35 Cosby Accusers Sit for Striking Cover Photo

They come together for powerful 'New York Magazine' photo essay
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Jul 27, 2015 5:18 AM CDT
Updated Jul 27, 2015 7:13 AM CDT
35 Cosby Accusers Speak Out
Some 35 Cosby accusers posed for this cover and a photo essay inside.   (New York)

A powerful New York magazine cover story brings together 35 of the 46 women who have publicly accused Bill Cosby of sexually assaulting them. The women—who appear on the cover and in a photo essay inside—describe how they were drugged and abused by a man many of them had trusted and looked up to, and how they felt it was impossible to come forward. "I felt like a prisoner; I felt I was kidnapped and hiding in plain sight," says Barbara Bowman, who accuses Cosby of abusing her when she was a teenager in the '80s. "I could have walked down any street of Manhattan at any time and said, 'I'm being raped and drugged by Bill Cosby,' but who the hell would have believed me? Nobody, nobody."

"Each story is awful in its own right," writes Noreen Malone at New York. "But the horror is multiplied by the sheer volume of seeing them together, reading them together, considering their shared experience." An empty chair on the cover symbolizes women who have not yet come forward, notes Daniel Politi at Slate, who believes the magazine's jarring cover may do "more to destroy the once-beloved comic's reputation than anything that has been released so far." And Cosby's legacy is continuing to unravel, reports the New York Times. Spelman College, a historically black women's college in Atlanta, has cut its ties with Bill and Camille Cosby, who donated $20 million in 1988. (President Obama, however, says there's no way to revoke Cosby's Medal of Freedom.)

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