Bill Cosby is a victim of 'mob justice' and accuser lied under oath, says Cosby's wife

Camille Cosby asks for criminal investigation of district attorney in husband's sexual assault case

Actor Bill Cosby and wife Camille Cosby arrive at Bill Cosby Trial at Montgomery County Courthouse (Getty)

Bill Cosby’s wife has claimed her husband was a victim of “mob justice” and accused his victim of lying under oath in the trial that found him guilty of sexual assault last month.

In an impassioned statement posted to her husband’s Facebook page, Camille Cosby said the testimony of the key witness in the trial was “perjured, unsupported by evidence, and “riddled with innumerable, dishonest contradictions”.

She called for a criminal investigation of Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele and his “cohorts,” calling them ”a homogeneous group of exploitive and corrupt people, whose primary purpose is to advance themselves professionally and economically at the expense of Mr Cosby’s life”.

Cosby was found guilty of sexually assaulting former basketball player Andrea Constand in a highly publicised trial last month. His lawyers have promised to appeal the ruling.

The Cosby Show star has been accused of sexual assault by more than 50 women over the course of his career, many of whom allege a similar pattern of Cosby plying them with drugs or alcohol before assaulting them. Cosby has denied all of the sexual misconduct allegations against him.

Ms Cosby likened these accusers – and the media coverage of their allegations – to a “lynch mob,” saying they had eliminated the possibility of a fair trial and an unbiased jury.

“Since when are all accusers truthful?” she asked, comparing her husband of more than 50 years to other black men throughout history who had been falsely accused of sexual assault.

She also lamented the cancellation of Cosby’s public performances in the wake of the allegations, and the fact that multiple colleges had rescinded the comedian’s honorary degrees.

“Once again, an innocent person has been found guilty based on an unthinking, unquestioning, unconstitutional frenzy propagated by the media and allowed to play out in a supposed court of law,” Ms Cosby wrote. “This is mob justice, not real justice.”

The comments echoed those of Cosby’s defence team in their closing remarks, in which they called the prosecution a “lynching” and decried the “mob rule” of the Me Too movement – an anti-sexual assault campaign that started years after Cosby’s 2015 arrest.

All 12 jurors in the case recently released a statement reasserting their confidence in the guilty verdict, and dispelling the notion that the Me Too movement had played any role in their decision.

“Our decision was not influenced in any way by factors other than what we heard and saw in the courtroom,” the jurors wrote. ”Not once were race or the #metoo movement ever discussed, nor did either factor into our decision.”

The jurors also said they found Ms Constand’s account “credible and compelling”. Defence attorneys had tried to poke holes in her allegations during the trial, pointing to more than a dozen inconsistencies in her statements over the years.

The prosecution countered by bringing in a forensic psychologist to explain that it was normal for a sexual assault victim’s account to evolve over time.

“In 2018, I think that we are more educated about this as a society, certainly more than we were 20 years ago,” forensic psychologist and Temple University professor Barbara Ziv testified.

She added: “But it is still part of the US rape myth that we blame victims for not being the kind of victims that we think that they should be.”