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.
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.
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 for the deposition, he wouldn’t later be criminally charged. That’s the basis on which his conviction was thrown out; the credibility of neither Constand’s testimony nor the other women’s was problematized by the court’s decision.
Rashad has not furnished evidence to support her suspicions about the allegations against Cosby, and former Howard students have already begun speaking out against Rashad’s remarks, with one alumna tweeting, “As a @HowardU School of Fine Arts alum, and as a survivor, this tweet from @PhyliciaRashad is disappointing. I hope we can have a dean who believes & respects survivors. Howards students who are survivors, I believe you & here are resources: https://www2.howard.edu/hustands/resources…” Representatives for Howard University did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Rashad has since walked back her comment, saying three hours later in another tweet, “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.” Rashad’s previous tweet celebrating Cosby’s release is still up.
The whole affair highlights the issues that arise from seeking recourse for sexual harassment and assault from a court system that seems more beholden to legal scope than to healing or justice—especially, it appears, when it comes to the wealthy and powerful. Rashad’s tweet also demonstrates the possible dangers of relying on the courts to affirm women’s experiences of sexual assault—judges’ decisions can be interpreted as the truth rather than the conclusion of a legal process.
A deal like the kind Cosby’s legal team struck would ideally protect any defendant from manipulation and abuse by law enforcement—but as New York criminal attorney Kevin B. Faga tells Vanity Fair, an agreement like this one is “not something every civil defendant and future criminal defendant would be able to receive and enjoy and get the benefit of. It’s very unusual for a civil litigant to have that sort of reach into a prosecuting agency and be able to negotiate something like that. Why wouldn’t a prosecutor want to be able to use a sworn statement?” (A prosecutor agreement also initially protected Jeffrey Epstein from facing charges for sex crimes in Florida, though a Florida judge eventually ruled that the deal—made by a team led by former U.S. labor secretary under Donald Trump, Alex Acosta—was illegal.) Faga also confirmed that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision as described does not constitute an exoneration.
Additional reporting by Chris Murphy.
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