Bill Cosby‘s wife Camille has spoken out against the #MeToo movement in her first interview in six years.
She told ABC News that she is “very, very pleased” that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court agreed on Tuesday to review two aspects of her husband’s case, including the judge’s decision to let prosecutors call the other accusers to testify about long-ago encounters with the actor and comedian.
Cosby, 82, has been imprisoned in suburban Philadelphia for nearly two years after a jury convicted him of drugging and sexually assaulting a woman at his home in 2004. He’s serving a three- to 10-year sentence.
“The state’s highest court … has said, ‘Wait a minute. There are some problems here. They can be considered for an appeal,’” she told ABC News Prime anchor Linsey Davis in a telephone interview. “I’m very, very pleased.”
The court will also consider, as it weighs the scope of the evidence allowed, whether the jury should have heard Cosby’s own deposition testimony about getting Quaaludes to give women in the past.
Secondly, the court will examine Cosby’s argument that he had an agreement with a former prosecutor that he would never be charged in the case. Cosby has said he relied on the alleged promise before agreeing to give the deposition in trial accuser Andrea Constand’s lawsuit.
Cosby, in the deposition, acknowledged a string of extramarital relationships. He called them consensual, but many of the women say they were drugged and molested.
Camille lashed out at the #MeToo movement and suggested it has “an intentional ignorance pertaining to the history of particular white women.”
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“First of all, I don’t care what they feel,” she said.
“The #MeToo movement and movements like them have intentional ignorance pertaining to the history of particular white women — not all white women — but particular white women, who have from the very beginning, pertaining to the enslavement of African people, accused Black males of sexual assault without any proof whatsoever, no proof, anywhere on the face of the earth.”
She continued: “And by ignoring that history, they have put out a lie in itself and that is, ‘Because I’m female, I’m telling the truth.’ Well, history disproves that as well, and gender has never, ever equated with truth. So, they need to clean up their acts. And it’s all of us as women who have not participated anything nefarious — we know how women can lie. We know how they can do the same things that men do — that some men do — because there are good men and bad men. There are good women and bad women.”
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Camille said her husband’s treatment was similar to the accusations that sparked the massacre of hundreds of Black Americans in Tulsa, Okla., in 1921 and defended her previous comparison of Cosby’s conviction to the lynching of Emmett Till.
“The parallel is that the same age-old thing about particular white women making accusations against Black men that are unproven — Emmett Till’s outcome, to mutilate his body in the way that it was, was just really so deeply horrendous,” she said.
“I mean — there’s a lack of words for that kind of hatefulness. But see, years ago, I interviewed the survivors from the Tulsa, Okla., riots in 1921. And that was another case of a wife female making a claim of sexual assault claim against a Black male, which we all know if we know about the Tulsa, Okla., riots. It gave licence to mobs of white people converging on a very independent — economically independent, educationally independent — Black community, named Greenwood and Topher, and hundreds of people were killed,” Camille said.
“So you boil this all down to racism?” Davis asked Camille. “You feel that if your husband were not a Black man that these accusations would not have been made and he would not be in prison?”
“I don’t know that,” Camille said, “because some white men have … there are some who have been sent to prison. But … it’s not the same situation as the history (of) a particular white women with Black men.
“We’ve seen them hanging from trees once they make those accusations,” she said of the men. “We’ve seen them being incarcerated … those accusations are made and — once again — unproven. Unproven.”
Camille said she talks to her husband every day but does not visit him in prison.
“In terms of visiting him, no, I do not want to see my husband in that kind of an environment — and he doesn’t want me to see him in that kind of environment,” she said. “So we are in sync with that, but I speak to him every single day.”
She also said she is “very concerned” about the current Black Lives Matter and anti-police brutality protests and that she wishes people were more “focused.”
“But they have to be focused,” she insisted. “And I’m very concerned about so many young people with nanosecond attention spans. They cannot be just jumping around from the movement to another.
“You have to stick with a movement and with a goal of the movement,” she said, “and the others with their agendas have their own movements to move forward but not to weaken a strong movement like this.”
— With files from the Associated Press
If you or someone you know is experiencing abuse or is involved in an abusive situation, please visit the Canadian Resource Centre for Victims of Crime for help. They are also reachable toll-free at 1-877-232-2610.
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