Phylicia Rashad, who played Bill Cosby's television wife on the hit 1980s sitcom "The Cosby Show," is defending Cosby following allegations leveled by numerous women.
Credit: Jennifer Brett
Credit: Jennifer Brett
"Forget these women," Rashad told Showbiz 411. "What you're seeing is the destruction of a legacy. And I think it's orchestrated. I don't know why or who's doing it, but it's the legacy. And it's a legacy that is so important to the culture."
The reporter happened to run into Rashad at an event Paramount held to promote "Selma," and the actress was not eager to get drawn into the controversy.
“I don’t want to become part of the public debate,” she told Showbiz 411.
But she energetically defended her TV husband.
“Someone is determined to keep Bill Cosby off TV,” alluding to people other than the women. “And it’s worked. All his contracts have been cancelled.”
Last month Cosby's daughter, designer Evin Cosby, thanked supporters and blasted the media amid allegations from a growing list of women that Cosby drugged them or made unwanted advances in decades past.
Also last month, Los Angeles prosecutors declined to file any charges against the comedian and sitcom star after Judy Huth claimed he molested her around 1974.
Cosby sccusers include morning show host Kathie Lee Gifford, who says Cosby once tried to kiss her, decades ago, and supermodel Beverly Johnson, who said in a piece for Vanity Fair that he drugged her when she was auditioning for his hit 1980s show "The Cosby Show."
Evin Cosby is an alum of Spelman College in Atlanta, where the Cosby Chair for the Humanities -- a prestigious endowed professorship funded in part by a $20 million gift that Cosby and his wife, Camille Cosby, gave to the school in the 1980s -- has been suspended indefinitely amid the controversy.
Camille Cosby has spoken out in her husband's defense, saying he is "a wonderful husband, father and friend. He is the man you thought you knew."
