Hanibal Buress. No, I hadn’t heard of him until he re-ignited allegations that Bill Cosby had raped a number of women at the height of his powers. Buress chose to rekindle the controversy not in an opinion piece or on a Sunday morning TV show. He used a stand-up routine. You can view the routine if you google his name. I’m not offering a direct link as most of the sites wrap it in  reams of comments that try to ‘balance’ out the content.

The important thing I heard was the nervous laughter from the audience. It was loud but it was forced. It was an ‘Oh god, do I really want to hear this? Maybe if I laugh loudly, he will stop’ kind of laugh.

The reality is we do need to hear it. The tragedy is that it took a male comedian three or four minutes to say what has been alleged by numerous women for the last twenty odd years and the world finally takes notice.

When Andrea Constand took a civil suit against Cosby, 13 other women were to testify that the comedian had raped them. Ultimately, Constand agreed to an ‘out of court' with Cosby, who was then at the height of his career.

In total 15 women have made allegations toward Cosby. None have received much media traction until Buress unleashed his machine-gun like monologue. It was only after that that media outlets have lifted the rock that is the Cosby allegations to see what is under it.

Perhaps it is irresponsible for a journalist to refer to anonymous allegations of criminal activity. Even then we are left with six accusations of sexual assault: Tamara Green says that Cosby drugged and groped her in 1970. Beth Ferrier says that Cosby drugged and raped her in 1984. Barbara Bowman says that Cosby drugged and raped her "multiple times" when she was 17 in 1985. Andrea Constand says that Cosby drugged and raped her in 2004. And today, supermodel Janice Dickinson says Cosby drugged and raped her in 1982. Taken together the public accusations span some 30 years and are remarkably similar in their detail.

So what has Cosby got to say? NPR had an excruciating few minutes when the star just shook his head and kept silent during a radio interview where he was confronted about the claims.

On this side of the Atlantic, we have seen far too many ‘saintly’ men weave the ideal ‘life’ as a cover for their actions. The comedian’s use of his ‘fictional’ family life may was revolutionary in the way race was re-imagined in America and that is to be applauded. But if it was just a tissue of lies and the real Cosby was the one described by the group of women whose voices have been ‘politely’ ignored, that advancement loses some if not all of its positivity.

Cosby would want us to see Hanibal Buress as, to paraphrase Bob Dylan in Hurricane, ‘a crazy black man’. If his allegations, along with the 15 women, are true, then Buress should be seen as doing society a very important piece of public service, unwittingly or not. Cosby seemed to think his fame equalled power. His power seemed to make some media outlets slow to follow up on the allegations made by these brave women. America’s dad did not want anything that would take away from that. The women did not matter.

That may be the second wave of abuse the victims are going through.