Comedian Bill Cosby’s ploy to get good publicity by inviting Twitter users to meme him backfired when people started superimposing his criminal accusations of raping women on top of his photo.
“The Cosby Show” star posted a photo of himself on Twitter Monday afternoon writing “Go ahead. Meme me.” What was supposed to be a lighthearted back and forth between Cosby and fans quickly took a turn.
Using the meme generator on his website, people quickly began meming pictures of Cosby with phrases like “My two favorite things, jello pudding and rape,” “Define drugged?” and “Claire, have you found my… never mind I found my raping hat.”
Though Cosby’s rape allegations stem back to nearly 20 years ago, they somehow managed to largely stay under wraps until last month when stand-up comic Hannibal Buress went on a diatribe about how despicable Cosby was, calling him a“rapist” during a stage set in Philadelphia. This coupled with the fact that NBC was reportedly considering a sitcom based on Cosby’s life were enough to bring this dark part of the actor’s past to light.
User @matthewbramlett took a more intellectual route, meming the star with the words “rape culture is a concept that examines a culture in which rape is pervasive and normalized due to societal attitudes about gender and sexuality. Examples of behaviors commonly associated with rape culture include victim blaming, sexual objectification, trivializing rape, denial of widespread rape or refusing to acknowledge the harm of certain forms of sexual violence that do not conform to stereotypes of stranger or violent rape.” He captioned the meme saying “this is fun!”
In order to get the meme’s back on track, a few hours later the word “rape” was removed from the generator’s options, along with “rapist” and “sex.”
Even that did not save Cosby from the Twitter onslaught, if anything it added fuel to the fire as users found more creative ways to get out their message.
@hendrik_busse memed a picture of the 77-year-old saying “this is turning out grap e. I mean rap e. I mean great. Phew.”
The entire generator and initial tweet from Cosby were eventually taken down.
