Evin Cosby, the youngest of Bill Cosby’s five children, posted a passionate defense of her father on his official Facebook page Wednesday, assailing his “public persecution,” and denouncing the “cruelty” of the media and his accusers who have branded him a ” ‘rapist’ without ever knowing the truth.”
“When people are so quick to cast hate and make accusations of horrific violence against my dad, they are callous in their carelessness about the harm they are causing to others,” she wrote. “Instead of going through the criminal justice system, these stories never got investigated and just got repeated. They have been accepted as the truth.”Bill Cosby, 79, tweeted links to his daughter’s statement on his Twitter account beginning shortly after 7 a.m. ET.
Andrew Wyatt, a spokesman for Cosby and his legal team defending him on criminal sexual assault charges in Pennsylvania, confirmed to USA TODAY that Evin Cosby’s post is legitimate but declined to answer questions about why she is speaking out now.
Jury selection is scheduled to begin next month for Cosby’s June trial on charges he drugged and molested Andrea Constand, a Temple University employee, at his home in suburban Philadelphia in 2004. He has denied the charges, saying the encounter was consensual.
This is the second time Evin Cosby has spoken out to defend her father since October 2014, when dozens of women began coming forward to accuse him of sexual assault in episodes dating back to the 1960s. But it’s the first time any of Cosby’s close relatives (he has four adult daughters; a son, Ennis, was killed in 1997) has issued a statement since the criminal charges were filed in late 2015.
Evin Cosby, a 40-year-old mother of two, dismissed her father’s accusers as “several women” and claimed their stories “never matched up.” She wrote that her father has been branded guilty in the court of public opinion and that the fallout has “punished not just my dad, but every one of us.”
She characterized the accusations against him as “things that supposedly happened 40 or 50 years ago, before I was born, in another lifetime, and that have been carelessly repeated as truth without allowing my dad to defend himself and without requiring proof.”
“We get all sorts of mixed-up messages in our society,” she wrote. “We are told that we have fundamental rights to be innocent until proven guilty. But, if enough people think you are a bad person, you are branded a bad person and the media just reinforces that. My dad, like anyone in this country, deserves to be treated fairly under the law.”
She described her childhood as happy, and her father as loving. As a grandfather, she says Cosby is helping to raise her children and teach them family values.
Bill Cosby's daughter defends dad, assails his 'public persecution'
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