For Cosby to commit these assaults against multiple victims over several years, there had to be a network of willfully blind wallflowers at best, or people willing to aid him in committing these sexual crimes at worst. In its wake, one of his accusers, Barbara Bowman, turned to the public once more with an article in the Washington Post. Bowman claims she was drugged then raped, though she said she never saw drugs. She said to CNN that Cosby told her she had been drunk. I told her how Cosby won my trust as a 17-year-old aspiring actress in 1985, brainwashed me into viewing him as a father figure, and then assaulted me multiple times. But as a teenager, I tried to convince myself I had imagined it. I even tried to rationalize it: Bill Cosby was going to make me a star and this was part of the deal," she wrote in her Washington Post article. After that, Bowman said, she "just gave up" and moved on with her life. I told friends what had happened, and although they sympathized with me, they were just as helpless to do anything about it. Editor’s note: A representative for Bill Cosby did not return multiple calls and e-mails from Washington Post staff for comment on this piece. This week, Twitter turned against him, too, with a meme that emblazoned rape scenarios across pictures of his face. In late October, comedian Hannibal Buress bluntly attacked what he perceived as Cosby's "smuggest old black man public persona" by saying, "Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby, so turn the crazy down a couple notches. Elsewhere, Cosby repeatedly denied separate sexual-assault allegations by Andrea Constand. In February, after Newsweek ran an interview with one of the purported victims, Tamara Green, Cosby's representative said, "This is a 10-year-old, discredited accusation that proved to be nothing at the time, and is still nothing." Lawsuit airs allegations 
 
 At the time of Constand's lawsuit, Cosby had been in the news for a sexual affair once before. In 2006, I was interviewed by Robert Huber for Philadelphia Magazine, and Alycia Lane for KYW-TV news in Philadelphia. The lawyers said I could testify anonymously as a Jane Doe, but I ardently rejected that idea. In the end, I didn’t have the opportunity to do that, because Cosby settled the suit for an undisclosed amount of money. A few months later, another Jane Doe, Beth Ferrier, also spoke out. He's still scheduled to star in an NBC sitcom next year, and his skills as a comedian appear undiminished.
– Last month, comedian Hannibal Buress called Bill Cosby a rapist in a video that quickly went viral. "Google 'Bill Cosby rape,'" Buress told an audience during a standup routine—and suddenly, Cosby's name and the accusations that he raped several women in the 1980s were everywhere. But why now? asks Barbara Bowman, who says Cosby "drugged and raped" her after winning her trust as a mentor when she was a 17-year-old aspiring actress three decades ago. On another occasion, at an industry event in Atlantic City, "he pinned me down ... while I screamed for help," she writes in the Washington Post. "I'll never forget the clinking of his belt buckle as he struggled to pull his pants off." "I first told my agent, who did nothing," then told a lawyer, who "accused me of making the story up," Bowman writes. But that didn't stop her from speaking out publicly, which she has done numerous times. Other women, including Tamara Green, Beth Ferrier, and Andrea Constand have done the same, CNN reports. "Why didn't our stories go viral?" Bowman asks, noting that the public outcry began "only after a man" called Cosby a rapist. That's "a very valid question," but "we know why, and that's part of the tragedy," Alanna Bennett writes at Bustle. She says Cosby, who has a new NBC show on the way, "is the kind of figure in American cultural history whom it is very uncomfortable to confront in the context of what's been accused." Click for her full column, or Bowman's.