The wife of Bill Cosby has broken her silence after her husband was found guilty of sexual assault last month.
Taking to Bill’s Facebook page, Camille issued a statement where she defended her husband and lashed out at his accusers and the media. The 80-year old entertainer was on trial for drugging and assaulting ex-basketball player Andrea Constand in 2004, and was convicted on three charges of aggravated indecent assault.
With each charge carrying a maximum of ten years behind bars, Bill faces the very real prospect of spending the rest of his life in jail. It was the second time the disgraced actor stood trial, with a 2017 jury unable to reach a verdict.
Constand is one of many accusers who have alleged Cosby assaulted them through the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. However, due to statute of limitation laws, only one charge has been brought to trial. While the #MeToo Movement has been celebrating the outcome, 74-year-old Camille has maintained her husband has done nothing wrong.
“Once again, an innocent person has been found guilty based on an unthinking, unquestioning, unconstitutional frenzy propagated by the media and allowed to play out in a supposed court of law,” Camille wrote. “This is mob justice, not real justice. This tragedy must be undone not just for Bill Cosby, but for the country.”
She said there was no proof her husband was guilty and blamed the media for tearing the former Cosby Show star down.
“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relentless demonization of him and unquestioning acceptance of accusers’ allegations without any attendant proof, have superseded the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, which guarantee due process and equal protection, and thereby eliminated the possibility of a fair trial and unbiased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 vented. “Bill Cosby was labelled as guilty because the media and accusers said so… period. And the media ensured the dissemination of that propaganda by establishing barricades preventing the dissemination of the truth in violation of the protections of the First Amendment. Are the media now the people’s judges and juries?”
She also implied that Constand wasn’t truthful, explaining her claims weren’t supported by evidence and were “riddled with innumerable, dishonest contradictions”. She also compared her husband’s case to that of a man who was wrongly accused of rape and called for a criminal investigation of the district attorney and his cohorts, branding them as “exploitive” and “corrupt”.
“How much longer will we, the majority of the people, tolerate judicial, executive, legislative, media and corporate abuses of power?” Camille asked. “We, the majority of the people, must make America what it has declared itself to be….a democracy…not to be destroyed by vicious, lying, self-absorbed paradigms of evilness.”
Constand’s lawyer, Dolores Troiani, has since released a statement in response to Camille’s claims.
“Twelve honorable people — a jury of Cosby’s peers — have spoken. There is nothing more that needs to be said,” the statement read, according to USA Today.
Meanwhile, Bill has just been expelled from the US Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In a statement, The Academy said the board “has voted to expel actor Bill Cosby and director Roman Polanski from its membership in accordance with the organisation’s Standards of Conduct”.
“The Board continues to encourage ethical standards that require members to uphold the Academy’s values of respect for human dignity,” it said.