Confused about Bill Cosby's legal problems?
The legal assault on accused serial rapist Bill Cosby continues to intensify even as the growing army of accusers intensifies the public shaming of the 78-year-old entertainment icon.
Friday could be an especially bad day for Cosby: He's being forced by one of his accusers, Judy Huth, and her unrelenting crusader-lawyer, Gloria Allred, into appearing for a deposition in Los Angeles — a deposition he has fought mightily to avoid. So far, he's failed.
By 7:30 pm ET, there was still no confirmation that the secret deposition had taken place, and even the usually-voluble Allred had buttoned up under court order, declining to say anything about where or when.
More than two dozen Cosby accusers to get prime-time attention
The same evening, NBC News is presenting a special Dateline show that brings together 27 of the more than 50 women who have accused him in the last year of drugging and sexually assaulting them decades ago in alleged encounters dating back to the mid-1960s.
Although the women are expected to repeat stories they have already made public in different forums in recent months, the visuals — more than two dozen women seated together in theater-like rows in a studio — won't be good for Cosby's already battered image.
But very little happening of late has been good for Cosby. He has denied all wrongdoing and he has not been charged with a crime, but that's about the only thing he has going for him in the current environment. Let's answer the big questions left hanging:
1. How many civil lawsuits are pending against Cosby?
Five that we know of. Six if you count one that's been revived from 2005.
Update: A new lawsuit was filed Thursday, Oct. 15, by Cosby accuser Renita Hill of Pittsburgh, who accuses Cosby of repeatedly drugging and sexually assaulting her in the 1980s when she was a teenager on a children's TV show he hosted in Pittsburgh.
Hill is alleging she was defamed, placed in a "false light" and emotionally distressed by statements by Cosby, his wife of 51 years, Camille Cosby, and his lawyer, Martin Singer, after Hill came forward, in a TV interview in Pittsburgh, in November 2014, to join a growing chorus of Cosby accusers with her own story.
Hill's is the third lawsuit against Cosby to allege defamation.
In the other cases, a group of three accusers is suing him for defamation in Massachusetts, where he lives. Cosby had repeatedly tried to get the case dismissed but a judge refused two weeks ago to throw the case out. Their attorney, Joseph Cammarata, has said he will seek to depose Cosby within weeks.
Ex-model Janice Dickinson, represented by lawyer Lisa Bloom (Allred's daughter), is suing him for defamation in Los Angeles.
Aspiring model Chloe Goins, represented by Florida lawyer Spencer Kuvin, filed a new suit against him in Los Angeles on Tuesday alleging sexual assault. (Goins also hopes the Los Angeles district attorney will one day file criminal charges against Cosby over their alleged 2008 encounter, the most recent of the accusations against Cosby.)
Andrea Constand, represented by Philadelphia lawyer Dolores Troiani, filed suit against him in 2005 in Philadelphia. That suit was settled in 2006 and supposedly sealed, but when damaging excerpts of the deposition in that case leaked earlier this year, Cosby's legal team went back to court to fight over the leak and a possible reopening of the case. That's still pending.
2. When will the public get to read Cosby's Friday deposition in the Judy Huth lawsuit?
Maybe never, if Cosby gets his way, but definitely not until Christmas. After the leaked deposition in the Constand case, he would not want public airing of his answers to sensitive questions about what he did or didn't do in 1974 at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles.
What's that case about again? Huth's lawsuit alleges sexual battery when she was 15. Despite multiple attempts by the Cosby legal team, led by celebrity lawyer Marty Singer, to get it thrown out and to stop the deposition, that case is moving forward. Cosby is scheduled to be deposed by Allred and Huth on Friday.
One thing's for certain: If this deposition is ever made public, it won't be until around Christmas. Why? Cosby won one concession from Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Craig Karlan on Wednesday: Testimony in the deposition will be sealed at least until Dec. 22, when there will be a hearing on whether to continue the seal (as Cosby wants) or allow the deposition to be made public (as Allred wants). Assuming, of course, it doesn't leak before that.
3. How many women have publicly come forward to accuse Cosby?
That depends on who is counting. By some counts, the total number, including some who have declined to give their full name, is short of 50; by other counts, the total has passed 50. As recently as Oct. 2, new accusers were coming forward.
Three new Bill Cosby accusers come forward
Their stories are all different in detail — who they were, how they met Cosby, what they say happened, where it happened — but are similar in pattern, involving alleged drugging into unconsciousness followed by sexual assault. Another thing they have in common is that most of the alleged encounters took place so long ago that criminal charges are unlikely.
4. What effect will repeated retelling of their stories on TV have?
So far, nothing legally significant, although the pressure on Cosby has cranked up every time there's a mass airing of Cosby accusers. The NBC Dateline interview is only the latest.
The cable network A&E interviewed 12 accusers last month. New York magazine got 35 of them to tell their stories and pose for a dramatic cover in July.
Cosby accusers line up to tell their stories again on cable
Multiple media publications have interviewed multiple accusers or published their first-person accounts, such as Barbara Bowman in the Washington Post.
5. Which celeb is Cosby's sharpest critic, refusing to let go?
That would have to be Judd Apatow, who has expressed his disgust with Cosby in all sorts of venues, even when he wasn't asked. He has repeatedly called on the public to "believe" the accusers in what he himself has described as "long late-night rants" against Cosby on Twitter.
Apatow continues criticism of Cosby
On Oct. 4, Apatow was back on the topic, when he was honored at the annual fundraising brunch by the victim-supporting Rape Foundation in Beverly Hills. When Apatow spoke, he called out Hollywood's failure to do anything about Cosby once the allegations against him resurfaced last fall.
"Almost nobody in our community spoke out against him," Apatow said. "To this very day, very few people with power have gone on record and said he's an evil person — and I stand with his victims."
Apatow repeated his standing demand: Support the accusers.
"We need to intervene when someone is crossing the line, and we need to be role models for respectful relationships," he said. "We all need to support the victims and tell them we care about you because if we don't, then people will not come forward, and the abuse and the violence will continue."
6. Does Cosby have any defenders left?
Precious few, most of them his family and a few of his former co-stars on The Cosby Show.
Keshia Knight Pulliam, who played his youngest daughter, Rudy, on the show, is one of his defenders (at least of his legacy). In an interview with The Grio on Tuesday, she said Cosby's legacy can never be taken from him.
"You can't take back the impact that it's had on generations of kids, and it's continuing to have such a positive impact on them," she said. "So I feel like the place that it has in people's hearts is such a nostalgic part of childhood and beyond, it's going to be difficult to take back those memories."
And she reiterated her comments in January that the allegations against him bear no resemblance to the man she knows and loves.
Keshia Knight Pulliam: Scandalized Cosby 'not the man I know'
"My comment doesn't really change, because, still, regardless of how many (accusers)…that's just not the man I know. That's not who I experienced. I never had that interaction with him, so I can't speak to it."
Pulliam's fellow Cosby Show alum, Malcolm-Jamal Warner, who played her brother Theo Huxtable, also has defended Cosby in the past, but he now thinks the show's legacy is tarnished.
"My biggest concern is when it comes to images of people of color on television and film, no matter what ... negative stereotypes of people of color, we've always had The Cosby Show to hold up against that," Warner said in an interview with the Associated Press. "And the fact that we no longer have that, that's the thing that saddens me the most because in a few generations the Huxtables will have been just a fairy tale."
