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Cont:https://news.yahoo.com/took-down-bill-cosby-190600604.html
Diana and I hadn’t been in the house long before my cell rang.
“Andrea”—Dolores’s tone was kind but measured and matter-of-fact—“we’re sorry to tell you this, but the DA isn’t going to move forward with the case. There won’t be any charges.”
I wasn’t surprised. Not really.
My lawyers and I had sensed that the case we were attempting to pursue wasn’t looking good. It was yet another sharp blow in what had already been, without a doubt, the most difficult year of my life.
A little more than twelve months earlier, everything had been different. I was a happy, confident thirty-year-old with a great job as the director of operations for the women’s basketball team at Temple University in Philadelphia. My work at Temple was a natural fit. Sports had always been my passion. I was an active child, and athletics had helped me channel my considerable energy and have fun at the same time. By high school, I was a star basketball player, and in my final year, I was lucky enough to see dozens of university scholarships flood in. In the end, I headed to the University of Arizona to play college ball. It turned out to be a wonderful choice, not just because I enjoyed the team and the school so much, but also because my paternal grandparents decided to retire to Tucson when they learned that I was a bit homesick. I saw them almost every day and was delighted to have my family close by once more.
At the end of my time at university, I had hoped for a spot on the fledgling WNBA roster, but when that didn’t materialize, I wasn’t disappointed for long. After a wonderful year spent teaching basketball skills to middle-school children in North Hollywood, California, I made the Canadian team for the 1997 World University Games in Italy. While there, I was recruited by Sicily’s professional women’s basketball team, and I played for two seasons before returning to Canada. I worked for Nike in Toronto for a short while before taking the Temple position, then spent almost three years in Philly. But in early 2004, I was ready to shift my path again. I was planning to move back to Canada to rejoin my large extended family and my old friends, and to pursue a career in the healing arts, as both my mother and my father had done.
I had a good future before me. I knew who I was and I liked who I was. I was at the top of my game, certain that the groundwork laid by my education and my athletic training had prepared me for whatever challenges were ahead.
But I was wrong. Very wrong.
Nothing could have prepared me for an early January evening spent at the home of a man I considered a friend.
That was the night that Bill Cosby raped me.
I was introduced to Bill Cosby in the autumn of 2002, more than a year after I’d started my job at Temple. He was an alumnus of the university, as well as a trustee, a significant donor, and an enthusiastic supporter of the women’s basketball program. The first time I met him, he was part of a small group of Temple employees and team supporters who were being given a tour of our newly renovated locker room.
I knew who he was, of course, but I had never watched The Cosby Show and had no real idea how big a celebrity he was. He’d been an extremely successful stand-up comedian, and in 1965, he was the first African American to land a starring role in a weekly TV show, the drama I Spy. It was a potent symbol of a changing America; in the previous year, the Civil Rights Act had been signed into law. The Selma March, in which Black protestors were brutalized by police, happened the same year as I Spy hit the airwaves.
Cosby’s star power continued to build with a number of his own TV shows—including the popular children’s animated series Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids—before The Cosby Show debuted in 1984. The family-friendly sitcom, in which Cosby played an obstetrician and father of five, was a huge success during its eight-year run, earning him the nickname America’s Dad. Cosby was also a big hit with marketers—his wholesome image and goofy charm made him the perfect spokesman for Jell-O and Coca-Cola, among other brands. By the mid-eighties, in fact, he’d become the highest-paid entertainer in the world, according to Forbes magazine.
Even as he was conquering the world of stage and screen, Cosby earned a doctorate in education, and he often gave public lectures about the importance of parenting, family, education, personal responsibility, ambition, and self-actualization.
I suppose it’s a testament to how little television I consumed as a child that Bill Cosby and most of his achievements had largely escaped my notice. And so I credited the attention he garnered at Temple—his calls had to be returned immediately, his interest in our new locker room was promptly met with an offer to tour the facility—to the fact that he was a major financial supporter of the university.
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