In her first public statement since her husband Bill Cosby was convicted of sexual assault, Camille Cosby has slammed the guilty verdict as “mob justice.†“The overall media, with their frenzied, relentless demonization of him and unquestioning acceptance of accusers’ allegations without any attendant proof, have superseded the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, which guarantee due process and equal protection, and thereby eliminated the possibility of a fair trial and unbiased jury,†she said. “Bill Cosby was labelled as guilty because the media and accusers said so … period.â€
Camille also invoked Emmett Till — the 14-year-old African-American boy who was lynched in 1955 after a white woman falsely accused him of flirting with her — before writing that “unproven accusations evolved into lynch mobs†against her husband. (Bill Cosby’s publicist also compared her client to Till last week shortly after the verdict came through.) Camille’s full statement is available at Deadline.
Camille, 74, and Bill, 80, have been married since 1964. She has long defended her husband against his multitude of accusers, previously arguing that he is the actual victim and that the encounters were consensual. Sixty-two women in total have brought forth allegations of being assaulted, drugged, and raped by him — you can read 35 of their stories here.
The first criminal trial for his 2004 sexual assault of Andrea Constand ended in a hung jury in 2017; his recent retrial found him guilty of all three counts of indecent aggravated assault.