Earl Ofari Hutchinson
“The jury was bombarded with uncharged, unproven accusations, turning the proceedings into a trial of Mr. Cosby’s character.” That was the claim disgraced entertainer Bill Cosby made immediately after a jury awarded Donna Motsinger nearly 60 million dollars in damages in a civil trial loss in a Santa Monica, California court. He immediately announced that he would appeal.
The hefty award was the latest in a seemingly never-ending parade of lawsuits, settlements, and judgements against Cosby. They all stem from his alleged decades of sexual abuse, drugging, and victimization of a legion of women claimants over decades.
This was hardly the first time Cosby screamed legal foul play at continually being hauled into court. He did it when he claimed there was a racial motive behind the dozens of women who claimed he drugged, raped, and sexually abused them for years.
Cosby is hardly the only one screaming that the case against him is take your pick: the white man, white establishment, or a sensationalism driven media establishment trying to bring down a wealthy, prominent Black man. Thousands of other Blacks, and many Cosby fans, shouted the same thing virtually from the moment the accusations of sexual rapacity started flying against him. They endlessly cited prominent, wealthy celebs, from Woody Allen to Charlie Sheen to Bill O’Reilly, to bolster their contention that there is a vicious malignant, racial double standard in hammering Cosby while letting the other big-name white sexual miscreants skip away relatively untouched.
Cosby was tried, convicted, and served three years in a Pennsylvania prison for sexual assault. He had the deep pockets to get the best legal team money could buy. They made sure they got the best jury he could get. That ensured that he would be found innocent or guilty based on the evidence, not because he was Black. Given the sheer number of alleged victims, the similarity of their accusations, and that many of them were white women, the wonder was that Cosby was not hauled into a court earlier in his career. He could thank his fame, name, and money for that. Something few Blacks could ever dream of.
But Cosby did pay a price. He served real prison time. He was and is persona non grata in the entertainment industry. His legacy is forever stained. But can Cosby make any kind of case that he is continually being subject to legal persecution, mountainous judgements, and character assassination. In his statement of protest of the latest verdict against hm he called himself “a symbol.” The implication had a clear, though unstated, racial edge.
It’s true that legions of big-name celebrities like Cosby have wound up in a court docket. Mike Tyson, Michael Jackson, and of course, O.J. Simpson. They all to varying degrees loudly hinted that race had much to do with their legal woes.
Cosby didn’t say it directly, but many others note that Black celebrities, professionals, business leaders, are hauled or slammed to the curb and arrested at any time no matter their status or appearance. Supposedly, it’s their very prominence that stirs resentment, jealousy, and harassment. It’s the old uppity Negro syndrome spruced up in modern day resentments over the wealth and success of prominent Blacks. Many Cosby defenders continue to reflexively claim that he became a marked man when he floated the idea of buying NBC in 1992. The very notion of a Black man owning a mega media outlet was supposedly considered racial heresy.
There’s no proof of any racist conspiracy to nail Cosby because of this, or because of his fame. The Cosby-NBC rumored deal came almost a quarter century before his indictment in Pennsylvania. It came about a half century before the verdict against him in the Santa Monica courtroom. During those years, Cosby was lauded, feted, and praised as the nation’s number one dad.
Even after the accusations against him mounted up of sexual misdeeds, and he confessed to giving drugs to one woman and getting drugs for other women he wanted to have sex in an affidavit he swore to in 2005, legions of legal experts either defended him or claimed there were no legal grounds to prosecute him because the statute of limitations had long since run out on most of the claims.
The lawsuit he lost in Santa Monica will not be the last for him. There will be other courts and other trials, and probably equally mountainous judgements against him There are still too many women that claim he victimized them.
For that, many will still call him the victim of a hopelessly tainted biased legal system. Many others will applaud the legal payback against him and say he’s getting exactly what he deserves. That ensures that Cosby is destined to remain both victim and victimizer.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book is The Epstein “Distraction” (Amazon ebook and Middle Passage Press)
He hosts the weekly news and issues commentary radio show The Hutchinson Report Wednesdays 6 PM PST 9 PM EST at ktymgospel.net