COSBY CO-STAR SUPPORT SHOW
BILL Cosby was America’s favourite dad for decades and yesterday his youngest “TV daughter” stood beside him as he faced day one of a sensational sexual assault trial.
Actress Keshia Knight Pulliam, who played the now 79year-old’s youngest daughter Rudy Huxtable on TV’s longrunning The Cosby Show, said she was supporting Cosby because “it’s what you do”.
Describing the trial as “heartbreaking”, Pulliam didn’t want to comment on the guilt or innocence of Cosby, with whom she worked from 1984 to 1992, and who she considered “funny and witty and smart and philanthropic and full of advice”, having known him as a child.
Cosby’s wife wasn’t in court to support him on the first day of his trial on three counts of felony aggravated indecent assault — each punishable by up to 10 years jail.
The now blind performer is accused by Andrea Constand of drugging and molestation in 2004 after she approached him for career advice.
Ms Constand was then 31 and had met Cosby professionally through her workplace Temple University, at which he served on the board of trustees.
Cosby has in recent years been accused by more than 50 women of sexual assault. B But the statute of limitations has expired on most of their claims and the jury in his current Pennsylvania trial will hear from just one of those accusers.
That woman, Kelly Johnson, testified yesterday that Cosby sexually assaulted her in 1996 after feeding her a white tablet in a bungalow at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles.
She said she woke up partially clothed and feeling as if she was “under water”.
“My dress was pulled up from the bottom and it was pulled down from the top. My breasts were out, I felt naked,” she told the courtroom.
In opening remarks yester- day, prosecutors said Cosby’s previous admissions of sharing incapacitating drugs including Quaaludes with multiple women before sex, showed his predilection to similar behaviour to that which both Ms Constand and Ms Johnson allude.
“Trust, betrayal and the inability to consent — that’s what this case is about,” said Assistant District Attorney Kristen Feden.
“This is a case about a man — this man — who used his power and his fame and his previously practised method of placing a young, trusting woman in an incapacitated state so he could sexually pleasure himself, so she couldn’t say no.”