Cosby’s spokesman David Brokaw replied that “the story is not true. It did not happen. Mr. Cosby was not contacted by the police and the first he learned about this was from the
National Enquirer
.”
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(In the article, Brokaw did admit that Cosby had dinner with Covington, but denies anything inappropriate occurred.) Cosby threatened to sue the
Enquirer
for $250 million unless it retracted the story, but the tabloid stood by the story—and even threatened to counter-sue should Cosby proceed—noting that it included in its story Cosby’s denial of Covington’s allegations.
15
The police contacted the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which declined to prosecute Cosby.
16
The complaint would only have resulted in a misdemeanor charge of sexual abuse in the third degree, similar in nature to Cosby lawyer Phillips’s conjecture in the situation involving Constand that the charges, if pressed, would amount to little more than inappropriate touching.
17
While we may never know if the most recent allegations are true, they prove that not even world-wide celebrity can protect one from the trials and tribulations that ordinary citizens endure. Of course, it’s clear that fame and fortune often entice people to jealousy and diabolical schemes to soil one’s reputation and to steal one’s money by any means available. This may be the case with Cosby’s accusers. On the other hand, the accusations could be true. Whatever the case, we should neither exult in Cosby’s troubles (schadenfreude is an ugly trait), nor too quickly, nor automatically, ignore his conduct. (We should have learned something from other celebrities who have faltered, and if we’re honest, from our own
lives, our foibles, our downfalls, our weaknesses, our tawdry truths well-hidden behind manicured lawns or the pretending moral facades we erect.) Cosby has through his magnificent work and “clean” image earned the culture’s benefit of the doubt, and in the case of Constand, the legal presumption of innocence until the proof of guilt. But as with any of us, what we reveal in public may not be all of what we are. Cosby has fiercely guarded his privacy, but on occasion, he has provided a rare glimpse into his family life, as he did when he addressed the traumas and conflicts surrounding one of his children.
In 1989, Cosby publicly discussed his daughter Erinn’s struggles with drug and alcohol addiction. His hand had been forced by a
National Enquirer
article detailing his daughter’s stay at a drug rehabilitation clinic for alcohol and cocaine abuse. The news, of course, was quite vexing for a man whose public image framed him as the premier American patriarch. He was still at the height of his fame as Dr. Cliff Huxtable, and the jarring contrast of his television authority and his personal struggles was poignantly drawn. “I always knew, of course, that Bill Cosby, actor and entrepreneur, is not Cliff Huxtable,”
Washington Post
columnist William Raspberry wrote at the time. “Still it seemed to me that anyone who can be so convincing in his role as perfect dad must be an above-average father in real life.”
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The conflation of the two images, Cliff and Cosby, was seriously challenged when Cosby spoke to
Los Angeles Times
writer Lawrence Christon. “We have four other children,” Cosby said. “This particular daughter appears to be the only one who is really very selfish. It isn’t that we hang our heads or that we’re embarrassed by this, because
we’ve been living with this person who knows that her problem isn’t cocaine or alcohol. I think that she’s a child who has refused to take responsibility for supporting herself.”
19
Cosby told Christon that he had informed all his children that they could become whatever they wanted if they pursued higher education. Being equipped with an undergraduate and, hopefully, a graduate degree, they would become, perhaps, psychologists, anthropologists, engineers or artists. And they’d never have to worry about how they’d pay rent or buy food or a car, since it would all be provided along with a paid vacation. Cosby and his wife Camille had set up a support system for their five children to dispense encouragement and love while insisting they become educated. It was wonderful and reasonable, but in Cosby’s mind, his daughter bucked the system.
But since 14, Erinn has always said, “I have to be me.” Fine. When she graduated high school, I said, “Obviously you have a better idea of what you wanna be.” She’s 23 now. She’s never held down a job, never kept an apartment for more than six months. She never finishes anything. She uses her boy friends. She wants the finer things but she can’t stand anybody else’s dirt, which is important. Developmentally, she’s still around 11 years old. The problem isn’t alcohol or drugs—at the rehab center her urine showed up negative. It’s behavioral. She’s very stubborn. It’s painful, not to me and Camille, but to her. It’s going to take her hitting rock bottom, where she’s totally exhausted and at that point where she
can’t fight anymore. Right now we’re estranged. She can’t come home. She’s not a person you can trust. You think you’re not a good parent because you don’t answer the call. But you can’t let the kid use you.
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Cosby’s tough-love approach won applause. Calling Erinn a “loser of a daughter,” Raspberry claimed that even as America learned a great deal from Cliff Huxtable, it might also glean lessons from real-life father Bill Cosby. “Parents are given to overestimating their role in their children’s lives,” Raspberry opined. “It is true that it is our responsibility to teach the basic values and to try to prevent as many of their childish mistakes as we can. But it is also true that our children are independent human beings, not printouts of our noble intentions.” He concluded that there were “valuable lessons” in Cosby’s tough-love approach, “chief among them the limits of what even the most loving of parents can do.”
21
If that’s true for a parent like Cosby, how much more true might it be for poor parents?
Despite his landmark television show, and despite writing the best-selling book
Fatherhood
, Cosby’s relationship to his daughter reflected the tensions that beset millions of other families, rich and poor, suburban and inner-city, and black and white—and brown, red and yellow, too.
22
As it turns out, Cosby didn’t discover his daughter’s drug habit until she informed him.
23
Cosby checked Erinn into Rhode Island’s Edgehill Newport Hospital and sought the advice of drug counselors and therapists for the proper response he should adopt. It was then that he decided that “tough love” was
called for. “We love her and want her to get better, but we have to take a very firm, very tough stand that forces her to realize that no-one can fix her problems but her,” Cosby said. “She has to beat this on her own.”
24
Erinn admitted that she began experimenting with drugs at an early age.
25
Her problems began at boarding school when her peers introduced her to marijuana, beer and vodka. When her parents insisted that she enroll at Spelman College—she took a year off before matriculating at the college her parents eventually blessed with an awe-inspiring contribution of $20 million—Erinn partied hard and eventually dropped out of school.
26
At nineteen, she headed to New York to work as a waitress and continued her drug use before retreating to Rhode Island. When she left rehab, she fell back into her bad habits and began once more to take drugs.
27
Cosby admitted that “he was at his wit’s end”—a position many parents come to—and told
Redbook
magazine that parents “have a dream of how to raise a child then all of a sudden they see it being crushed.”
28
But perhaps his family situation was a bit more complicated than good parent and bad child. When Erinn read what her father had to say about her to Christon in 1989, she was pained, but didn’t speak out until three years later. “All that stuff is his perspective,” Erinn claimed. “He was not there. . . . I had already hit my rock bottom without [my parents’] knowing about it. The only reason they knew I was doing drugs is because I told them. These aren’t things that are abnormal in any other family, but because of who I am, it’s a big deal.”
29
But she couldn’t hide the hurt she felt when she read her
father’s comments. “I think it’s really awful that he can say something like that, that makes him look like a saint and me look like a piece of shit. I didn’t use my boyfriends, they used me.”
30
Erinn admitted that her parents had expectations that “didn’t fit my goals.” She also warned against conflating the Huxtables and the Cosby family. “The average family, if they’re not divorced, has a mother and father who come home every day. Mine didn’t. . . . When I’d see him, it was always about school. It wasn’t like, ‘Let’s talk, Dad. . . .’ We never were stable. During the week, you’d go to school, then you’re off on the weekend to wherever he was working.”
31
As a result, Erinn got very close to her grandparents, who offered love and care. After graduating from a Quaker boarding school and attending, and then leaving, Spelman—“I don’t like being in an environment with one race,” she said, while also detesting the efforts of sororities to recruit her and the spite of jealous classmates—she returned to Manhattan and continued her drug abuse. But where Cosby dismissed his daughter’s problem as behavioral, she saw in her drug use a quest for her father’s love. “I found myself surrounded by the wrong people. I used to live with wanting the . . . validation, especially from my dad, because he wasn’t there. I guess I wasn’t feeling confident, so you get involved with drugs.”
32
Erinn said that in treatment at the rehabilitation center, she owned up to many of her weaknesses and, equally important, discovered that she didn’t need her father’s validation, a prospect that, ironically, may have infuriated him more. “I think that’s what made him even more mad.” Although her parents were invited to join in family therapy, she claims they
“never showed up. . . . I thought, ‘Who were the best people to go to when you’re crying out for help . . . ? He never had any interest in what I was doing. . . . Even the people at the rehab center were surprised, because they thought my parents would really want to know.” Despite the troubles they had been through, and despite talking mostly by phone—Erinn moved to Miami in the early 1990s—she still contended in 1992 that she and her parents loved each other.
33
Erinn’s move to Miami wasn’t motivated only by the desire to escape family troubles and a history of drug abuse, but also by the constant specter of paparazzi angling in trees outside her window for a shot—and a failed marriage in 1990. She was also trying to put behind her the memory of a tragic event that sent her to therapy: an alleged November 1989 sexual assault by boxer Mike Tyson when she was twenty-three years old. Erinn claimed that she and a female friend met the pugilist at a New York nightclub in the company of one of Erinn’s male friends. At 11:30 P.M., the foursome headed off in Tyson’s car to talk, and ended up at his New Jersey home for what she was told was a get-together. She felt safe because she was with friends, it wasn’t too late, and when they arrived at Tyson’s home, several cars were parked outside. But once inside, there was no one there; the cars obviously all belonged to Tyson. The boxer invited his guests to look around, and when Erinn stopped in a room to ask about boxing memorabilia, Tyson left the room. “I was still looking. I heard the door lock, and I turned around and the next thing I knew I was on the ground,” Erinn claimed. “He was groping.”
34
Erinn said that Tyson kept her face to the floor, holding her down
by the arms and covering her mouth. “He didn’t say anything to me basically. It was a lot of struggling and at one point I was able to scream. I had been trying to scream all the time. I was fighting for my life. I was terrified and I knew I had to do something. I am not going to sit there and let this guy do this.”
35
Erinn said that when a female member of Tyson’s household staff heard Erinn’s scream, she knocked on the door, prompting the boxer to let Erinn up, and she quickly ran away. Once downstairs, Erinn said she told her girlfriend she wanted to leave, even as she claimed that Tyson offered her and the household staff member money to keep quiet. When Erinn arrived at her parents’ home in New York, where she was living, she told them what had happened and they pledged to handle it. A couple of weeks later, Erinn claimed that Tyson confronted her in the same club, angry that she had told her parents and outraged that part of the agreement they allegedly extracted from him was to attend therapy for a year—an agreement Erinn claimed Tyson didn’t keep.
36
Tyson was asked to leave the club. For a long time, Erinn did not speak publicly about the alleged incident, even when Tyson was on trial in 1992 for allegedly raping beauty contestant Desiree Washington, a silence she regretted. “I knew and I believed her. It stays with you. Seeing him every day on TV, I get angry. It is always going to be there. . . . I wish I had possibly gone to the police and pressed charges and maybe this would have prevented the whole thing from happening. At that time I was scared . . . and really didn’t want to deal with it.”
37
Tyson denied the claim and his lawyer, Alan Dershowitz,
issued a statement, saying that “Erinn Cosby’s three-year-old allegations are demonstrably false. We are reliably informed that Mike Tyson and Erinn Cosby were never alone in the same room together, and there are a number of witnesses who would so testify.”
38
Erinn finally came forward after a former boyfriend threatened to sell the story to a tabloid if he wasn’t paid off. When she refused, the
National Enquirer
ran the story in April 1992, under the headline, “Bill Cosby’s Daughter—Mike Tyson Tried to Rape Me, Too!”
39
When asked to comment, Cosby declined, saying through a spokesman, “It’s a family matter.”
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