Hannibal Buress calls out Bill Cosby’s history of rape allegations

Comedian Hannibal Buress says he’s been doing a bit calling Bill Cosby a rapist on and off for “about six months,” but it was his latest performance in Philadelphia that caught the attention of the media.

“It was unexpected,” Buress told Howard Stern about how the story blew up. “It wasn’t my intention to make it part of a big discussion.”

“It’s just information that’s out there,” Buress said of why he made these accusations. “I said it and I gotta stand on it, but it is an interesting situation.”

“Bill Cosby has the f—ing smuggest old black man public persona that I hate,” Buress said during his set. “He gets on TV, ‘Pull your pants up black people, I was on TV in the ‘80s. 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 don’t curse onstage.’ Well, yeah, you’re rapist, so I’ll take you saying lots of motherf—ers.”

The information that Buress is referencing is a 2006 case against the venerated entertainer by Andrea Constand, who claimed that he drugged and sexually assaulted her in his home in 2004. She filed a civil lawsuit against him claiming that he gave her three “herbal” pills he told her were for stress that sedated and made her unable to walk before sexually assaulting her. “Oh my, you must be more ill then we believed. I totally lost motor control; I was almost unable to hold my head up. I was very, very, very stoned,” she recalled. “He took me into my apartment and then very helpfully and nicely was prepared to take off my clothes and help me into bed and pet me, and that’s how the actual assault began.”

When he case came to light, thirteen people came out of the woodwork say they had also been drugged and/or assault by the comedian.

Cosby ended up settling Constand’s case, and as part of the settlement, she is unable to talk about what happened, but the other thirteen people were not legally bound not to tell their stories. Newsweek even spoke to one of the victims this past February, but oddly enough until this Hannibal Buress joke went viral, these allegations have not been in the public consciousness concerning Bill Cosby. Maybe no one really wanted to believe their favorite TV dad could be capable of such abusive acts.

Barbara Bowman, the woman who spoke to Newsweek, was a 17-year-old model when she first met Cosby, and he became a mentor to her. After she turned 18, however, the drugging and sexual assaults began. She said she felt pressured into many of the things he asked her to do because she thought she needed to do them to “make it.” After they got in a terrible fight and Bowman says Cosby tried to force himself on her, she says she was immediately dropped by her agent and frozen out of her career.