of the executives involved left the company.
You know how executives are.
You get rid of one and you replace them with two, and that's pretty much how this was.
They moved those ones out.
New ones moved in.
And then they got bought by Microsoft.
That was pretty much how the business side of that occurred.
But there was some media, of course, there was stories about this.
And I feel like I thought a lot about this.
And I feel like this story can't be told properly the way I'm looking at it without just reading the article.
Because what we're looking at, like we're dealing with something that's like shared reality, right?
Like shared reality is like everyone has their own subjective reality.
And then we have an assumption about a lot of things about our subjective reality that other people also feel the same way about the world.
And it's a shared reality, that our subjective realities overlap, right?
So in this case, we're looking at Bill Cosby.
And we have generally now a shared reality about Bill Cosby in that we think he's a dangerous monster, generally speaking.
And we, at a previous moment in our pasts, I think you're about the same age as me.
going to ask you your age but i think we're about the same age uh we seem to have gone through 80s if that helps We seem to have gone through most of the same kind of moments in life and seen most of the same media.
So I figure we're roughly the same age.
And so, you know, we probably watched Bill Cosby on television as children.
And, you know, there was a previous moment before we thought he was a dangerous monster where we thought he was a lovable TV dad.
Yeah.
And, you know, we have this sort of schism inside our memories where we feel a sort of revulsion about a time when we looked at him favorably.
And because we don't want to look at him that way.
Among people who have looked at the Bill Cosby situation and case and looked into it realize that part of what allowed him to get away with what he was doing for so long was the fact that we nearly universally looked at him as a lovable TV dad.
Like when individuals, and there were individuals who went to police departments, various ones, because they were happening in different jurisdictions, went to police departments, there were police who turned them away because they just could not believe that Bill Cosby did these things.
And that's awful.
That's awful.
And we, as like, we don't usually think of ourselves as just viewers of a thing as part of the problem.
But in a way, we kind of were because we all allowed at some point in the past, the people who lived through both of these times, you know, people who are younger only know him as a monster, I guess.
Fine, I'm fine with that.
But we had to go through a thing where we had to rewrite our view of him and we had to wrestle with the idea that any of the people that are famous that we like could just be monsters behind the curtains, right?
And this was a moment that really taught us that in a real visceral way, more so than some other celebrities who turned out to be monsters, I think.
And I think this moment gives a real interesting insight to how people were looking at this through a lens and sometimes getting it wrong and this weird gray area between how we should look at this person and when, you know, whether we should forgive people for ever having thought of him as not a monster, right?
Because I didn't think he was a monster when I was a kid.
No.
Yeah.
Why would I?
I think very few people did because he was very good at keeping that under wraps while he was also, he was on TV a lot.
He was very charismatic on TV a lot.
And he was also like another factor is that he was on TV with other charismatic people.
When I look back on it, when I kind of, you know, look back at the people on the Cosby show, I think I liked Felicia Rashad more than I liked any of the other characters or the other actors, right?
She played the mom.
And she is, the last time I checked, still, you know, doesn't see Bill Cosby as a monster, it seems.
And I think it's sad.
I don't know how else to describe that.
I don't know how to, where to put that, right?
She's lost in the space because this guy that she respected a great deal and worked with for decades and felt that she knew very, very well, played his on-screen wife.
You know, she didn't see that monster and refuses now to rewrite her memories to include that, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I know.
And I think this whole thing started because I was talking about someone who kind of took the opposite approach.
I was listening to the radio and the DJ was talking about Malcolm Jamal Warner who just recently.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, yeah, right, right.
Yeah.
And he's like, he's like, I used to watch, and he goes, he was talking about when he was on a Cosby show when he was Theo.
And he was like, he's like, and he pauses and he says, well, I didn't like Cosby, but I like Theo.
And I'm like, I'm like, okay, I mean, like we were saying, this was 40 years ago.
Nobody knew back then.
Well, very few people knew what it was back then.
So I'm like, I was saying, it's okay if you like the show at the time before you knew what you know now.
It's, you know, you don't have to tell yourself, no, I never liked it.
I always knew there was something wrong with that guy.
Yeah.
And there's been people who, I've seen people who have sort of said that, and then other people who just kind of like to stay quiet about it, which I don't know, whatever, I think is fine too.
You don't want to talk about shout to the world how much you liked the Bill Cosby show back in the 80s or whatever.
I'm not going to like, you know, police you for that or anything weird like that.
But I do think it's, it's interesting that in trying to rewrite our memory of this personality, we are sort of, some people are getting to a point where they feel that, you know, it's always been this way.
He's always, he has always been a monster, but we didn't always know.
And so, yeah, there's this, you know, and I think we need to be able to, you know, take on a more complex and nuanced interpretation of this where maybe we can forgive people who liked Bill Cosby once upon a time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, like, as I think back about it, I used to like, I used to watch a lot of his stand-up comedy acts and stuff.
Yeah.
I had tapes.
Yeah.
And then I was a fan of the Cosby, the Cosby kids, you know, Fat Elbert and the Cosby kids and all that stuff.
And it's, and I haven't gone back to any of it since this happened, but I could, like, I would not look down on somebody just because they liked the show in its heyday, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Bill Cosby was one of the biggest comedians in the English-speaking world.
Yeah.
And in a lot of ways, he was also a positive force.
Like, you know, he did a lot of work to try to reverse racism and all kinds of stuff.
So that's just, in my opinion, that's the real shame is that, you know, we now have to, we now can't look at the good things he did without it being tainted because of all the horrible stuff he did.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, that's, and that's a, that's a struggle that happens now.
I mean, in some ways, that's where Felicia Rashad is, right?
She's looking at like her whole career relied on him and his personality.
Yeah.
And, you know, her career was already kind of over before this all fell apart.
But, you know, that must be a difficult journey for her.
Yeah, I'm sure.
Having known him personally and having seen him in one lens for all this time and then finding out this whole other side of him.
Yeah.
I mean, you and I didn't know him personally, right?
Right.
Not even a little, I'm assuming.
No, never met him.
Right.
But in that, in the end, in the interest of being able to forgive people for having once enjoyed the show, this, what we're going to go through is an interesting sort of test case because these are going to be people that we don't really want to forgive.
So let's get into it.
Okay.
I got to present.
I'm going to share screen.
Yeah, yeah.
I should have done this before, but I don't have a producer.
All right.
So.
All right.
So sharing my second screen here.
This is the article.
I went through, like I looked at it and I thought there's maybe there's ways I could just highlight some portions or whatever, but I felt like the impact of the way they're writing it and the image you get from it won't really be happening unless I just read it.
So the article is called Inside Blizzard Developers Infamous Bill Cosby Suite.
So first there's a picture of a bunch of frat boy type guys hanging out a very on a looks like a bed with a very large picture of Bill Cosby.
Yeah, and it's obviously one of those sweaters that are on the show.
Yeah, right.
It's probably taken right from the show or something, right?
And this was published, this article was published in July of 2021.
So four years ago, this would have been mid-pandemic, right?
And this would have been right as all of that was happening.
I was the guildmaster of a guild in World of Warcraft with a bunch of players who were talking about quitting because they didn't want to be supporting a company where this was happening.
So since news broke last week of widespread allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination at Activision Blizzard via a legal complaint from the state of California, many top male developers there, both current and former, have responded with shock and dismay.
But while many claim they weren't aware of the problematic frat boy culture leading to accusations of sexual harassment and assault at the hands of male Blizzard employees, comments and images shared on social media paint a different picture.
Based on photographs and screenshots of the Facebook posts obtained by Kotaku, this article is on Kotaku.
It's clear that people beyond Alex Afro Siabi, the man named in the lawsuit, and a longtime World of Warcraft developer, were aware of the, in quotes, Cosby suite mentioned in the lawsuit.
That was apparently a nickname for Afro-Siabi's BlizzCon 2013 hotel room, seemingly a reference to the name of previously convicted rapist Bill Cosby.
Afro Siabi worked on World of Warcraft beginning in 2004, designed some of its biggest quests, and eventually became a creative director on the 2016 Legion and 2018 Battle for Azeroth expansions.
He is also the only person outside of Blizzard president J. Allen Brack outright named in the lawsuit, a fact that's made it easy for many to try to distance themselves from Afro Siabi's actions.
In quotes, during a company event, an annual convention called BlizzCon, Afro Siabi would hit on female employees, telling them he wanted to marry them, attempting to kiss them and putting his arms around them.
The complaint reads, This was in plain view of other male employees, including supervisors, who had to intervene and pull him off female employees.
Afrociaby was so known to engage in harassment of females that his suite was nicknamed the Cosby Suite after alleged rapist Bill Cosby.
But the Cosby Suite was more than just a nickname or a joke.
Based on images and comments, Afro Siabbi posted on his Facebook supplied to Kotaku by a former developer at Blizzard, it was reportedly a booze-filled meeting place where many, including Afro-Cabi, would pose with an actual portrait of Bill Cosby while smiling.
It was also a hotspot for informal networking at BlizzCon, three sources told Kotaku, where people looking to make inroads at the company would go to meet and hang out with some of its top designers.
Afrociaby did not respond by press time and has deleted most of his social media presence.
But Afrociabi can clearly be seen in a number of pictures surrounded by a variety of unidentified people sitting on a bed.
The captions on the screenshot suggest the album hails from gatherings held for BlizzCon 2013 in a hotel room that was repeatedly referred to as the Cosby Suite in comments.
The captions and comments are both written by and refer by name to other Blizzard employees, the pictures show.
One ex-Blizzard source, familiar with the people presented in the pictures, identified an HR representative as one of the Blizzard employees who was in the hotel room.
Another image from the same Facebook album shows a screenshot of a 2013 group chat called the BlizzCon Cosby Crew.
In it, former Blizzard designer David Cosack writes, I'm gathering the hot chicks for the cause.
Bring them, replies Afrociabi.
You can't marry all of them, Alex, Cosack writes.
I can.
I'm Middle Eastern, responds Afrociabi.
Jesse McCree, currently a lead game designer at Blizzard, then writes, you misspelled fuck.
Corey Stockton, currently a lead game designer at Blizzard, and Greg Street, former Blizzard developer currently working at a new MMO at Riot Games, were also present in the chat.
The chat was provided as a series of screenshots depicting a wide array of Facebook posts by Afrociaby, all under a 2013 photo album.
The album contained a picture exclusively dedicated to the amount of alcohol procured in preparation for the Cosby Suite, according to the captions.
The album showcases the large framed Cosby photo from a variety of angles held by a number of different people.
Possibly the greatest group chat in the history of mankind, Stockton wrote in a Facebook comment at the time, based on the screenshot.
Stockton and McCree did not immediately respond to a crest for comment.
Street and Cossack declined to comment.
Greg Street has tweeted a brief statement in which he claims the Cosby Suite was a quote-unquote green room for taking breaks during BlizzCon and that he is quote embarrassed at the nickname of that room given all that we know now.
By 2013 there were already multiple allegations of sexual assault against Cosby, even if a conviction, which was later overturned on a technicality, wouldn't come until 2018.
According to one source with knowledge of the hotel room, the Cosby Suite name was a play on the comedian's ugly sweaters and didn't have any sexual connotation.
At least, not when the joke began.
Instead, they suggest the running joke was that the rooms in question looked dated like the sweater.
One source said they were told it was a reference to an ugly boardroom back at Blizzard's main office, which reportedly had similar patterns to the sweater.
Another said they understood it to be a reference to an ugly hotel room during a different gaming conference.
But in all pictures of the 2013 BlizzCon hotel room reviewed by Kotaku, the walls were largely white and blank, and the decor was nondescript.
The rug visible in some of the photos does have a pattern, but it looks nothing like the sweaters in the framed picture everyone is holding.
Another ex-Blizzard source pushed back on claims the Cosby Suite was a joke about ugly boardrooms or sweaters, noting that when Blizzard moved to its new Irvine, California campus in 2008, the office had been freshly painted, and to their knowledge, there was no infamous ugly boardroom.
Moreover, regardless of the source of the joke, many of the captions and comments posted on the 2013 Cosby Suite album were sexual in nature.
During discussions with Kotaku, sources who suggested that the joke was an innocent play on an infamous room somewhere else also insisted that despite this apparent widespread notoriety that was memorable enough to commemorate with a framed picture, they did not know the room belonged to Afrociabi specifically.
Two other former Blizzard developers told Kotaku that when they heard about the Cosby Suite through Whisper Networks, they clearly interpreted it as a reference to the allegations against him.
In one image procured by Kotaku, a group of women are sitting on the bed in the room with the Cosby portrait.
One of the women appears to have a hand on another's breast, which is cheered on by the men in the comments.
According to the images procured by Kotaku and two sources with knowledge of Afrociabi's alleged predatory behavior, Cosby's reputation was apparently the point of why the group of men gathered around his picture in the photos.
it was such a boys club that creating something like the cosby suite was seen as funny one source told kotaku only you could get uh i don't know why they use that word something laid alex reads one of the facebook comments in the picture Cause approved, reads another written by Cossack.
However, one source told Kotaku that Cossack was one of the few who intervened in the past when another Blizzard developer was sexually harassing them.
The Cosby Suite and BlizzCon Cosby crew chat also call into question recent statements by current and former high-ranking Blizzard developers.
While Street recently apologized for a sexist panel response to a World of Warcraft fan at BlizzCon 2010, he did not give any public indication that he was aware of or involved in something like the Cosby Suite, despite it being publicly mentioned in California's current lawsuit.
Afrociaby mysteriously left the company sometime last year without an official announcement by Activision Blizzard.
Up until the filing of the lawsuit becoming public, many of his contributions to the game persisted, including multiple non-player characters and items that reference his name.
After some fans demanded that references to him be removed, the World of Warcraft team said on Tuesday night that inappropriate references would soon be pulled from the game.
While Blizzard did not specify what exactly is going to be axed, the post mentions the brave women who have come forward to share their stories following the lawsuit.
An employee brought these 2013 events to our attention in June 2020.
A spokesperson for Activision Blizzard told Kotaku when asked about the Cosby Suite images and the allegations against Afrociabe.
We immediately conducted our own investigation and took corrective action.
At the time of the report, we had already conducted a separate investigation of Alex Afrociabi and terminated him for his misconduct in his treatment of other employees.
Last week, current Blizzard president J. Alan Brack called the allegations in the legal complaint troubling in an email to staff, but ignored the fact that he was also named in it for allegedly failing to allegedly failing to sanction Afrociaby for allegedly sexually harassing female co-workers.
That sentence need to be reworked.
Brack also stated a BlizzCon developer panel in 2010 alongside Afro-Siabi and others in which Afro-Cabby made sexist remarks to a fan in the audience who had questioned the quote-unquote Victoria's secret catalog appearance of World of Warcraft's female characters.
When the news of the lawsuit first broke, Activision Blizzard issued a statement largely denying the regulators' framing of the allegations as distorted and in many cases false descriptions of Blizzard's past.
And that past claims and that past claims of misconduct had already been addressed.
That statement and recent comments by Brack and other Activision Blizzard leaders have many current and former developers feeling like the company is at best in denial or at worst intentionally seeking to obfuscate the truth and shirk responsibility for how people who work there are treated.
As a result, over a quarter of Activision Blizzard's current staff, as well as many former employees, have signed on to an open letter rebuking the company's current handling of the allegations against it.
Many are also planning a walkout in support of demands like an end to mandatory arbitration agreements, transparency and compensation, and more diverse hiring.
Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotik announced last night that the company's previous statements had been tone deaf and pledged to make some changes to the company going forward, including investigating all managers currently at the company to see whether they have impeded the integrity of our processes for evaluating claims.
You have to be willing to look at the ugly side of things in order to get better, one former Blizzard developer told Kotaku, denials aren't going to help.
So that's the whole article, start to finish, nothing deleted.
So after that, just first take, where are you at?
Like your first thoughts on what's happening with where, what do you, yeah.
I mean, first thought is obviously this guy definitely had some had some sexist views, apparently, because if he was making comments to fans at panels, that's yeah, you feel pretty bold.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, like, I get, I'm not excusing it, but I, but I understand how, like, when there's a bunch of guys in a chat room, they'll start trying to, you know, one-up each other on, you know, this is how many women I can get with in one night kind of stuff.
Which yeah, the locker room feel of the conversation.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
But yeah, like I said, I don't, I don't, I'm not saying I condone it, but I've certainly seen it before, but but it's, but, but actually, like making suggestive comments to women in panels, that's that's going a bit, a bit far, I think.
That's yeah.
Yeah.
Um, also, uh, the references here to marrying them.
Yeah.
Oh, and this other guy saying that you misspelled fuck.
That's, yeah.
I mean, that's what I'm getting at.
I mean, that's the kind of stuff like these guys sound like they're like in their 20s and stuff, and yeah, that unfortunately uh, when you're, when you're that young, when you got that, when you still got all those hormones charging through you, that kind of commentary happens um, which it's.
It's part of our general culture that I think we're sort of informally working to change.
Yeah, I hope so, because yeah, we don't have a formal process for it, because it doesn't work very well that way, but like, and you know, fathers slowly raise their sons to be better.
I mean, it's a slow process right yeah, and and now that i'm looking at the stuff from the outside, I can definitely see where all these people were coming from, about the, you know, because I think like, if I had been in a room like that and that stuff was going on, I would have been like oh, we're just joking around, but looking at it, but looking at it from an outsider's perspective and you know, from with the benefit of agent experience, I can see why this is definitely a toxic culture that needs to be changed.
Yeah, so what do you think about the Cosby suite?
Uh, I mean, I could, I could see where people are coming from.
But like, I was kind of taking a brief glance at like, the timeline of events and um, and yeah, the timeline is interesting, isn't it?
Because there were, there were like allegations and charges as far back as 2005, but they kind of got okay, I didn't hear about them at all.
So we're going to get into that.
I have, I have all of that, I have many tabs here we, we have all that.
But so, but based on the article, they make it clear here that these guys should have known that this was this reference that yeah, that Cosby doesn't mean old fuddy-duddy comedian, he means putting things in people's drinks so that you can take advantage of them.
I mean, if I can be crude yeah, it definitely.
The article definitely lays out the picture that it's an extended rape joke yeah yeah, and that he is sort of their idol yeah yeah, that that's that article, especially that screams that hashtag cause approves is definitely uh yeah, eyebrow raising.
Yeah yeah they, they lay it on pretty thick.
Yeah, in this, in this article uh, so you are correct that uh timeline, I have an article here, so i'll pull this up, add to stage here.
I have a timeline for these things.
So, and that's formerly.
Well, I mean, we're not going to go through it exhaustively, it's point form is what we're going to do.
But fact timeline thing here, key person in the Cosby takedown was a woman named Andrea Constand.
People sometimes ask, how did he even come to meet any of these women?
Some of them he met because he was in parties he shouldn't have been at.
Some of them he met because he was uh uh um, they were looking for jobs in, in tv shows and whatever.
In this particular case he was like yeah, in this particular case, this was a woman that he was.
He was a member of the board of directors of Temple University that is in Philadelphia and that's kind of his home turf.
Like, if you've listened to much of his comedy, it'll come up a lot that he grew up in Philly and that Fat Albert is in Philly, all that stuff.
And this is in right there in Pennsylvania, right there in inside the, the city itself, and she worked in the athletic department.
So that's how they met at the university.
And uh, in january to february sometime in that time frame i'm not sure the exact date uh, she says that she was sexually assaulted at his home.
Uh, and all the details of that we're not going to get into.
That's what she says and that's, generally speaking, how we see it.
Um, so in march of 20 of 2004, she leaves her position at the university.
She's a Canadian woman.
She moves back to Canada, um in she you know she has a whole long, rich story of how she came to eventually come to terms with what happened and how she came to to accuse him.
But in january of 2005, like nearly a full year after she was assaulted, she goes back to Philadelphia and she files a police report with the Durham Regional Police.
Oh wait no, that's in Toronto.
Sorry, she.
She files it with the police in Toronto.
They get in touch and then it starts an investigation where he is, in this little town in Pennsylvania Cheltenham, or whatever.
Um, so he makes a statement at the time with his lawyer.
Um, he says that he's uh uh, you know it was, it was consensual and and that that's it.
Um, so a woman named Tamara Green says in an interview on television that says in television that Constan's decision to file a police report against Cosby uh prompted her to come forward with similar allegation from what she experienced in the 1970s.
Now, this is a woman who was a attempting to be a model, but uh, that didn't make it very far.
She, she was a person who just didn't happen to become famous um.
So okay, just another little mark.
Uh, in march, Constant files.
Uh, in february, the district attorney in charge of this uh announces that he will not be criminally prosecuting Cosby.
So in march, the very next month, Andrea Constan files a civil lawsuit.
So over the time uh they they, They do investigations.
They find other people.
It's hard to tell.
There's 12 people who are listed as Jane Doe 1 to Jane Doe 12 who are going to be witnesses in this civil suit.
And some of them are women that have their own allegations.
But some of them were not that.
They were other people who were providing corroborating testimony for Andrea's state of mind and where she was at which time and this.
sort of thing, what she said at different times, that sort of thing.
So it's not like some people think there were 12 people who were assaulted by him in this suit, but that's not really true.
Some of them were, and some of them were just witnesses to other things.
But she files this lawsuit.
Sometime around June, a model, a famous model named Janice Dickinson calls Cosby a bad guy who preys on women.
She does this on the Howard Stern show.
So that's pretty prominent.
And his show is usually pre-live, so it doesn't – see, this is the sort of thing where regularly whenever anything would happen that referred to Cosby in a bad way, he had multiple PR places across the U.S. listening to radio stations and everything.
And if anything bad would come up with his name on them, he would immediately go into action and they would threaten lawsuits and they would retract and this sort of thing.
So this was part of the machine.
It wasn't just all of us who were just blind to seeing him as a monster, as I said earlier.
We did also were blind to it, but that was also part of the machine.
Barbara Bowman in June also, she is one of the people who was listed in the lawsuit who's going to give a testimony.
She says that she's one of the people who has been assaulted.
But this doesn't get a lot of press.
It's just a thing that she sort of says and no one knows what to do with it because she's not a very famous person, right?
So sometime around June or July or so, Cosby, during this course of this lawsuit, Cosby is deposed.
And these are recorded.
But no one sees them because they're sealed up.
So the depositions are done.
And then some lawyers argue back and forth.
And then this civil suit is settled for $3 million.
But we don't know that.
It was an undisclosed amount.
And in the agreement for the $3 million, Andrea Constant agreed to never make public accusations against Bill Cosby again.
So it sort of closes the story here.
And then we pretty much don't hear anything until October of 2014.
So Hannibal Burris has mentioned this story a fair amount as the guy who took Cosby down.
He even says he's not really the guy who took Cosby down.
He knew about some of these things through word of mouth.
And that's the sort of thing that, you know, the PR companies, the public relations companies that were in charge of this couldn't really stop, was that a few people in the comedy communities would whisper this or whatever.
Yeah, there's these allegations.
The PR spin about Andrea Constant and some of the other women who have said this is that they are just out for money.
This is the spin.
And this was always the spin.
This is a dark part of our collective social past as a society is that, you know, before Me Too, and Me Too was probably around 2016 kind of time frame.
It was, yeah, it was rumors.
I remember many people looked at these as you know, people who were just looking for some kind of attention or money or whatever, looking to sue, which was also meant to be why it was always the star quarterback who got accused instead of just some random person X who got accused, right?
Which it's still among some people who try to slide this under the carpet or whatever, right?
Right.
Uh, but we're slowly getting, I think, I feel like we're slowly getting to a place where we are believing these and we are acting on them more than we did.
Um, but Hannibal Burris, it says in October he says this joke, but he actually did this joke several times.
He was on a on a comedy tour and he was kind of going to various places and he didn't do this joke at every location he was at, but he did them at several through the year.
And according to stories about this, the joke didn't land very well.
The audiences didn't like the joke.
Um, and you know, comedians they're working on their jokes, they're getting the timing.
They're, you know, he kind of has this joke, and it's, you know, this joke probably didn't get as much work as the other jokes.
So, but he liked the joke because he hated Cosby and he knew he heard about these things, and he didn't really even know how clear and how widespread or anything like that.
He just, he just didn't like Cosby.
That was it.
He just didn't like him.
And he knew about this.
And so he just put those two things together and said, fuck that guy.
I'm putting this joke in.
And the joke was that Cosby was always giving people hell about things, swearing and comedy and about how people should act and all this stuff.
Yeah, especially white people being too serious.
Yeah, yeah.
If they were being too, what's the word, black, is kind of how it would be put, right?
If they were acting in a way that was like their own culture separate from that of that of white America, that seemed to be the thing that triggered Cosby more than anything else.
Yeah, it's basically why I'm doing something on black people as a whole as a whole.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
But the joke was verbatim: pull your pants up, black people.
I was on TV in the 80s, and then Burris says, Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby.
So turn the crazy down a couple notches.
And so this, he does this a couple times at different places.
But on October 16th of 2014, he does this joke in Philadelphia, which is Cosby's hometown.
He's much more famous in Philadelphia than he is anywhere outside of that, which is crazy because he was well known outside of that.
But in Philadelphia, he's like the hometown hero, right?
Like probably the most famous person from Philadelphia who's still right.
Yeah, yeah.
There have been other famous people, but they're dead.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So then there is an article written about this a couple days later in a local newspaper, which adds fuel to this fire and it starts to gain traction in online and everything else.
It says in this article that on November 10th, the routine goes viral, but the thing had legs before that online, right?
It went to the end of the day.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I don't have this story here where I read it, but I did read at the time, a few years ago when I read this, a time where throughout his thing, he'd been working on the joke and he'd been trying it.
And it was really unpopular when he did it.
That's why he didn't do it in every location.
But he was sort of working on the timing and he's trying to, you know, I don't know all the dark art of comedy, but I knew that they rearrange words and they get the yeah, yeah, they work on it, right?
They mold it to, you know, however they want to do it.
So it gains legs.
And this is how I know it gains legs because Bill Cosby himself, who in apparently it must have been a moment where he just didn't understand how the internet works, he attempted to overwhelm this sort of growing notion that he's a person who sexually assaults women by drowning it out.
I think he attempted to drown this out with his likability.
By he he posts an invitation on Twitter to, as he puts it, meme me, create memes about me.
And many of the memes are about these claims.
Like this completely backfires.
This is the Streisand effect on steroids.
Like this is, this makes it way worse, right?
Like he, and I think this is just how he doesn't understand internet culture, right?
And that seems likely.
Like a lot of people say some work for Cosby.
Yeah, that seems like it's a thing that gives Cosby a break.
And I'm not interested in giving Cosby a break today.
So throughout November into December, into January, there's on the timeline here, there's more people who come forward with allegations, many more.
I think by January, there's something on the order of 25 to 30-ish kind of number.
There's also a couple back and forths.
There's mostly females of Cosby's family and work relations, including Felish Rashad, who are making statements saying that this isn't true.
This isn't the man that you know and everything else.
But the moment that really turned the tide here was that in July.
So Andrea Constant is not totally quiet during this time.
Like most people have forgotten who she is.
And sort of her name has come up a couple times as this is kind of ramped up because they look back at this thing.
Oh, well, there was this woman who accused him of this, you know, 10, 11 years ago, whatever it was.
And, you know, but it was settled out of court.
It's sealed or whatever.
She takes some of the money that she got.
She still has some.
And she gets a lawyer and she goes to a courtroom.
And they make the argument that if Bill Cosby gets to mention these accusations in public and claim that they didn't happen, then Andrea Constant should get to speak up as well and say that they did.
And the judge agreed.
So then she was able to add her name to the list of accusers.
And I've heard a couple different versions of this.
Somewhere between a week to 10 days after she got the right to add her name to the list of accusers, the depositions are released.
The videotaped depositions are just released.
This doesn't seem to be something that was meant to happen.
I've even heard one version of the story that this was just a clerk who got it wrong.
It doesn't even seem to be that like that like a reporter was like digging deep and like found them in a thing and asked and they gave that reporter permission when they shouldn't have or anything like that.
It doesn't seem like a journalist was looking for this at all.
It was just a clerk who said, oh, this is not sealed anymore.
I guess I'll just, and he just, he or she or whatever it was, put them online.
And this, this was the moment that was putting nails in the coffin here.
So when we're looking at this and we think about, you know, this, this article, this article from Kotaku, and by the way, this was just a couple years after Kotaku was kind of at the, just to the side of the heart of the Gamergate issue about, you know, ethics and journalism and everything.
And then this article is written.
This appears to say that the fact that it was named the Cosby suite should be extremely damning evidence that these men had planned well in advance to do very bad sexual things to people in this hotel room.
But for starters, we have to ask, is it reasonable to think that they looked at Bill Cosby as a monster at that time?
So this happened in November of 2013.
Hannibal Burris didn't play his do his joke in Philadelphia until October of 2014, nearly a full year later.
So, okay, you know, there's that.
Some people say, well, maybe we should still, you know, I mean, these are really bad guys.
Let's just put this fork in him anyway.
You know, I'm not against putting the fork in them.
But here's the thing is that there's reasons why even they would not have thought of him this way.
Like, what if they had called it the Bill Murray room, the Bill Murray suite, right?
Or the Don Rickles suite, the old comedian guy who's, you know, long has been, and why does anyone think he's cool anymore, right?
Like this, you know, so there's some reasons.
Let's look at them.
So this is a thing called the Mark Twain Prize.
It's given for American humor, though once given to a Canadian man.
But in 2009, so we're talking four years after the lawsuit with Andrea Constant is settled, they give this very prestigious award to Bill Cosby.
And many famous comedians, there's a list of them here, Terry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Malcolm Jamal Warner, Stephen Wright, Willie Nelson, Carl Reiner.
I mean, they show up to honor him at this moment, right?
I mean, and this is televised.
I watched that live.
Here's another one.
So here's a handy, dandy website.
This is a list of honorary degrees awarded to Bill Cosby.
So this man received 72 honorary degrees in his life.
So, you know, he was widely recognized for a very long time as a positive role model figure in society.
And not just to the black community either, like to society at large.
Starting from 1985, many, many of these.
So right through looking at 2000, he got four in the year 2000.
He got one, two, three, four, five, six in the year 2001.
One, two, three, four, five, six in the year 2002.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven in the year 2003.
And then in 2004, he got three.
I see a lot of them out of Pennsylvania too, too.
Sure, yeah.
I mean, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, South Dakota.
Right.
So, I mean, but several in Pennsylvania.
That makes sense, right?
That's his home turf.
And then there's a gap.
Right.
So 2004, then there's a gap, right?
Not again until 2007.
Only one in 2007, two in 2008, one in 2010, one in 2011, one in 2012, three in 2013, and one in 2014.
So we're talking like multiple institutions, people who are giving out the Lifetime Achievement Award for Comedy, you know, University of San Francisco, University of Baltimore, Boston University is a major university, right?
Like these, some of them are smaller colleges, Oberlin College, Miles College.
I've never heard of those.
Carnegie Mellon Mellon should make sure that.
Carnegie Mellon, yeah, it's a major one.
Yeah, yeah, 2007.
These, these are, it's not insignificant when you have this list of universities giving him honorary doctorates that, you know, you might be a bunch of frat boys, you know, to make the case that society at large was not viewing him as a monster should be, I think, an easy sell.
But there's another incidence here.
So this is a website that lists Bill Cosby concert history.
So these are, I'm just listing here, you know, many tour dates in 2014 even.
If we look on page one, we'll see the most recent.
They peter off quite quickly after, because again, it was not till November of 2014 when the meme me moment happened.
And this was the moment this was catching fire online.
He had some dates in 2015, but all of these dates were heavily heavily protested.
And I can't find the article anymore, but there was an article about how all of these institutions, like these institutions were protested even after he left because people were outraged that they even had him there.
But he had a sort of a tour contract that would be set up in advance.
And if they refused to let him do his show, they owed him essentially the price of the full house of ticket sales, which a lot of these small venues, they can't afford to do, right?
And this handy chart here, concerts per year.
So through the 90s, there was three, four, five.
He's busy with a TV show at the time.
2002 starts to ramp up with 22.
2003, 16.
2004, 29, 2005, 33, 2006, fewer at 14.
I mean, we're talking like 44, 58, 64, and until 2014, yeah, with 98 and 2013 and or 2014, right?
So he was touring constantly through this time at many places.
Right.
So another moment that fits in this is that in 2013, we're talking on the timeline of the Blizzard employees having a Cosby suite in November of 2013.
We might look at what Cosby was doing in November of 2013.
He had, within a week of BlizzCon, he made his debut performance on Comedy Central.
He didn't like Comedy Central because they allowed swearing in their comedy and he was dead set against that.
But he did a full special and it aired on Comedy Central.
And that came out a week after the BlizzCon Cosby suite.
And he was on all the talk shows to support it.
He was on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart where he gave Jon Stewart shit for swearing, right?
Again.
And Jon Stewart was like, fucking this again, really?
Like, why?
You could just not say anything and just walk the fuck off stage.
Whatever.
But, I mean, he went on all the shows.
He was on Dave Letterman.
He was on Jay Leno.
I can't remember if Jay Leno was on him, but he was on all the popular comedy-like shows like that that had, you know, to push his show, to show the, you know, because that would all the press you got to do to push your TV show.
And it wasn't a TV show.
It was just a special, but, you know, they wanted to replay it and get more ads from it.
So that's what he was doing.
So if Jon Stewart isn't calling him out for his, you know, sexual assault allegations, why would we expect these Blizzard guys to do it?
But it feels like we have to, it feels like we're protecting monsters when we even say this.
Right.
So how do you feel now?
Do you feel like this is a gray area enough that we hit this?
You know, like the article says these were monsters.
And they don't, they purposely also don't list any dates of when anything happened to make it clear to anyone because that would make it clear that this is kind of less true.
You know what I mean?
But I mean, what we have here is a story of, you know, in your memory trying to figure out, because most people wouldn't do what I did and look up all these sources, right?
What, how this came to occur.
You know, they look back in time from 2021, looking backward.
You can't remember all the time.
Oh, in 2013 or 2014 or 2012.
I can't remember exactly which year.
Who was president when they happened?
It's hard to say.
I don't know.
Like, yeah.
It was Obama for all of them.
Yeah.
But yeah, I mean, it's this, this is also a story of just bad journalism that just is leaning hard on the sensational issue to get more eyeballs on it, right?
Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree.
Those guys are definitely doing it.
Yeah, really bad.
They're often flush them.
Yeah.
And questionably, we need to add ads off.
Yeah, yeah.
This was just a bad coincidence that they made the afternoon.
Ships that passed in the night, and then later on that night they each did piracy.
Yeah, that's kind of how it is, right?
Yeah.
And I think that I also think that like journalism like this is, you know, everyone complains about, you know, the media, the mainstream media or whatever, like both sides, every side kind of does.
But things like this, I think, are, they're not even egregious, right?
This passes most notice because everyone wants to wants the bad people to get the bad things happen to them, right?
Because why wouldn't you?
You would be a monster if you didn't.
Right.
Right.
And, but the reason why a piece, like an article like this could be bad is easily because it makes people, I mean, it kind of makes people think that this is a huge slam dunk case, which turns out it wasn't.
The state of California filed a lawsuit against Activision Blizzard, and the Blizzard lawyers and the state of California lawyers both agree that this isn't sort of widespread enough and pervasive enough to go with a trial.
So they settle out of court like a couple months later.
And then a couple months after that, Microsoft buys Blizzard.
Presumably, the sale was pending, you know, they wouldn't go through with it until the lawsuit was wrapped up, right?
Which would have caused the Blizzard lawyers to want to settle instead of fight tooth and nail to be totally innocent or whatever.
But it angered a lot of people because they're like, well, this was a slam dunk case.
Those were demons.
And you had the demonry in front of you.
They had the Cosby suite.
Like, how could you not get the, you know, why isn't there hangings in the street from this?
But the fact is that the fact that it was the Cosby suite isn't important.
The Cosby suite is mentioned because they're doing business in the Cosby suite.
And it's the unspoken part of the access to the Cosby Suite is that you are going to participate in the party atmosphere that's happening there, which is a different level of thing for the women as it is for the men.
Right.
And that's why.
That's why it's mentioned.
That's why it's there.
It's yeah, and I mean, and it's not like a huge case of it, but one thing I always think about is something that was mentioned, actually going back to Jon Stewart, because I first heard it in a book The Daily Show wrote where they said that the point of the media is to provide context.
Yeah.
So try to explain to us this is why this is important.
And in this case, they're like purposely muddling that context.
Yeah, absolutely.
You're right.
Yeah, purposely muddling.
That's a good way to put it because they want to sell the sensational aspect of this of the Cosby suite.
And they mentioned it many, many times.
Yeah.
Oh, get one for the cause, cause approved or whatever.
And it's like, okay, but like switch it with Don Rickles.
Rickles approved.
Like it doesn't make any sense all of a sudden, but that's the level of seriousness it would should really probably get in 2013 when this happened.
And there's kind of one more aspect of this that I think is interesting.
And I don't know how much sort of importance to put on it, but I look at things like the way we sort of, as a whole society, right?
We rewrote our view of Bill Cosby.
We totally rewrote it.
And people would look back on that and they say, well, you know, we used to think of Bill Cosby as a great guy, and now we think of him as the opposite of a great guy.
And the only difference is that.
I think that's the first time they called him America's Dad, which wasn't the nickname he had back in the day.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He was the, you know, yeah.
Which was undoubtedly also an image he was fostering to help him get away with things like this.
Yeah, really bad.
When he was getting at us, when he was getting at Jon Stewart for cousin, it was like he was trying to cultivate this squeaky clean image.
Oh, yeah.
And he did that for years.
Like he started his comedy career right around the same time that Richard Pryor did.
And they were both very prominent black comedians in the same area of the world.
I think, don't quote me, but I think Richard Pryor might have been from Chicago.
I can't remember.
Might have been, I don't know.
I shouldn't talk.
I'm sure it was somewhere on the East Coast, but relatively close and would have been touring in the same kind of areas.
And their styles of comedy were drastically different, right?
And Bill Cosby's sort of rivalry that was a one-sided rivalry.
Like Richard Pryor didn't really care about Bill Cosby.
He just didn't care.
He's like, shrug and then go do his set, right?
But Bill Cosby would, you know, a lot of people think that Bill Cosby's sort of squeaky clean image was sort of also enhanced by wanting to set himself apart from Richard Pryor, who was sort of saying all the swear words more than anyone else, right?
Like leaning into that art.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Like way, yeah.
He was as Eddie Perfect.
He was pretty tame by today's standards, but back then he was definitely.
Yeah.
Maybe.
I haven't listened to a lot of the old, old standouts.
Maybe I should from Richard Pryor.
I remember him from like movies and stuff.
Yeah.
But the way that we rewrote this whole thing about Bill Cosby, you know, and the difference between how we see him now and the way we saw him then is just, you know, this ethereal thing we just call public perception.
Right.
You know, one wonders if this isn't in some way, some small piece, even if it's not, you know, consciously known by some of the people that do this, on some subconscious or intuitive level, part of the building blocks for what we have now in that we have entire areas of unreality where people just think that if they convince everyone, something will be just true.
You know, like the one I always use is flat earth.
Like it seems like the flat earthers really feel that, you know, the earth is really flat.
The only reason why we think it's spherical is because everyone just is sort of told that.
Yeah.
You know, Bill Cosby was always a monster.
The only reason why we thought he wasn't was everyone just kind of thought that he wasn't.
And then we eventually, you know, learned that he was.
And, you know, that change happened.
And I think some of them think those changes can happen for the other things we feel strongly about too.
All we have to do is just get enough people on board and the whole thing just flips magically.
It just becomes the thing we know it is.
I wonder if that's a piece.
It's not, it's not like that happened and then it flowered into.
You know, it wasn't the butterfly flicking its wings to make a hurricane but I wonder if it's just one piece of a building block of the society with the information society we've built that's led to where we have these movements, apparently that just think they can maybe convince everyone.
What do you think?
Am I way off base here or?
I mean, I guess it's okay to tell me i'm wrong.
It's okay, I mean, I get what you're saying.
There are definitely people who have this whole uh, who seem to have I should say seem, because I can't actually read their minds but they seem to have this worldview that uh, reality is what I decide it is and uh, and if enough people agree with me, then it really is.
Yeah, it's like that reality can be democratic somehow.
Yeah, it's like that famous quote that's been variously attributed to, like Lenin and other people, that a lie told often enough becomes the truth.
Yeah yeah, right.
Joseph Gobel said a similar thing.
Yeah um, I can't remember the exact quote, but I think I talk about where you said like uh, accuse you no no, that's something else.
But yeah, he did say, accuse the other side of that of which you're guilty.
But um no, it was.
Yeah, I wish I had this on hand, it was, it's a, it's a quote.
That where people pare it down to not include the whole quote uh, he says something about how it's talking about the big lie, isn't it?
Yeah, if you repeat it enough, it becomes true.
Yeah, but the next part of what he says is also very, very important, because it tells part of the story, which is that the next part of what he said there is that uh, it even becomes true for the person saying it, which also like, really says something about the Nazis that the people who make that, who repeat that quote, don't like to say.
You know what I mean, they don't like to repeat that part.
That oh, it becomes real for the person telling the lie too.
Okay yeah, I guess that's that is how it's done, you know yeah, I think it's something to hear about, about people telling a lie so much that they start to believe it themselves.
Yeah well yeah, I mean, that's, that's how lies work.
Right, that's that's.
I mean, that that's how memory works too.
Like when you remember things, people think of their memory as like a recording, like a vcr, and it just you know, maybe it degrades, it gets fuzzy or something, but that's not really how it works.
You are rewriting your memory every time you remember something.
Yeah it, it can drift in quality every time you remember it, and the more often you remember it technically, the more likely you are to have it drift because you're you're rewriting it every time.
I know like I uh, like there's been a few times where my mom would be telling me something and she'd like, she's like she was telling her sister some story and her sister remembers it totally differently and she's like, how come she remembers it differently?
I'm like look, people just remember stuff the way they want to remember it.
Well yeah, that that I mean.
As it, as it changes, they lean on the parts that they like And that assists the change.
But other things just change just because, right?
Folk tales and urban legends that we retell.
And even the people who retell them tell them slightly different each time.
And it drifts, right?
Yeah.
Interesting.
So anyway, I think we've done this to death.
I think it's enough.
I think we're good.
So thank you very much for coming on the podcast.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Have me muddle through this.
And you list off a bunch of places where people can find you.
Do you want to list some of those again just to the end as well as the beginning?
Yeah, so like I said, I'm on Twitter at NotBadgers.
Just one word.
And then you can also hear me usually every week on Adventures in Hell World, which is where we find podcasts.
Yeah, one of my top five podcasts.
Yeah.
Thanks.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That one's more comedic than this show was.
Yeah, I'd throw in a joke or two, but it's not my area.
Oh, that's fine.
I was just letting people know.
It's okay.
You guys are much funnier on your show than I am on mine.
It's okay.
Everyone's got their own.
It's not a contest.
It's not a contest, Eric.
But if it is, you're winning, but it's fine.
It's not a contest.
You said it, not me.
I did say it.
It's okay.
I'm okay with it.
So I'm available online as well.
I'm Spencer G. Watson on Twitter.
That's pretty much most of the only place.
I'm also Spencer Watson on Blue Sky.
If people go there, I don't go there as much as I should.
Yeah, same.
I'm on Blue Sky under the same name, but I'm barely ever there either.
Yeah, I don't seem to have enough time even to do the two things I do anywhere else.
So, yeah.
But if anyone has any questions, comments, complaints, concerns about anything they heard on this podcast, you can send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.