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Abstract
On July 26, 2015, New York magazine published its cover story, “‘I’m No Longer Afraid’: 35 Women Tell Stories about Being Assaulted by Bill Cosby and the Culture That Wouldn’t Listen,” written by Noreen Malone, and an associated portfolio by Amanda Demme. Six months in the making, this print and multimedia digital project included thirty-five photos and print testimonies of women sexually assaulted by Bill Cosby, along with six video testimonies. I investigate how this popular culture archive of survivor voices tells the story of sexual violence from within women’s lived experiences. More specifically, I argue that this novel archive of survivor testimony largely intervenes in dominant discourses and builds an alternative community history by reworking the role of the expert mediator, reckoning with racial structures of disbelief, illuminating cultural capital as entrenching disbelief, asserting survivors’ power to name their condition, and reclaiming survivor stories.
Acknowledgments
A version of this manuscript was presented at the 2017 Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference in Dayton, Ohio. The author thanks the reviewers, Alina Haliliuc, Holly Gilbert, and Jeff Youngquist and especially the editor for their thoughtful comments and constructive recommendations.
Notes
1 Of the approximately sixty sexual assault accusations Cosby faces, this case is currently the only one in which prosecution is an option due to Pennsylvania’s lengthy statute of limitations for sex crimes.
2 A retrial of this case began on April 9, 2018. It concluded on April 26, 2018, after just two days of deliberation.
3 The project featured a cover story by Noreen Malone and a portfolio by Amanda Demme. The story, distributed in various platforms across the Web, is also titled, “Cosby: The Women—An Unwelcome Sisterhood.” According to the project’s Online Journalism Award, photo editors Jody Quon and Sofia de Guzman reached out to the women to ask them to participate, and Jen Kirby contributed additional reporting. The videos were directed by Amanda Demme, with Stephanie Wescott serving as producer and Abraham Reisman as editor.
4 The New York Media LLC includes nymag.com, from which one can access vulture.com, thecut.com, and grubstreet.com. Figures for the company’s various Web pages and sites are combined collectively; the number of online visitors for the individual sections is not available. The annual print circulation of New York magazine is approximately 406,000.
5 Briefly, to prove nonconsent, this antiquated legal standard required a woman to demonstrate that she fought a rapist with all her force even if it put her life in jeopardy and was futile. Today, the utmost resistance standard generally has been replaced with reasonable resistance and consent standards, but Ehrlich argues that its ideological residue remains and influences how we perceive rape. Ehrlich asserts that perpetrators are able to effectively advance claims of innocence by adopting a rhetoric of nonagency grounded in a view of the male sexual drive as uncontrollable and requiring female restraint, while framing survivors as enacting ineffectual agency based on the utmost resistance standard. Strategic acts of resistance that fall outside of the standard are obscured and reworked as consent (120).
6 I recognize that men and nonbinary persons also experience sexual violence. Here, I am focusing my investigation on violence against women because the archive is geared toward the experiences of (those who appear to identify as) women. Constand’s account was not included in the archive; this is presumably because her civil lawsuit included a confidentiality agreement.
7 The survivors weighed a variety of factors in the formulation of their experiences. Some factors included whether family and friends would believe them, how the perpetrator responded to the incident, and the degree of control that was present. Wood and Rennie note, “Anything that suggests even a modicum of control casts a shadow of doubt on the construction of what happened was rape” (132). Convincing a perpetrator to put on a condom, wearing a particular shirt, letting the perpetrator kiss them, or consenting to go to a date’s home all were grounds for survivors questioning whether they were “really” raped and whether they thought others would believe them (132).
8 Although Malone’s cover story and the assemblage of survivor narratives are featured in a variety of formats, this analysis focuses on their presentation in New York magazine’s “The Cut” Web page.
9 Women traditionally wore these “widow’s weeds” for at least a year. However, both England’s Queen Victoria, wife of Prince Albert, and Sarah Polk, wife of 11th U.S. president James Polk, famously wore widow’s weeds from their husbands’ passing to their own deaths four decades later.