Phylicia Rashad, who played Bill Cosby’s TV wife for 12 years on two different hit shows, spoke out on Wednesday shortly after the comedian’s sexual assault conviction was overturned by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. The news came as an unwelcome shock to many in Hollywood, but Rashad was overjoyed.
“FINALLY!!!!” she wrote on Twitter. “A terrible wrong is being righted- a miscarriage of justice is corrected!”
While the comments on Rashad’s tweet were closed and unviewable save for people Rashad follows, less than an hour after she posted her thoughts, there were over 10,000 retweets with commentary on them. The term “Claire Huxtable,” the name of Rashad’s Cosby Show character, was quickly trending in Twitter.
Bill Cosby’s Release From Prison Prompts Strong Reactions In Hollywood
Writer and producer Eric Haywood — Manifest, Power, Empire — said that, as a result of people retweeting Rashad’s post, his timeline “is filled with that big-ass photo of that rapist smh.”
Cosby was sentenced to three to 10 years in prison, and has been serving time at Pennsylvania’s State Correctional Institution at Phoenix. He had been found guilty in his second trial for the 2004 rape of former Temple University employee Andrea Constand. Cosby, 83, has maintained that the engaged in consensual relations.
“Cosby’s convictions and judgment of sentence are vacated, and he is discharged,” the justices wrote in their opinion. The ruling means that the actor can not be charged for the rape of Constand again. There is the potential that the overturn opinion could be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but that is highly unlikely and doubtful that the Nation’s highest court would even take the case.
More than 60 women have claimed that Cosby drugged and assaulted them over the decades with a similar combo of pills and alcohol as used on Constand. Some of those women were among the onlookers at the two trials and the sentencing hearing in the fall of 2018. Additionally, Judge Steven O’Neill allowed current Montgomery County DA Kevin Steele in the second trial to have five other accusers, including ex-America’s Next Top Model judge Janice Dickinson, take the stand and tell their stories of being assaulted by once beloved Cosby.
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