The Quaalude Tablets

One question sits under this book: why a man convicted in 2018 of three counts of aggravated indecent assault is not in prison. The answer is procedural. In April 2018 a jury in Norristown, Pennsylvania, found Bill Cosby guilty of assaulting Andrea Constand. In 2021 the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned that conviction on a due-process ground related to a non-prosecution agreement made by an earlier prosecutor. Sixty different women have accused him. One case reached a verdict, and the verdict did not hold.

Elliot Cranmer opens earlier, in the Philadelphia childhood and the early-1960s Greenwich Village clubs, and follows the arc from there. William Henry Cosby Jr., born July 12, 1937, the eldest son of a Navy steward and a domestic worker, served in the Navy, took a track-and-field scholarship to Temple, and dropped out in 1962 for the clubs. The 1965 I Spy casting made him the first Black lead actor in an hour-long network drama. Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids came to CBS in 1972. A 1976 concept that failed became, eight years later, The Cosby Show, the show that saved NBC and made Cosby, for its entire eight-year run, the most-watched man in America.

The rest is the record: the 1969 marriage to Camille Hanks, the Pound Cake speech of 2004, the long accumulation of accusations, the Constand civil and criminal cases, the 2015 release of the deposition, the Norristown trial, the conviction, the overturning, and the late-life chronicle of accusations the criminal system has been unable to prosecute.

What Cranmer sets down is both things at once: the most popular Black entertainer in American television history, and a serial sexual predator whose criminal liability the statute of limitations and the post-conviction appellate process have, between them, kept inside a single courtroom.