Tragedy in the House of Cosby

Bill Cosby has four daughters. I’ve thought of them often since the Cosby allegations began flooding in less than a year ago. They are all four elegant, educated women who have remained mostly silent during the hurricane that has been visited on them. Cosby’s youngest daughter is the only voice of support we have heard and this was prior to the most recent revelations which were contained in a leaked deposition. There are a lot of victims of Cosby’s frightening ego and monstrous behavior, and among them, inevitably, are his daughters.

Consider what it must have been like to grow up in the household of a man who thinks of women as objects (at best). Consider the way young children pick up on cues to which adults remain willfully blind. Children see a glance, a moment, a small gesture, they hear a conversation that no one realized they heard, and it makes them uncomfortable, even horrified, but they say nothing. They hear rumors and get a lump in their throats but loudly defend their dear father when it comes to it. They are not hungry for lunch anymore after hearing the cruel whispers. They cry alone in their beds, a storm of conflicting feelings ripping them to shreds from the inside.

All children experience some form of deep anguish during their childhoods, but not many have an idol for a dad. He’s heroic. He’s infallible. And the world over he is loved. If his daughters felt uneasy about their father’s behavior at times, they knew that the fault must lie with THEM, not their father. How could HE be at fault? Here are the seeds of self-hatred, planted by dear ole dad.

In a light, playful interview Cosby’s youngest daughter gave years ago about her fashion business, she said, “When I told my dad I wanted to go to FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology), he said I would graduate by folding napkins.” Then, it notes, she laughs. This is exactly the kind of invalidation I would expect of Cosby. His daughter laughs, because laughing is an outstanding coping mechanism for cruelty, yet it doesn’t undo the damage. This flip statement is a perfect example of a rich, influential, beloved man using his power to destroy the confidence of someone who looks up to him and thereby keep her subordinated to himself. It’s not, in the slightest, funny. And it perfectly lines up with his more extreme behavior with the young women outside of his family.

When his second oldest daughter went through a typically rebellious phase in adolescence, papa Cosby reacted with “tough love.” Cosby was not going to tolerate any drug taking in his family — though he didn’t mind buying drugs and passing them out to other young women (to put the most generous possible spin on it). She later commented on all the pain that she had caused her father. No sign she noticed all the pain he had caused her.

I have no inside knowledge of the Cosby household. I know only what I have learned online about his daughters — which is almost nothing. They are very private. But I have also lived long enough to know and understand men like Cosby, men of a certain generation, men who live a deep split between how they are perceived and who they are with their families, men who are fundamentally, if not physically, violent.

I support the silence of Cosby’s daughters, since, whether they defend or denigrate their father publicly, it can only bring them more grief. And I offer my sincere condolences, because the war that must be raging among them and within them each individually is the kind of war which no one survives. Some will defend dad no matter what is revealed, because that is how dad has trained them: that they are mere extensions of him. One or two will say, “I always knew who he was.” And that daughter will be ostracized. But no one will live through this plague introduced by America’s dad. “All are punished,” says the Prince in Romeo and Juliet. Perpetrator and victims alike, all are punished.