Bill Cosby Fires Back At Critics In Exclusive Post-Prison Interview
In the first extensive interview after his prison release, Bill Cosby implored his detractors to read the seven-page Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling that overturned his conviction in an effort to avoid having “mainstream media dictate falsehoods.”
He said in an interview posted Wednesday (July 7) at Black Press of America that he believes the ruling serves as vindication against all the accusations of sexual assault against him. The ruling, however, does not address vindication, reports say.
“There’s a big smile on my face,” Cosby told the news outlet. “A big smile on my face because I was there.”
Cosby, 83, claims no one wanted to believe in his innocence.
“You’re sitting in a room trying to explain something, and there is a knock on the door,” he told Black Press, trying to use humor to illustrate his point. “You say, ‘who is it?’ [The response is], ‘It is the truth.’ So, people start jumping out of the window.”
According to Penn Live, the Supreme Court overturned the conviction on a legal technicality but did not vindicate Cosby from guilt. Cosby was released because a prosecutor’s office violated its previous agreement not to “file charges when Cosby gave incriminating testimony in a civil case filed by Andrea Constand, whom he was charged with drugging and violating at his Philadelphia-area home in 2004,” the report says. So his civil suit testimony should not have been used in his criminal trial.
Cosby, however, disagrees. “The court’s decision was not a technicality,” he said. “These people sound like they haven’t read what the judges have written. It’s not a technicality. These [detractors] don’t want to know anything. It’s like the woman who said she knows five women that I drugged and raped. Well, where are they?”
Cosby served more than two years of a three-to-10-year sentence at Philadelphia-area state prison. Previously, Cosby vowed to serve all 10 years rather than acknowledge remorse over the 2004 encounter with Constand. In late 2015, he was charged when a prosecutor presented newly unsealed evidence.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court said that testimony tainted the trial, even though a lower appeals court had found it appropriate to show a signature pattern of drugging and molesting women. He was released on June 30.
Read the full interview here.
