Out of Erinn’s tragedy came some good: She appeared on a few talk shows, including
Donahue
, to give her side of the alleged Tyson assault, which forged a renewed relation with her father. “After I did
Donahue
, my dad thanked him for making it easier for me to say what I had to say, and was very proud of the way I came across. I think for the first time . . . he’s beginning to understand something. He has a lot of pride, and he’s not one to tell me, ‘Oh, Erinn, I’m really proud of you.’ He’ll have eight other people tell me before he would.”
41
Erinn’s struggles with alcohol and drug abuse point to internal issues she needed to confront, since, as both she and her father concluded, her problems grew less from addiction than from the personal choices she made. And her rebellion may have indeed called for the tough-love measures that Cosby sought to apply. It also appears that, at crucial points in her story, Erinn sought the love and affection of a father who, contrary to his public image, was endlessly absent and forbiddingly distant. Of course, that is often the price paid by the
children of any prominent figure. But it seems that Cosby’s unwillingness to own even part of her drug drama—and his insistence that Erinn’s problems were wholly self-created, despite her contention that her abuse of alcohol and drugs was in part an attempt to fill in the void left by her father’s absence—suggest Cosby’s inability to believe that anything he did might have contributed to his daughter’s actions. This in no way relieves Erinn of responsibility for her actions, but it need not be an either-or proposition, so that Cosby fails to come to grips with the notion that actions he took—or, as it were, didn’t take—may have made his daughter more vulnerable to her demons. To own up to one’s direct, or even indirect, influence in another’s fate or fortune, without assuming undue praise or scorn for either, is a sign of moral maturity.
If Cosby found it difficult to attend therapy with his daughter, as she claims, it might have stemmed from the fear of losing absolute parental authority in a therapeutic setting, which demands all participants be equal partners in struggling toward wholeness and truth. The therapeutic setting might encourage an empathy that one otherwise resists, or is incapable of achieving alone. While Cliff Huxtable may have been more willing to acknowledge his culpability while demanding responsibility from his child, Bill Cosby appears to have been incapable of such an admission. And if what Erinn says is true, that Cosby found it nearly impossible to tell her that he was proud of her, and it’s evident that he was, then he may have been plagued by the syndrome of
the difficult admission
—of love, of pride, of longing, of regret, of grief,
of pain, of whatever emotion claims one’s attention—that affects so many parents and partners.
It would be too easy to overinterpret, and hence misinterpret, the relation between Cosby’s apparent difficulties in his family life and his current assault on the poor. After all, he has been remarkably generous in giving millions to black colleges and causes. But it would not be contradictory to suggest that Cosby’s resistance to viewing shared responsibility as a mode of moral survival has an effect on how he has held the poor accountable for their plight without calculating the role of other factors—structural racism, economic inequality, public policy decisions and the like, factors I address in the last chapter. And neither would it require dime or pop psychology to conclude that the social scold possesses an unshakable belief in his correctness, an admirable trait in forging one’s path in the world when few others believe in you, as Cosby did in his early comedy career, but a less desirable feature as one tries to understand and address social phenomena like poverty. A lot more empathy—the kind that may have been helpful in his dealings with Erinn, a privileged child—is surely called for when addressing a population of severely underprivileged folk.
Happily, Erinn’s relationship with her parents improved considerably; in October 1998,
Jet
magazine reported that Erinn wed Michael Canaday, an internal medicine physician, in a private ceremony at her parents’ Philadelphia home.
42
And she has taken an active part in the “Hello Friend” foundation the Cosbys established in memory of their murdered son, Ennis, to help children with learning differences.
43
If Cosby was able to reconcile with Erinn, the failure to come to successful terms with another woman claiming to be his daughter led to a trial in court and perhaps Cosby’s most embarrassing episode: the allegation that he fathered a child out of wedlock—a claim he denied, but which forced him to confess his adultery. In a tragic confluence of sordid events, on the day Cosby lost his beloved son, Ennis, a doctoral student in education at Columbia University, in a racially charged murder in Los Angeles, Autumn Jackson, a twenty-two-year-old woman who claimed to be Cosby’s illegitimate daughter, demanded on the phone that the comedian pay her millions so she wouldn’t sell her story to the tabloid
Globe
. Two days later, Jackson and an acquaintance, Jose Medina, a fifty-one-year-old writer, were lured from their Los Angeles base to the New York offices of Cosby’s lawyer to sign what they believed was a multimillion-dollar settlement. They were arrested on the spot for extortion. Jackson had begun her extortion efforts in November of 1996, after she placed a call to one of Cosby’s representatives saying she had run out of money. (Cosby had been sending her money for years.) Cosby arranged for Jackson to receive $3,000, but that didn’t satisfy her, and she demanded more money in exchange for her silence.
44
Jackson and Medina eventually concocted a scheme to extort $40 million from Cosby, but after he refused to pay, Jackson lowered the price to $30 million, and, ultimately, to $24 million.
45
Initially, Cosby and his spokesman David Brokaw “unequivocally and absolutely” denied that Jackson was his daughter, saying they had a birth certificate to prove their
claim. Brokaw admitted that Cosby had paid Jackson’s educational expenses, as he had for numerous young people, but that he didn’t know how Cosby chose scholarship recipients or even how Jackson had been selected.
46
Brokaw was even more emphatic in dismissing Jackson’s claim and suggesting Cosby’s ease in denying paternity. “This woman is claiming to be his daughter, and she tried to extort $40 million from him, and she’s now in custody, so what’s the implication. Obviously, if Bill Cosby allowed the process to unfold as he has, then he is comfortable with what he’s maintaining, which is that he’s not the father.”
47
Eventually, however, it leaked out that Cosby had had an affair with Jackson’s mother. At Jackson’s trial in a Manhattan Federal District Court in July 1997, Cosby was forced to admit to a “single sexual encounter” in Las Vegas in the early ’70s with a fan named Shawn Thompson.
48
Later, Cosby said that Thompson visited him and showed the star a child’s picture. “Doesn’t she look like Ensa?” she asked Cosby, referring to one of his daughters. “This is your daughter.” Cosby’s reply was short and simple. “I said, ‘That’s not my daughter,’ and that was it.”
49
(Thompson claimed that she had no other lovers besides Cosby at the time and that Jackson was born nine months after their fling.) Cosby says that Thompson promised to keep quiet about their tryst to spare Mrs. Cosby any embarrassment. (He eventually told her in the early ’80s.) Later, however, according to Cosby, Thompson constantly “borrowed” money from Cosby with an implied threat of telling Camille, a threat Thompson denied making. Over the years, Cosby gave Thompson more than
$100,000, either in cash or by checks in the names of friends whom he would reimburse. “Obviously, with the threats going and going,” Cosby said in court, “I just didn’t want her to have any sort of evidence that she could say, ‘Well you paid this to me.’”
50
Cosby testified that, despite his troubles with Ms. Thompson, he made an effort to support Autumn with her educational and living expenses, even though he was careful to point out to her that he wasn’t her father. “Autumn, I will tell you this: I am not your father, I will be for you a father figure—a father figure—but I am not your father.”
51
Robert M. Baum, one of Jackson’s defense attorneys, was barred by Judge Barbara S. Jones from eliciting testimony on the issue of paternity. He was granted permission by the judge to try to prove that Autumn believed she was Cosby’s child, hoping to explain Autumn’s actions as “a lawful negotiation of her rights as a daughter.”
52
To bolster his claim, Baum told the jury that when Autumn was a child, her mother Shawn shared with her a secret as she watched a Saturday morning cartoon. “You know who that man is who you are watching on TV?” Shawn asked Autumn. “The voice of Fat Albert? That man is Bill Cosby. He’s your father.”
53
Baum seemed to imply that Cosby had sent mixed messages to Autumn: On the one hand, he denied being her father, and on the other hand, he appeared to behave in a way that suggested he was. For example, Cosby admitted in court that he told Autumn he loved her, and he spent time with her—like the time Cosby described taking a high-school-age Autumn to the taping
of an episode of
The Cosby Show
in New York, and placing her photo on a piece of furniture on the set so that she could view it when she watched at home. Cosby made her feel special and encouraged. “You will see this picture of you, and this is to inspire you to go and become somebody.”
54
Cosby also admitted that he had scrapped taking a paternity test in Chicago several years before the trial began because he feared that the results would leak out to the tabloids. (Before the start of the trial, Cosby had once again declined to take a paternity test, but after it was finished, he offered to take the test, and gave his blood, but Autumn refused to participate.)
55
In an interview outside of court, Baum cited Cosby’s decision to forgo the paternity test, and his admission that he loved Autumn, as factors reinforcing Autumn’s belief that Cosby was her father. Baum said that “under the circumstances, where he’s paying for everything and the mother is saying, ‘He’s your father,’ how could she believe anything else?”
56
Baum contended that Autumn kept her secret until she became desperate, until she was homeless and living in a car—and that only after making repeated requests to Cosby for more money did she attempt to sell her story, believing, in Baum’s words, that “it is the only property I have to sell in order to survive.”
57
But Cosby would have none of it; his actions recall his “tough-love” approach to his troubles with Erinn. After Autumn dropped out of college, and sought more money from him, Cosby went off. “I was upset,” Cosby confessed in court. “And I said to her, ‘I’m tired of you. I’m tired of your mother.
You and your mother have never given me a happy moment for what I’ve given.’”
58
Cosby offered to pay for college and living expenses if Autumn found a part-time job to help herself, an offer he framed tersely: “take it or leave it.”
59
It was then that Jackson came up with her scheme, in cahoots with Medina, to extort Cosby for millions, and placed several calls to Cosby and his representatives. They also wrote letters to several of the companies for whom Cosby endorsed products, calling attention to his alleged fathering of an illegitimate daughter in an effort to embarrass him with the corporations who paid him as much for his wholesome image as for his enormous talent. The letters, to CBS, Kodak, Phillip Morris, the owner of Jell-O, two publishers of Cosby’s books, and even President Clinton, misspelled Autumn’s first name and charged that Cosby was a “Deadbeat Father. . . . Autum is left in the Cold, Penniless and Homeless.”
60
Cosby spoke in court about his embrace of “the moral values” and “the family values” in his vast body of work, including his commercials, signaling how potentially damaging Jackson and Medina’s actions were. “They come to me,” Cosby said, in reference to the companies that had signed him to endorse their products. “Kodak is family, family pictures, family children. The pudding is family. Ford, car, family.”
61
That’s when Cosby instructed his lawyers to contact the FBI and to snag Jackson and Medina, who were eventually convicted of extortion, conspiracy and crossing state lines to commit a crime. A third man, Antonay Williams, with whom Autumn eventually had twin boys (delivered in prison),
cooperated with the authorities and was given probation.
62
When her daughter was sentenced to serve twenty-six months in prison, Autumn’s mother Shawn protested, “This child is facing long years for phone calls and letters, when all they really were were a cry for help.” She said that Cosby should “run as fast as he can to the judge and ask for leniency for her.”
63
Although no one excused Jackson’s behavior, some critics offered sympathetic portraits of Jackson while criticizing Cosby for failing in his parental obligations.
64
One of the most thoughtful and balanced takes on the entire affair was provided by
New York Times
columnist Bob Herbert. Readily conceding that Jackson’s behavior was “stupid, preposterous, pathetic, and no doubt illegal . . . [and] also—intentionally or unintentionally—profoundly cruel” (since it coincided with Ennis’s death), Herbert let on that “you cannot escape the queasy feeling that this [trial] is something that should not be happening. This is unnecessary.”
65
Herbert argued that Cosby’s claim that he “unequivocally and absolutely” was not Autumn’s father was too strong in light of his admitted affair with Shawn Thompson. Herbert argued that while the court ruled that the legal proceedings wouldn’t worry with the question of Cosby’s paternity, “you would have to be a cold fish indeed to believe it is not relevant to Autumn Jackson. There seems to be no doubt that Ms. Jackson has long believed that she was Bill Cosby’s daughter, and that must have been a torment.”
66
Herbert said that Jackson must have been “hurt and confused” when at age nine, she saw
The
Cosby Show
become a cultural phenomenon and Cosby, her father, at least in her mind, become America’s dad. As Herbert poignantly wrote:
It must have been alternately exciting and unbearably depressing. Autumn Jackson would sit in front of the tube on Thursday nights and laugh with the rest of the country at the idealized antics of the Huxtable family. And then she would go to bed with the inescapable thought that her father, the greatest of them all, cared more for his TV children than for her. Bill Cosby may not be Autumn Jackson’s father. But it was Autumn’s desperate fantasies about the perennially absent Mr. Cosby that drove her to make the ludicrous demands that landed her in such deep trouble. . . . [Y]ou wonder if there isn’t room somewhere in this entertainment for some measure of mercy. What she did was wrong. But is it necessary to send her off to a stretch in a Federal penitentiary? You wonder what purpose that would serve. And you toy incessantly and uneasily with the most disturbing of thoughts: What if Bill Cosby really is her father?
67