Without Andrea Constand, none of this happens. Bill Cosby is still America's No. 1 dad, still beloved for giving us the Huxtables and Fat Albert, still embraced in too many corners of the country for telling young black men to pull up their pants, still selling out arena after arena.

It's all fallen apart now, swiftly and luridly, with woman after woman after woman—19 of them in all, for now—accusing Cosby of some sort of s*xual misconduct. There are plenty of momentsyou can point to as the precipitant, but every one of them can be traced back to a lawsuit filed by one woman—Constand. Then the director of operations for the women's basketball program at Temple University, Constand in 2005 did what no one else had done before: She put her name on paper in a public record and said that Cosby had drugged and raped her.