Phylicia Rashad Is Thrilled That Bill Cosby’s Been Released From Prison
Phylicia Rashad has issued a followup statement after celebrating the release of Bill Cosby. Without mentioning Cosby by name, Rashad tweeted, “I fully support survivors of sexual assault coming forward. My post was in no way intended to be insensitive to their truth. Personally, I know from friends and family that such abuse has lifelong residual effects. My heartfelt wish is for healing.” Her initial tweet celebrating Cosby’s release has not been deleted as of this time.
Howard University has issued an official statement regarding Rashad’s tweets. It reads:
“Survivors of sexual assault will always be our priority. While Dean Rashad has acknowledged in her follow-up tweet that victims must be heard and believed, her initial tweet lacked sensitivity towards survivors of sexual assault. Personal positions of University leadership do not reflect Howard University’s policies. We will continue to advocate for survivors fully and support their right to be heard. Howard will stand with survivors and challenge systems that would deny them justice. We have full confidence that our faculty and school leadership will live up to this sacred commitment.”
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Phylicia Rashad, heralded stage and television actor and dean of Howard University’s fine arts college, is celebrating the release of her former boss and TV husband, Bill Cosby.
Cosby, who was convicted in 2018 of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand at his home in 2004, had his conviction overturned by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Wednesday. The court found that a previous prosecutor’s agreement with Cosby prevented him from facing charges for assaulting Constand. The overturning of the conviction is not a decision about whether Cosby did or did not assault Constand and others—it’s an acknowledgement of a prosecutor’s previous promise not to prosecute him.
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Former federal prosecutor Neama Rahman told the Daily Beast that a decision like this is “extremely rare.” And it seems that by any reasonable appraisal, it’s a technicality. But Rashad’s tweet—“FINALLY!!!! A terrible wrong is being righted- a miscarriage of justice is corrected!”—when examined alongside previous statements in which Rashad defended her costar against the allegations, seems to imply she now believes that Cosby has suddenly been cleared of wrongdoing.
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In a 2015 interview with ABC, Rashad claimed that the accusations against Cosby—from more than 60 women to date, some of whom were allowed to testify in court against him in 2018 in order to demonstrate a pattern of assault—were “not about the women,” but about “the obliteration” of Cosby’s legacy. In a 2020 interview with Bustle, Rashad—who is among the comedian’s most high-profile defenders, next to singer and producer R. Kelly, himself currently awaiting trial in a sex trafficking case—compared Cosby’s conviction to Zora Neale Hurston’s career suffering after she was indicted for allegedly molesting the 10-year-old son of her former landlady and two other boys, according to biographer Virginia Lynn Moylan.
That case was thrown out after Hurston’s alibi was checked and the boy admitted to investigators to making up the story, Moylan writes—still, the black press had run with the story after it was leaked, according to The New York Times, and Hurston’s reputation was smeared. The writer died impoverished in 1960, with her legacy only revived many years later, after novelist Alice Walker wrote about Hurston. Given this comparison, Rashad seems to believe that not only Constand’s testimony against Cosby, but also the accusations of 60-plus other women, all lack credibility.
Cosby’s own deposition in civil court about giving women drugs was used to prosecute him after an earlier prosecutor, Bruce Castor, had refused to go forward with Constand’s case in criminal court. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has now deemed this deposition unusable in criminally prosecuting Cosby, since when it came to the civil case, Castor assured Cosby that if he sat.
