Names and faces
Samantha Bee apologized to Ivanka Trump and viewers on Thursday for using an obscenity to describe the daughter and adviser to President Donald Trump during a segment of her TBS comedy show. Bee said her language was “inappropriate and inexcusable. I crossed a line, and I deeply regret it,” she said. On Wednesday, toward the end of a segment about President Trump’s immigration policies on her show, Full Frontal, Bee called Ivanka Trump a vulgar slur as she urged her to “Put on something tight and low-cut” and speak to her father about policies that separate children from their parents when they enter the country illegally. TBS issued a statement saying Bee was right to apologize. “It was our mistake, too, and we regret it,” the network said. Nothing was said about whether Bee or the show would face disciplinary action. Coming two days after ABC canceled Roseanne following a racist tweet about former adviser to President Barack Obama Valerie Jarrett, Bee’s remark was immediately seized upon by critics who believe that offensive language by liberals is not viewed as harshly. White House press secretary Sarah Sanders called Bee’s language “vile and vicious” and said executives at TBS and corporate parent Time Warner “must demonstrate that such explicit profanity about female members of this administration will not be condoned.” Ari Fleischer, former White House press secretary under President George W. Bush, tweeted that the mainstream media’s is applying a double standard. “There’s no uprising against Bee,” Fleischer wrote. “Why? … Because the MSM protects Obama and his aides, but not Trump. The hypocrisy is sickening.”
The woman whose allegations that Bill Cosby drugged and assaulted her led to his conviction said the pills he gave her made her feel like a “limp noodle,” leaving her helpless to fend off the 2004 attack. Andrea Constand, 45, a former Temple University sports administrator, spoke to NBC News in her first interview since a jury convicted The Cosby Show star of three counts of aggravated indecent assault. Constand’s comments closely tracked what she said on the witness stand at Cosby’s trials as she described how Cosby knocked her out with three blue pills he called “your friends,” then attacked her at his suburban Philadelphia home. “My mind is saying, ‘Move your hands. Kick. Can you do anything? I don’t want this. Why is this person doing this?’ And me not being able to react in any specific way,” Constand said in the taped interview, a brief clip of which aired on NBC’s Today show on Thursday. The full interview is due to air tonight on the network’s Dateline show. Cosby, who turns 81 in July, has said his sexual encounter with Constand was consensual. He’s confined to his home awaiting sentencing.