During a phone interview with ABC News, Camille Cosby, who inspired The Cosby Show TV character Claire Huxtable, told correspondent Linsey Davis that she believes the #MeToo movement needs to “clean up their act” and explained that she doesn’t care about the feelings of her husband’s accusers and critics.
What We Know:
- This discussion took place after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court agreed to hear part of her husband’s appeal on his 2018 sexual assault conviction.
- “My first reaction is hopefulness, possibilities,” Cosby said in her first major media interview in six years. “The state’s highest court has said: ‘Wait a minute. There are some problems here. They can be considered for an appeal.’ I’m very, very pleased.”
- When asked by Davis if she was concerned about any blowback from the #MeToo movement and those who felt she was on the wrong side of history, she responded, “First of all, I don’t care what they feel.”
@ABC News: Camille Cosby on her husband’s appeal and her messages for the BLM and #MeToo movements. With @SantinaLeuci & @LinseyDavis https://t.co/VbbFz9vVGH
— Chris Francescani (@CDFrancescani) June 24, 2020
- She continued reciting a line from James Baldwin’s 1972 book No Name in the Street, “Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”
- “And I’m going to add the word ‘intentional,’” Cosby added. “The #MeToo movement and movements like them have intentional ignorance pertaining to the history of particular white women – not all white women – but particular white women, who have from the very beginning, pertaining to the enslavement of African people, accused Black males of sexual assault without any proof whatsoever.”
- “And by ignoring that history, they have put out a lie in itself and that is: ‘Because I’m female, I’m telling the truth.’ Well history disproves that, as well, and gender has never, ever equated with truth,” she continued. “So, they need to clean up their acts. And it’s all of us as women who have not participated in anything nefarious – we know how women can lie. We know how they can do the same things that men do – that some men do – because there are good men and bad men. There are good women and bad women.”
- Camille also spoke about current protests against police brutality and racial inequality that are sprouting up across the country, saying she wished they were more “focused”. “I’m very concerned about so many young people with nanosecond attention spans. They cannot be just jumping around from the movement to another,” she said.
Cosby said she speaks to her husband daily, but does not visit him in prison.
