Bill Cosby, the Hollywood paragon of Black family values, was convicted of sexual assault in 2018 as the #MeToo movement exploded and women across the globe shared personal histories of sexual harassment and abuse. He is serving up to 10 years in prison.
In a nearly empty Philadelphia courtroom in June 2015, a lawyer for Bill Cosby implored a federal judge to keep the comedian’s testimony in an old sexual battery lawsuit under wraps. It was sensitive. Embarrassing. Private.
U. S. District Judge Eduardo Robreno had another word for it.
The conduct Cosby detailed in his deposition was “perhaps criminal,” Robreno wrote five years ago Monday, in a momentous decision that released the case files to The Associated Press, reopened the police investigation, and helped give rise to the #MeToo movement.
Cosby, the Hollywood paragon of Black family values, was convicted of sexual assault in 2018 as the movement exploded and women across the globe shared personal histories of sexual harassment and abuse. He is serving up to 10 years in prison.
And now in the midst of another historic reckoning — this time addressing the treatment of African Americans and other people of color by police and the criminal justice system — Cosby,82, has won the right to an appeal.
He hopes to use the moment to his advantage.
“The false conviction of Bill Cosby is so much bigger than him — it’s about the destruction of ALL Black people 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 earned acclaim for his groundbreaking (and intentionally race-blind) performances on television in the 1950s; mingled, but rarely marched, with civil rights leaders and the Black elite in the 1960s; and solidified his wealth and power with his star turn as “America’s Dad” on “The Cosby Show” in the 1980s.
All the while, he promoted education and gave millions of dollars to historically Black universities.
But his increasingly jarring comments on poverty, parenthood and personal responsibility offended younger Blacks in his later years, most famously in his 2004 “Pound Cake” speech — which he gave just months after the sexual encounter that would prove his downfall.
As he toured the country, Cosby argued that “the antidote to racism is not rallies, protests, or pleas, but strong families and communities,” as the essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates noted.
