As if the poor man hasn’t suffered enough, with all these women who keep coming forward with allegations of rape and sexual assault dating back decades and now court documents being unsealed in which he admits to obtaining drugs to use on women “he wanted to have sex with”, Bill Cosby now undergoes the humiliation of having his likeness removed from the Walt Disney World Hall of Fame Plaza. The bronze bust of the comedian, entertainer and alleged multiple rapist will have gone by the time you read this.
With this event, Cosby enters something of a hall of infamy in which decommissioned statuary stands – or rather does not stand – in mute testimony to the strength of feeling occasioned by revelations alleged and actual about once-hallowed figures.
There are a lot of Lenins in there, many of them pulled down during the Euromaidan – a wave of pre-revolution unrest in Ukraine – two years ago, the rest cast away by various groups and countries no longer as keen to celebrate the man responsible for the deaths of millions as they once were. Ditto, apart from the Euromaidan bit, Stalin.
They are joined by fellow dictator and mass murderer Saddam Hussein’s assorted pieces of iconography, including the famous statue in Firdos Square that was sledgehammered by a local wrestler then pulled down by a US ARV, marking the end of the battle of Baghdad in 2003.
Closer to home, a statue of Michael Jackson commissioned by Mohammed Al Fayed and placed outside Craven Cottage, the home of Fulham football club (then owned by Fayed) in 2011 was removed as soon as the new owner, Shahid Khan, took over last year, though this seems to have been motivated as much by Jackson’s lack of relevance to football as by the rumours of his sexual interest in children that swirled around him for years before his death in 2009.
The statue of Joe Paterno, Penn State’s “winningest” football coach, was melted down after his alleged involvement (later rebutted in a 2013 report) in covering up the child abuse perpetrated on a grand scale by his assistant coach Jerry Sandusky came to light.
Jimmy Savile’s non-monument in the hall of infamy comprises his gravestone (pulverised at the request of his family to avoid distressing visitors to the cemetery in which the unrepentant predator is buried), a wooden bust at the children’s swimming pool in the Scotstoun sports complex in Glasgow, the plaque on his former house in Scarborough, and innumerable others quietly removed from the children’s wards, mental hospitals and other buildings where he was inexplicably allowed to roam.
What a legacy.
- This article was amended on 9 July 2015 to add a reference to the 2013 report defending Joe Paterno’s actions in the Sandusky scandal.
