Bill Cosby finally agrees there’s a victim in his long-running legal battles himself.
The fallen funnyman’s lawyers called him a victim of racial discrimination Tuesday as they went for the jugular in their war with famed civil rights attorney Gloria Allred.
Cosby’s legal pit bulls issued a furious statement accusing Allred of violating their client’s civil rights in her outspoken representation of 33 women who say the comedian sexually assaulted them.
“Mr. Cosby is no stranger to discrimination and racial hatred, and throughout his career Mr. Cosby has always used his voice and his celebrity to highlight the commonalities and has portrayed the differences that are not negative no matter the race, gender and religion of a person,” the statement obtained by the Daily News said.
“(Allred) calls herself a civil rights attorney, but her campaign against Mr. Cosby builds on racial bias and prejudice that can pollute the court of public opinion,” they said. “And when the media repeats her accusations — with no evidence, no trial and no jury — we are moved backward as a country and away from the America that our civil rights leaders sacrificed so much to create.”
Allred apparently drew the lawyers’ ire by holding a press conference in California Tuesday alongside an actress who claims Cosby sexually assaulted her during a casting meeting in the early 1970s.
The women were calling on Gov. Jerry Brown to sign a bill eliminating the statute of limitations for rape and sexual assault in the Golden State. Actress Linda Ridgeway Whitedeer spoke alongside Allred after a meeting with Brown’s advisers regarding the legislation known as SB 813.
“My presence here today is to show my appreciation to all of those who managed to get this bill to pass unanimously and in such a timely manner for future generations,” Ridgeway Whitedeer said, according to a transcript of her remarks.
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“Hopefully it will be a deterrent,” she said, adding the bill would give victims “ample time to come forward, so they won’t be emotionally destroyed in the legal process.”
Ridgeway Whitedeer said she was in her 20s when the William Morris Agency sent her to audition for one of her first film roles in Hollywood.
Cosby greeted her at the studio, ushered her into the director’s office, grabbed her by her hair and forced her to perform oral sex on him, she claims.
“He had surprise on his side. All I had on my side was shock followed by a sickening humiliation that he gloated over. He had planned it. I didn’t have a chance,” she said Tuesday.
Allred said while it’s too late for Ridgeway Whitedeer and most of her clients to seek criminal prosecution, California should follow in the footsteps of 16 other states that have passed bills like SB 813.
“I urge Gov. Brown to sign this important bill. If he does sign it, statutes of limitations no longer will be a sexual predator’s best friend and a victim’s worst enemy,” she said Tuesday.
Cosby, 79, has been accused of sexual assault by more than 50 women in the past two years.
He appeared Tuesday in a suburban Philadelphia courtroom and received a tentative June 5 trial date for his felony sexual assault case based on allegations he doped and groped Temple University women’s basketball manager Andrea Constand in 2004.
He’s also battling civil lawsuits involving at least 11 other accusers and claims ranging from defamation to child sexual assault.