Stacy Brown says it wasn’t hard to get Bill Cosby to break his recent media silence. He simply called him at home, writes Paul Farhi.
Stacy Brown says it wasn’t hard to get Bill Cosby to break his recent media silence, as drugging-and-sexual-assault allegations have piled up against the legendary comedian. He simply called him at home.
“To my surprise, he just picked up the phone,” said Brown, a freelance reporter whose story on Cosby was published on Sunday by the Washington Informer, a weekly newspaper aimed at African-Americans in and around Washington, and by the New York Post. “His tone wasn’t, ‘What are you doing calling me?’ He didn’t sound annoyed at all. He was very upbeat.”
Well, maybe it was a little more complicated than that.
Brown’s brief conversation with Cosby, in which Cosby said his wife, Camille, would continue to stand by him, was the result of a long chain of events in which Brown sought the Cosby camp’s co-operation in telling his story through newspapers aimed at the black community.
For its part, Cosby’s team says Brown misrepresented himself and did not indicate that he was interviewing Cosby for publication.
Before speaking to Cosby, Brown said he and Benjamin Chavis jr, head of the black-owned National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), had talked with Cosby’s representatives about a formal interview.
Chavis and Brown also suggested last month that Cosby write an op-ed column about the allegations. According to Brown, the interview and the column would be published in newspapers represented by the NNPA.
Both sides said on Monday there had been an exchange of e-mails about such an idea, but no commitments had been made.
Brown said he decided to call Cosby when the entertainer’s representatives, including attorney Martin Singer and “crisis” manager Matthew Hiltzik, stopped talking to him about the black-newspaper idea. “That trail went cold, and the conversation stopped,” he said.
In his brief comments to Brown, Cosby did not directly address any of the growing number of allegations against him. Instead, he mentioned that Camille, his wife of 50 years, had been holding up well under the onslaught of allegations and had remained loyal to him.
“Love and the strength of womanhood,” Cosby said, according to Brown. “Let me say it again, love and the strength of womanhood.”
In a separate development, Camille Cosby issued her first comments on Monday since more than 20 women emerged in recent weeks to accuse her husband.
“A different man has been portrayed in the media over the past two months. It is the portrait of a man I do not know,” her statement read in part. “… There appears to be no vetting of my husband’s accusers before stories are published or aired.”
She added that “many in the media” were quick to link the accusations against her husband to a story published by Rolling Stone magazine about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia – until that story unravelled.
“None of us will ever want to be in the position of attacking a victim,” she said in her statement.
“But the question should be asked – who is the victim?”
Bill Cosby took a veiled swipe at the news media in his comments to Brown, suggesting that black-owned publications were more fair than their mainstream brethren.
“I only expect the black media to uphold the standards of excellence in journalism and when you do that, you have to go in with a neutral mind,” Cosby said, according to Brown.
His comments were the first since he told a Florida newspaper on November 21 that the allegations were “innuendo”.
Cosby’s camp said Brown identified himself as a freelance reporter in his conversation with the comedian but accused him of several ethical breaches.
“Mr Brown did not indicate that he was interviewing Mr Cosby for publication, did not say he was reporting for the New York Post, and did not tell Mr Cosby that the conversation was being recorded,” John Schmitt, an attorney for Cosby, said on Monday.
Brown said Cosby knew he was speaking to a reporter because he ended the brief conversation by saying he wasn’t supposed to speak to the media.
Brown, 46, interviewed Cosby 18 months ago for a story published by the Informer and the black-owned Baltimore Times, as well as the New York Post.
The story was about Cosby’s criticism of African-Americans for not taking responsibility for antisocial behaviour. – Washington-Post Bloomberg
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