Thirty complainants constitutes a pretty strong pattern.
Particularly if they are geographically separated and have not consulted.
Particularly if methods coincide between cases.
One accuser is "he said, she said", 30 is corroborative evidence.
Yea, occam's razor.
Even a truthful accusation is pretty unlikely, given women don't usually want to speak up about things like this. A false accusation much more unlikely.
The odds of 30 women all making false accusations is pretty much nil. The only explanation is that Cosby did exactly what he's being accused of.
I think its highly likely that Cosby is guilty, but law must be based on general principles, not what makes sense for specific cases.
The first accusations were made many years ago and people heard about them. That makes any accusation after that, non-independent. Subsequent accusations have more potential benefit and less risk than the first one, thus the odds of another false accusations increases with each one.
Financial payout is enough motive for some people to do absolutely anything, including kill a person. So, it is more than enough for a person to make themselves look victimized (something people increasingly like doing for free). This is especially true with a famous person who may be willing to secretly pay extortion with no need to go public with the accusation. Then once the person refuses, you have already made up the lie and accused them privately, which makes it easier to go public with it and go after them through the courts.
Suppose Cosby gave and took drugs during consensual sex with a woman. Then, she tried to extort him, he refused, she went public, others heard about it, and saw what they thought would be an easy payday precisely because they thought people would share your assumption that "more than one = guilty".
This is even more likely, if Cosby did actually have consensual drug-involved sex with these women, and a false accusation just requires altering one "minor" but critical fact of whether they knew they were being given drugs. When a lie is 99% truth, it is easy to tell, and that 1% makes all the difference in whether it was rape.
I think he's guilty and don't want him to go free, but much more than that, I don't want our legal system to be undermined by the invalid idea that 30 unsupported and not actually independent accusations are somehow given sufficient support by their mere co-existence. If each accusation had its own unique evidence supporting guilt, but not beyond a reasonable doubt, then their collective partial support could be enough to support a conclusion beyond doubt of guilt in some of the cases. That would make it analogous to scientific evidence where each study has some evidence that is partially flawed, but collectively their is no plausibly alternative account for all of it.
But accusations are not evidence for themselves or for other accusations, especially when the existence of one accusation makes other accusations more probable.
