Vox Sentences: Bill Cosby charged with a sexual assault prosecutors knew about 11 years ago

Bill Cosby is charged in a 2004 assault; Puerto Rico is about to miss more debt payments; and the US considers new sanctions against Iran.

Vox Sentences will be off tomorrow and Friday for New Year's. See you in 2016!

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Bill Cosby's day in court

Handout/Getty Images

• Bill Cosby has been charged with sexual assault by Pennsylvania prosecutors. The charges stem from a 2004 incident involving a basketball manager at Temple University, believed to be Andrea Constand.

  [NY Mag / Dee Lockett]

• The charges are happening now — 11 years after the incident — not because new information just came out; rather, the charges are based on evidence prosecutors had all along, but didn't think was strong enough to build a case on. Then the evidence became public last year, causing a new round of scrutiny.

  [BuzzFeed News / Nicolas Medina Mora]

• Of course, having dragged their feet for so long didn't stop the Pennsylvania prosecutors from getting a photo-op out of Cosby's "perp walk" — which is one reason why I (Dara) agree with this 2011 column by Gene Healy that perp walks are gross even when the schadenfreude is understandable.

  [Reason / Gene Healy]

• As Diana Moskovitz points out for Deadspin, broader social attitudes about the credibility of rape accusers have changed substantially since 2004.

  [Deadspin / Diana Moskovitz]

• Cosby didn't cause this shift. But it's certainly affected him. As the several women who'd accused him of assault got renewed attention in recent years, new accusers came forward as well.

  [Vox / German Lopez, Jenée Desmond-Harris and Todd VanDerWerff]

• The total number of accusers is now somewhere around 60. 35 of them spoke to New York magazine this summer.

  [NYMag / Noreen Malone and Amanda Demme]

• The result: one of the biggest reputational collapses of the century. Bill Cosby was once America's Dad. He is now, as the New York Daily News writes (in an editorial that you should really read all the way through), "America's Predatory Step Uncle."

  [New York Daily News]

• Cosby's fall is particularly ironic given that he'd spent the last decades of his career as a "pull up your pants" racial moralist — a juxtaposition that Adam Serwer made earlier this year, by annotating Cosby's famously controversial "Pound Cake" speech based on what we've learned about his private life since then.

  [BuzzFeed News / Adam Serwer]

Puerto Rico in debt trouble again

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

• Puerto Rico is about to default on another set of debt payments, totaling about $37 million.

  [The Hill / Vicki Needham]

• The Puerto Rican government will be paying interest on its direct debt on time. But as Treasury Secretary Jack Lew put it this week, Puerto Rico is basically in default already. It's already shifting money between creditors, and taking money out of pension funds to pay its debts.

  [The Guardian / Dominic Rushe]

• Puerto Rico has been teetering on default for the last six months. But its debt crisis has been foreseeable for several years — even though it kept getting more money lent to it thanks to a loophole in US bond policy.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• Both parties in Congress have proposed bills that would give Puerto Rico some debt assistance. But they can't agree on a single proposal, and debt relief got left out of the spending bill passed in December.

  [Mother Jones / AJ Vicens]

• Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has promised to take up Puerto Rican debt relief in the first quarter of 2016, so there might be a solution before the island misses its next set of debt payments on May 1.

  [The Hill / Peter Schroeder]

A bad week for US-Iran relations

Cristina Young/U.S. Navy via Getty Images

• The federal government is planning to issue a new round of economic sanctions to companies and individuals allegedly involved in developing Iran's ballistic missile program.

  [Wall Street Journal / Jay Solomon]

• This is a response to two ballistic-missile tests Iran performed this fall, debuting a kind of long-range missile they hadn't used before.

  [CNN]

• Iran's government might treat the new sanctions as a violation of the nuclear deal it approved earlier thie year. At the time, Iran said that the deal would be nullified if any future sanctions were imposed on Iran.

  [CNN]

• Then again, Iran also believed that the bill passed by Congress earlier this month, restricting visa-free travel to the US by Iranian nationals, was a violation of the nuclear deal, and the deal as a whole still stands.

  [The Hill / Julian Hattam]

• The US is also mad with Iran for an incident Saturday in which an Iranian ship fired unguided rockets within 1,500 yards of an American aircraft carrier — a ship which, the US says, wasn't in Iranian waters at the time.

  [NBC News / Jm Miklaszewski, Courtney Kube, Ali Arouzi and Alastair Jamieson]

MISCELLANEOUS

The gay torch song singer Vadim Kozin was one of the most famous musicians of the 1930s in the Soviet Union. Then the NKVD came for him. [BBC Magazine / Monica Whitlock]

• California hasn't executed anyone since 2006. But one county there was responsible for one in six death sentences handed down in the US in 2015. Why?

  [BBC / Vanessa Barford]

• At least six prominent Bangladeshi atheists have been murdered by Islamists in the past few years — and those who haven't been killed are living in constant fear.

  [New Yorker / Samanth Subramanian]

• This 2012 profile of Ted Cruz — the "tea party wonderboy" who could "turn the Senate upside down" — has aged very, very well.

  [Mother Jones / Tim Murphy]

• What if huge ongoing pain and deprivation — from chronic pain, or depression, or abuse, or addiction, or imprisonment — isn't an aberration, but something most people endure in some way or another?

  [Slate Star Codex / Scott Alexander]

VERBATIM

"The first rule of the cookie factory: Don't think about anything, ever." [Pacific Standard / Erin Griffith]

• "Not long after graduation, she married a man she’d just met because, as she later put it, she 'couldn’t afford a car and he had one.'"

  [NY Mag / Kim Brooks]

• "China has a lot of orphanages for children. But the Ji Xiang temple has an entirely different purpose - it's an orphanage for the elderly."

  [BBC / Celia Hatton]

• "Plants, insects, tiny bugs under the sink, bacteria, day after day, accomplish things that no scientist anywhere in the world knows how to do."

  [Manu Prakash to New Yorker / Carolyn Kormann]

• "It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that the Internet is a technology that was created specifically to trade Grateful Dead shows."

  [Pacific Standard / Scott Beauchamp]

WATCH THIS

2015 in 4 minutes [YouTube / Estelle Caswell and Liz Scheltens]

Alex Wong/Getty Images and Vox / Estelle Caswell and Liz Scheltens