In the time since 74-year-old comedian Bill Cosby has been accused of multiple aggravated indecent assaults, few people have come to his defense. Wednesday morning, though, the NNPA Newswire published an essay by Cosby's daughter Evin Cosby, as Entertainment Weekly notes. In the piece, the 40-year-old defends her father, who experienced a public fall from grace in 2014 after various allegations of sexual assault made national news. Cosby alleges that the media's attitude toward her father has damaged her life and her family.
"The public persecution of my dad, my kids’ grandfather, and the cruelty of the media and those who speak out branding my father a 'rapist' without ever knowing the truth and who shame our family and our friends for defending my dad, makes all of this so much worse for my family and my children," Cosby writes.
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Cosby goes on to dismiss the various charges brought against her father in court. She mentions two in 2005 and "several" in 2015. According to a list published by Slate in 2015, there are 51 women in total who have accused Cosby of sexual assault. The incidents themselves span decades, from 1968 to about 2004. Comedian Hannibal Buress is often credited as a catalyst for the cascade of allegations that surfaced in 2014. A clip of the comedian saying that Cosby "rapes women" went viral that year, and more and more of Cosby's accusers began to reveal themselves to the press soon afterward. (More than half of the alleged victims made themselves known in the years following.)
Evin Cosby alleges that these cases are unsubstantiated. She writes, "Instead of going through the criminal justice system, these stories never got investigated and just got repeated. They have been accepted as the truth."
Her father rarely speaks on the matter. "I have been in this business 52 years and I've never seen anything like this. Reality is a situation and I can't speak," the comedian said on ABC's Nightline.
His daughter, one of five of Bill Cosby's children, explains in the essay that her father, contrary to current opinion, is a champion for women. "On The Cosby Show he only depicted women as smart and accomplished. On The Cosby Show and on A Different World, he took on then taboo subjects like menstrual cycles and rape, and even did a show on AIDS before anyone else would bring it up."
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She adds, "He loves and respects women. He is not abusive, violent or a rapist. Sure, like many celebrities tempted by opportunity, he had his affairs, but that was between him and my mother."
Cosby is set to go to trial in June of this year for the sexual assault of a women in Philadelphia in 2004. He faces 10 years in prison if convicted.
Read Evin Cosby's full essay for NNPA Newswire here.