More has changed in the past few years for women who allege rape than in all the decades since the women’s movement began. Consider the evidence of October 2014, when a Philadelphia magazine reporter at a Hannibal Buress show uploaded a clip of the comedian talking about Bill Cosby: “He gets on TV, ‘Pull your pants up, black people … I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom.’ Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby, so turn the crazy down a couple notches … I guess I want to just at least make it weird for you to watch Cosby Show reruns. Dude’s image, for the most part, it’s fucking public Teflon image. I’ve done this bit onstage and people think I’m making it up … That shit is upsetting.” The bit went viral swiftly, with irreversible, calamitous consequences for Cosby’s reputation.

Perhaps the most shocking thing wasn’t that Buress had called Cosby a rapist; it was that the world had actually heard him. A decade earlier, 14 women had accused Cosby of rape. In 2005, a former basketball star named Andrea Constand, who met Cosby when she was working in the athletic department at Temple University, where he served on the board of trustees, alleged to authorities that he had drugged her to a state of semi-consciousness and then groped and digitally penetrated her. After her allegations were made public, a California lawyer named Tamara Green appeared on the Today show and said that, 30 years earlier, Cosby had drugged and assaulted her as well. Eventually, 12 Jane Does signed up to tell their own stories of being assaulted by Cosby in support of Constand’s case. Several of them eventually made their names public. But they were met, mostly, with skepticism, threats, and attacks on their character.

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× Name: Beverly Johnson Age: 62 Occupation: model, actress Alleged Assault: mid-1980s Johnson got a call from her agent saying Cosby wanted Johnson to audition for a small role on The Cosby Show. Johnson met Cosby on the set, where he invited her to come over to his house to read for a part. The first time, Johnson brought her young daughter with her. Cosby served them brunch and gave them a tour of the house. Johnson returned a second time, alone. They talked about her career and Cosby led her upstairs, under the pretense that they would rehearse. Cosby had a big espresso machine installed in the room, and he insisted Johnson have a cup. She didn’t want to argue, and took two sips. After the second, she knew she had been drugged. Cosby approached her, and put his hand on her waist. Johnson cursed him and called him out for drugging her. Cosby grabbed her arm and almost dragged her down the stairs, out of the house, and into a cab. “In the end, just like the other women, I had too much to lose to go after Bill Cosby,” Johnson wrote in her initial public testimonial about the incident, in Vanity Fair, in December 2014. “It comes at an inopportune time for a black man of Cosby’s stature. It’s a conversation of race very much needed in this country for centuries, and there’s a conversation about violence against women that’s also needed. You have these two conversations happening. Just so happens that I am a black woman. Once I made the decision, I knew that [it] was going to be fraught with a lot of conflicting views. No one wants to be victimized again.” « Back to Article

In Cosby’s deposition for the Constand case, revealed to the public just last week, the comedian admitted pursuing sex with young women with the aid of Quaaludes, which can render a person functionally immobile. “I used them,” he said, “the same as a person would say, ‘Have a drink.’ ” He asked a modeling agent to connect him with young women who were new in town and “financially not doing well.” In the deposition, Cosby seemed confident that his behavior did not constitute rape; he apparently saw little difference between buying someone dinner in pursuit of sex and drugging them to reach the same goal. As for consent, he said, “I think that I’m a pretty decent reader of people and their emotions in these romantic sexual things.” If these women agreed to meet up, his deposition suggested, he felt that he had a right to them. And part of what took the accusations against Cosby so long to surface is that this belief extended to many of the women themselves (as well as the staff and lawyers and friends and others who helped keep the incidents secret).

Months after his depositions, Cosby settled the case with Constand. The accusations quickly faded from the public’s memory, if they registered at all. No one wanted to believe the TV dad in a cardigan was capable of such things, and so they didn’t. The National Enquirer had planned to run a big story detailing one of the women’s accounts, but the magazine pulled it when Cosby agreed to give them a two-page exclusive telling his side (essentially that these were instances that had been “misinterpreted”). People ran a piece in which some of the Jane Does told their stories under their own names, bolstering Constand’s account, but Cosby’s career rolled on. In 2014 alone, there was a stand-up special, plans for a new family comedy on NBC, and a high-profile biography by Mark Whitaker that glossed over the accusations.

The group of women Cosby allegedly assaulted functions almost as a longitudinal study — both for how an individual woman, on her own, deals with such trauma over the decades and for how the culture at large has grappled with rape over the same time period. In the ’60s, when the first alleged assault by Cosby occurred, rape was considered to be something violent committed by a stranger; acquaintance rape didn’t register as such, even for the women experiencing it. A few of Cosby’s accusers claim that he molested or raped them multiple times; one remained in his orbit, in and out of a drugged state, for years. In the ’70s and ’80s, campus movements like Take Back the Night and “No Means No” helped raise awareness of the reality that 80 to 90 percent of victims know their attacker. Still, the culture of silence and shame lingered, especially when the men accused had any kind of status. The first assumption was that women who accused famous men were after money or attention. As Cosby allegedly told some of his victims: No one would believe you. So why speak up?

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× Name: Patricia Leary Steuer Age: 59 Occupation: former training and development specialist Alleged Assault: 1978, 1980 Then-22-year-old Steuer worked at the University of Massachusetts and met Cosby there after he gave a lecture in 1978. He offered to mentor Steuer as she pursued a singing career. Cosby later invited her to a dinner party at his Massachusetts home. When Steuer got there, the table was set for just two people. Cosby handed Steuer a drink and insisted she perform an improv exercise, pretending she was a queen with oatmeal covering her face. She began to feel woozy. Her next memory is of Cosby standing above her — her clothes off — in a bathrobe. He handed her a toothbrush, telling her she had gotten sick and passed out in his guestroom. Steuer went home, still unsure of what actually happened to her. Cosby kept in touch, arranging for acting lessons and a gym membership for her. He invited Steuer to events, but nothing more occurred until he asked her to join him in Atlantic City. In the evening, she met him in his suite, where he handed her two large pills and a glass of Champagne. The next morning, she woke up naked in one of the rooms of his suite. Steuer joined on as a Jane Doe in the 2005 Andrea Constand lawsuit; she had initially wanted a pseudonym in New York, but when the news broke that Cosby admitted in depositions that he’d given women quaaludes, she sent an email saying that protection wasn’t necessary. “He can no longer claim that we are lying,” she wrote. “I wanted to spend time with him because this is the man who said he was going to help me with my career. So I thought, ‘Okay, I'll take the pills.’ I really had no idea what his modus operandi was. Not that I blame myself, or that I feel responsible, but I allowed my ambition to overrule my judgment. I placed my trust in a flawed human being. I don't want to ever be seen as his victim. What happened happened. I told the man that I was going to marry, whom I met shortly after that. I told some of my friends. I got a mixture of disbelief, but I didn't get a lot of encouragement to go to the authorities because, in the late '70s, women didn't challenge powerful men.” « Back to Article

But among younger women, and particularly online, there is a strong sense now that speaking up is the only thing to do, that a woman claiming her own victimhood is more powerful than any other weapon in the fight against rape. Emma Sulkowicz, carrying her mattress around Columbia in a performance-art protest of her alleged rape, is an extreme practitioner of this idea. This is a generation that’s been radicalized, in just the past few years, by horrific examples of rape and reactions to rape — like the 2012 Steubenville incident, in which high-school football players brutally violated a passed-out teenage girl at a party and photographed and braggingly circulated the evidence. That same year, when a 14-year-old Missouri cheerleader accused a popular older boy at her school of sexual assault, her classmates shamed her on social media and the family’s house was burned down. The whole world watched online. How could this kind of thing still be happening? These cases felt unignorable, unforgettable, Old Testament biblical. Would anyone have believed the girls, or cared, had the evidence not been digitizable? And: How could you be a young woman and not care deeply about trying to fix this?

This generation will probably be further galvanized by the allegations that a national cultural icon may have been allowed to drug and rape women for decades, with no repercussions. But these younger women have given something to Cosby’s accusers as well: a model for how to speak up, and a megaphone in the form of social media.

Facebook and Twitter, the forums that helped circulate the Buress clip, were full of rage at Cosby’s perceived cruelty. Barbara Bowman, who’d come forward during the Constand case, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post about her frustration that no one had believed her for all those years. Three days after Bowman’s op-ed, another woman, Joan Tarshis, came forward to say Cosby had drugged and raped her in 1969. By the end of November, 16 more women had come forward. Cosby resigned from Temple’s board of trustees and sought monetary damages from one of his accusers; he also told “Page Six” that he wanted “the black media to uphold the standards of excellence in journalism [and] go in with a neutral mind.” (Cosby, through representatives, has consistently denied any wrongdoing, and hasn’t been charged with any crimes. Emails to four of his lawyers and press reps went unanswered, although his team has begun a media tour to deny that his admission of offering Quaaludes to women was tantamount to admitting he’d raped anyone.) By February, there were another 12 accusers. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler joked about it at the Golden Globes: “Sleeping Beauty just thought she was getting coffee with Bill Cosby.” Attorney Gloria Allred got involved, representing more than a dozen of the women. Even President Obama said it was clear to him: “If you give a woman — or a man, for that matter — without his or her knowledge a drug, and then have sex with that person without consent, that’s rape.”

There are now 46 women who have come forward publicly to accuse Cosby of rape or sexual assault; the 35 women here are the accusers who were willing to be photographed and interviewed by New York. The group, at present, ranges in age from early 20s to 80 and includes supermodels Beverly Johnson and Janice Dickinson alongside waitresses and Playboy bunnies and journalists and a host of women who formerly worked in show business. Many of the women say they know of others still out there who’ve chosen to remain silent.

× Name: Linda Joy Traitz Age: 64 Occupation: sales Alleged Assault: 1969 Traitz met Cosby while working as a waitress at Café Figaro in Los Angeles. The comedian offered to drive her home one night, but instead he took her to a beach. They parked and he pulled out a briefcase full of pills. He told her to take one to relax, but Traitz declined. He became angry. He groped her and tried to climb on top of her. Traitz pushed Cosby away, and fended him off. “I was assaulted, but I wasn’t raped,” she says. She came forward on Facebook in November 2014 after seeing comments from people attacking one of Cosby’s victims. “I blamed myself at the time. I thought I did something wrong. This happened when I was 18. It took me a long, long time to come to terms with the fact that it was him, it wasn’t me. You have to pick yourself up and keep moving. If you don’t, you become a victim for the rest of your life. Nobody wants that. Life has not been easy for me. I’ve had a little bit of a hard time. I had addiction problems as I got older, in my 40s. It got me. It brought me to my knees. ” « Back to Article

× Name: Linda Kirkpatrick Age: 58 Occupation: former administrative assistant, entrepreneur Alleged Assault:1981 Kirkpatrick played against Cosby in a mixed-doubles tennis tournament in Las Vegas. The comedian made a wager: If Kirkpatrick and her partner beat Cosby and his partner, Cosby would give them free tickets to his show. Kirkpatrick and her partner won. Her tennis partner was unavailable, so Kirkpatrick went to the show alone and was escorted to Cosby’s dressing room. He handed her a glass filled with a clear liquid and what appeared to be fruit at the bottom; she drank about half of it. Her memory of the rest of the night is a blur, but some moments stuck with her: Cosby on top of her, trying to kiss her; Cosby wearing a silver bracelet with his wife’s name on it. She doesn’t remember how she got home. Cosby called the tennis club to apologize for his behavior, and offered to make it up to her. Kirkpatrick accepted his apology and went to his hotel in promise of receiving a front-row seat to his show. Again, Cosby tried to force himself on her. She pushed him away, and left. She came forward in January 2015. “I didn’t come forward before. I was a coward. I felt, at 25, if I revealed what a big celebrity with a seemingly family-oriented persona had done, that I’d be called a liar, like many of the victims have been. I was afraid and I was embarrassed.” « Back to Article

× Name: Marcella Tate Age: 67 Occupation: former model and actress Alleged Assault: 1975 Tate met Cosby at a Chicago nightclub, through a friend, in 1975. One day, Cosby called Tate and asked her to pick him up at the airport. She did, and when he got in the car, Cosby asked if she’d take him to the Playboy Mansion, where he said he was staying. Cosby invited her inside for a glass of wine. Tate agreed, and, once inside, Cosby handed her a drink. The next thing Tate remembers is waking up next to a naked Cosby in bed. She doesn’t remember how she got home. She came forward in April 2015. “I understood at the time that it was wrong, and I didn’t really know what. I pushed it down and it resided in a very private place. It affects your trust with other people. You push it down and you don’t deal with it.” « Back to Article

× Name: Linda Brown Age: 67 Occupation: former model Alleged Assault: 1969 Cosby went out with a 21-year-old Brown after Brown’s modeling agent arranged it. Brown saw Cosby perform, and they went to dinner afterward. Cosby said he would take Brown home, but before he dropped her off, he said he needed to make a short detour to his hotel room because he had a gift for her. At the hotel room, he handed her a record and a soda, asking if she’d wait while he made a phone call. She took a sip of the soda and blacked out. She woke up in bed, naked, where she says Cosby began to sexually assault her. She came forward in February 2015. “ I felt like a real-life blow-up doll for him. I kept it a secret because I was so ashamed and embarrassed about allowing something this horrible to happen to me. Originally I thought I was the only one to fall into that trap. When I realized that not only wasn’t I the only one, but he did this to many, many women, I felt the need to come forward and help report them because there is strength in numbers.” « Back to Article

× Name: Kaya Thompson Age: Occupation: former writer Alleged Assault: late 1980s 17-year-old Thompson was an aspiring model who came to New York City from Maryland to connect with an agency. Within an hour of arriving at the agency, she was sent to Kaufman Astoria Studios to meet with Cosby on the set of The Cosby Show. Cosby offered to mentor her, and he spoke to her parents, assuring them that he’d guide Thompson as she built her modeling career. “I looked at him as a father figure,” she says. However, uneasiness began to creep into Thompson’s relationship with Cosby, she says. She tried to break off contact with the comedian, but in her last confrontation with him, Cosby forced himself on her. She came forward publicly in March 2015, although she had been a Jane Doe in the Andrea Constand lawsuit. “He knew I was pretty much broken down. He pointed to a bottle of Lubriderm and told me to get it. I gave him a hand job. I went to leave, and, completely unsolicited, he gave me $700.” « Back to Article

× Name: Tamara Green Occupation: attorney Alleged Assault: early 1970s Green met Cosby through a mutual friend in Los Angeles. Cosby asked Green, an aspiring singer and model at the time, to help him raise money for a new club the comedian wanted to open. One day, Green didn’t feel well, and she phoned Cosby to tell him she couldn’t help him. Cosby convinced her to grab lunch at Café Figaro, telling Green she’d feel better after she ate. At the restaurant, he offered Green red and gray pills. He told her that they were over-the-counter cold medicine. Green swallowed the pills. Soon after, she began to feel dizzy, and the two left the restaurant together. Cosby drove Green to her apartment where he undressed himself and began to undress her. He began rubbing her body. He masturbated while assaulting her through digital penetration. Green struggled, saying repeatedly, “You’re going to have to kill me.” Cosby put two $100 bills on the coffee table before he left Green’s apartment. Green came forward in 2005, and signed onto Andrea Constand’s lawsuit, not as a Jane Doe, but in her own name. She was the second woman to publicly come forward. “From the first day until this day, I have told everyone who would sit still long enough. If it comes up at all — last year, I sold a truck to a fella, and I remember sitting in the cab of the truck telling the story, and him looking at me like I had two heads.” « Back to Article

This project began six months ago, when we started contacting the then-30 women who had publicly claimed Cosby assaulted them, and it snowballed in the same way that the initial accusations did: First two women signed on, then others heard about it and joined in, and so on. Just a few days before the story was published, we photographed the final two women, bringing our total to 35. “I’m no longer afraid,” said Chelan Lasha, who came forward late last year to say that Cosby had drugged her when she was 17. “I feel more powerful than him.”

Accompanying this photo essay is a compilation of the interviews with these women, a record of trauma and survival — the memories that remain of the decades-old incidents. All 35 were interviewed separately, and yet their stories have remarkable similarities, in everything from their descriptions of the incidents to the way they felt in the aftermath. Each story is awful in its own right. But the horror is multiplied by the sheer volume of seeing them together, reading them together, considering their shared experience. The women have found solace in their number — discovering that they hadn’t been alone, that there were others out there who believed them implicitly, with whom they didn’t need to be afraid of sharing the darkest details of their lives. They are scattered all over the country — ten different states are represented — and most of them had no contact with their fellow accusers until recently. But since reading about each other’s stories in the news, or finding one another on social media, or meeting in person at the photo shoots arranged by New York, many of the women have forged a bond. It is, as Tarshis calls it, “a sorrowful sisterhood.” ■

Testimony

The Incidents

“My agent said we’ve been contacted by a really, really big person in the entertainment industry who’s interested in mentoring promising young talent. I find out it’s Bill Cosby. I had the understanding I was going to be receiving private acting coaching from him. This was the opportunity of a lifetime. A driver would pick me up, my agent was paying for it. That made it all very, very professional. The door opens, and there stands Cosby. He’s in his sweats and very casual, very friendly. I had a monologue prepared. He seemed unimpressed. He said, ‘Let’s try a cold read,’ so he pulls out a script. The scene was set in a bar; the character was someone who was inebriated. He poured a glass of white wine. And he said, use this as a prop — now, that means you’re going to have to sip on it, of course. I really don’t remember much, except waking up in his bedroom. He was naked, and he was forcing himself into my mouth.” —Heidi Thomas