IT happened a couple of weeks ago when I got a Skype message from a woman I had met in America while doing research on a book about rescuing animals during Hurricane Katrina.
It came out of the blue and she asked whether I was interested in a business project.
When you say that to someone who’s squandered life savings on emigrating and has two exuberant brats at university, you’re guaranteed to get their attention.
Anyway, the short version is that I was asked whether I had heard of Bill Cosby.
Bill Cosby? TV’s Dr Cliff Huxtable in the superb Cosby Show on a beautiful black family that was ironically watched more by white South Africans in the apartheid era than almost anything else?
Yes.
Did I know that Bill Cosby was also under a serious scrutiny at the moment with more and more women coming forward and claiming he’s a serial rapist?
That too I did know. It’s in every newspaper. But what had this to do with me?
Well, would I be interested in doing a book on this? Two of Cosby’s alleged victims were interested in speaking to me
What? Me? A guy from the sticks in the southern hemisphere being called over to write on probably one of the biggest celeb scandal stories of the year, if not the decade?
Okayyy …
Cosby, I hasten to say, has strenuously denied any wrongdoing and said everything was consensual.
Drug tricks
But he has admitted to giving women Quaaludes (Mandrax to you and me), which were legal drugs at the time, to get them into bed.
To put this in a modern context, according to the BBC the drug now most commonly cited in rape cases, Rohypnol is often referred to as latter-day Quaaludes.
It has many of the same effects; it’s quick to work, erases memory and is a muscle relaxant.
And Cosby has admitted in a legal deposition that he bought Quaaludes by the score and fed them to women he planned to seduce.
Those women, some of whom took 40 years to come forward as they thought no one would believe them if they spoke out about TV’s favourite dad, are now saying they want justice.
Cosby may be innocent, but he’s not going to face these accusations in a criminal court. The American statute of limitations decrees that most charges against him are too old.
So as Cosby’s accusers have no other recourse, they have gone public, as America has a vastly different legal system to ours.
There is a TV programme called Dateline which is going on air next week that is, by all accounts, going to blow the lid sky high.
I was in New York last week and the pace at which this scandal is moving has now gone supersonic.
I have, at best, only a few months to pull it all together as we want to be among the first on the street.
As mentioned earlier, the number of women who claim to have been abused by Cosby is growing by the day.
Even President Obama has said that use of drugs as a seduction tool is rape – an obvious reference to Cosby, and it has been seized upon by the media.
Which is a roundabout way of telling loyal reader(s) that this column will go into hiatus for a while while I bang out words around the clock on the latest … er, Cosby show.
So it’s time to temporarily move on. I have been doing this column in one form or another (anyone still remember Monday BlueZ?) for about 18 years now.
Thank you all for your magnificent support.
