Read: Bill Cosby’s Respectability Politics Align Perfectly with Rape Culture
Joseph C. Phillips, former actor on The Cosby Show, published an article on his blog earlier this week titled, simply, “Of Course Bill Cosby Is Guilty.” Guess what it’s about.
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In the piece, Phillips—who joined the cast of The Cosby Show in 1989 and was voted one of 2015’s Most Influential African American Republicans by conservative news site Newsmax—describes how, on set, everyone knew about Bill’s infidelity and sexual prowess.
“Bill sleeping around was a ‘fact’ that, like the air, seemed to just be. You didn’t have to see it or hear it to know that it existed,” he writes.
Phillips excused his indiscretions at the time, though, saying that with the “parade[s] of pretty young women that streamed through the studio,” no man would be able to “have the fortitude to turn so much nookie down every single time.”
But when the series of rape and sexual harassment allegations began in 2014, Phillips started to worry that there was truth to the claims. At the peak of the Cosby controversy, Phillips ran into an old friend who had also considered Cosby her mentor. When he asked her about it, she burst into tears and told him about Bill Cosby’s “violation of her trust, loyalty, and body.”
Phillips ends his piece with a plea. “Bill,” he says, “you have a family who loves you, a wife who is devoted to you; you have more money than you can spend. Please, go live a quiet country life. Allow those of us who truly love you to preserve just a bit of our enchantment.”
