In a nearly empty Philadelphia courthouse in June 2015, a lawyer for Bill Cosby implored a federal judge to keep the comedian’s testimony in an old sexual assault lawsuit secret. It was sensitive. Embarrassing. Private.
Federal District Judge Eduardo Robreno had another word to say it.
The conduct that Cosby detailed in his statement was “perhaps criminal,” Robreno wrote five years ago on Monday, in a momentous decision that disclosed the case files to the Associated Press, reopened the police investigation and helped lead to the #MeToo movement. .
Cosby, the Hollywood model for black family values, was convicted of sexual assault in 2018 when the movement exploded and women around the world shared personal stories of sexual harassment and abuse. He is serving up to 10 years in prison.
And now, amid yet another landmark trial, this time addressing the treatment of black Americans and other people of color by the police and criminal justice system, 82-year-old Cosby has earned the right to an appeal .
He hopes to seize the moment to his advantage.
“Bill Cosby’s bogus conviction is much bigger than him: It’s about the destruction of ALL blacks and people of color in America,” Cosby spokesman Andrew Wyatt said when the court accepted the appeal late last month. .
Cosby, who grew up in public housing in Philadelphia, has a complicated relationship with the black community. He gained acclaim for his innovative (and intentionally blind) performances on television in the 1950s; they mixed, but rarely marched, with civil rights leaders and the black elite in the 1960s; and solidified his wealth and power with his starring role as “America’s Dad” on “The Cosby Show” in the 1980s.
All the while, he promoted education and gave millions to historically black universities.
But his increasingly jarring comments about poverty, parenthood, and personal responsibility offended younger blacks in his later years, most famous in his 2004 “Pound Cake” speech, which he gave just months after the sexual encounter that would demonstrate his downfall.
While touring the country, Cosby argued that “the antidote to racism is not protests, protests or pleas, but strong families and communities,” as essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates noted.
“Cosby’s gospel of discipline, moral reform, and self-sufficiency offers a way out: a promise that one does not need to cure America of its original sin to succeed,” Coates wrote in his 2008 Atlantic article, “This is How We Lost the White Man ‘: The Audacity of Bill Cosby’s Black Conservatism. “
The appeals issues the court accepted do not directly include racial bias, which Cosby’s legal team raised more frequently on the courtroom steps in Montgomery County than within the courtroom. Its advocates, however, say that race permeates the case.
The Cosby celebrity “does not change his status as a black man,” said appeals attorney Jennifer Bonjean, the latest of more than a dozen criminal attorneys in the case.
“It would be naive to assume that his prosecution was not tainted by the same racial bias that pervades the criminal justice process explicitly and insidiously,” he said last week.
Cosby’s wife of 56 years has been more forceful.
In an interview last month with ABC-TV, Camille Cosby said the #MeToo movement ignores “the story of particular white women” who have “accused black men of sexual assault without any evidence.”
“We know how women can lie,” said Camille Cosby, who only made brief appearances at her husband’s trials, on defense closing arguments, and did not visit him in jail. She declined to speak to the AP last week.
The appeal depends on two questions that have shaped the case from the start:
– Cosby had a fierce deal with Dist. Atty Bruce Castor that Cosby could never be charged after Castor declined to arrest Cosby in 2005? Defense attorneys say Cosby relied on such a promise when he released the 2006 statement later in prosecutor Andrea Constand’s lawsuit, and used it against him at trial.
Beaver accepts that they did. But it was never put in writing, and Castor’s chief delegate at the time, Risa Ferman, who helped conduct the initial investigation and reopened it in 2015 when he was a district attorney, seemed to not know it.
– How many other accusers should be able to testify before the scales of justice confront the accused?
Cosby’s trial judge allowed only one other accuser in the first trial when the jury came to a standstill, but five in the new trial a year later. The jury convicted Cosby on all three counts of sexual assault.
The state’s intermediate appeals court seemed unimpressed by either issue, rejecting Cosby’s first appeal.
“The reality is that he gives them drugs and then sexually attacks them,” Superior Court Judge John T. Bender said of the arguments. “That’s the pattern, isn’t it?”
But Cosby appealed again, setting the state Supreme Court arguments expected sometime next year.
Cosby’s attorney, Bonjean, believes the #MeToo movement is fading, and that Cosby, if she wins a new trial, could avoid what she called “the mafia standards of justice for a hashtag movement.”
Not long after meeting Constand in 2004, Cosby delivered the “Pound Cake” speech to the NAACP, referring to a scenario in which the black community complains when police shoot someone for a stolen piece of cake.
“Then we all ran away and were outraged: ‘The police shouldn’t have shot him.’ What the hell was he doing with the cake in his hand? Cosby asked.
A decade later, black comedian Hannibal Buress led Cosby to the task with his scolding.
“You rape women, Bill Cosby, so get the craziness down a couple of notches,” he said onstage in 2014.
Former prosecutor Kristen Gibbons Feden, who gave closing arguments in Cosby’s new trial, acknowledges the good that Cosby did for the black community. She also believes that there is a racial bias in the criminal justice system.
“It doesn’t make Cosby innocent,” said Feden, who is Black. “It means that we need to fix the criminal justice system.”
Wake Forest University dean Jonathan L. Walton, who teaches about African-American social movements, said Cosby certainly drove black representation in American culture. However, Walton said Cosby may not be the best messenger for today.
“One should agree with him regarding systemic racism and the injustices of the ‘justice system,'” said Walton, dean of the divinity school, “while also suspecting what appears to be his pattern. , only identifying problems when they personally benefit you. “
