As Bill Cosby trudges along his “Far From Finished” comedy tour, the world outside his protective bubble continues to demonstrate why that’s a terrible name, with three more women now joining the unending list of those who have accused him of sexual assault. Gloria Allred held another press conference yesterday, in the hopes that this might finally be the moment when Cosby would “acknowledge and take responsibility for his conduct towards women.” Her clients—Janice Baker-Kinney, Marcella Tate, and Autumn Burns—shared their depressingly familiar tales of Cosby meeting them at parties, the Playboy Mansion, and Las Vegas casinos in the ’70s and ’80s, offering them pills or alcohol laced with some sort of sedative, then molesting them. And their stories brought the total number of women who have now come forward to a staggering 41, and the total number Cosby has acknowledged to zero.
To put that number in perspective: Bill Cosby has appeared in two times more sexual assault allegations than episodes of The Cosby Mysteries. If the allegations of rape against Bill Cosby were episodes of The Cosby Show, they would already be well into their second season (right around the one where the Huxtables meet Stevie Wonder). Bill Cosby now has more than twice as many rape charges as he does comedy albums. Bill Cosby has almost exactly the same number of sexual assault accusations as he does acting credits on IMDb. And so on.
Which isn’t to belittle these new accusations brought forth by Baker-Kinney, Tate, and Burns—only to demonstrate that they’re part of what is by now a bleak regularity, the numbing effect of which Cosby seems to be counting on (as is his wont). Meanwhile, The Daily Mail reports he’s currently fighting the defamation suit brought by one of his first accusers, Tamara Green, pleading with the judge to keep a confidential deposition from 2005 sealed that Green’s team believes could contain Cosby admitting to assaulting Andrea Constand and others—and possibly pave the way for more civil lawsuits to come. But without the judge agreeing to that extraordinary measure, and no other possibility of legal action currently on the horizon, Cosby mostly continues to hope that, eventually, the public will just get tired of hearing about all this and move on (something you can see play out in microcosm, right here in the comments).
Because all the think-pieces have already been written; all the personal judgments have already been made. By now, you either acknowledge that these billows of smoke suggest a raging forest fire, or you maintain that it’s just a case of he said versus she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she and she said. At this point, the exact number probably isn’t going to change your mind, any more than it will Cosby’s.
Meanwhile, Cosby continues to perform, with his next show scheduled for May 2 in Atlanta—and another protest similarly scheduled to take place outside. Judging by his most recent show in Baltimore, even that protest has taken on its own feeling of grim routine: Someone stands up and yells that Bill Cosby is a rapist, an unperturbed Cosby has them silenced, and his show rolls on. Only the numbers change.