In his first interview since being sentenced, Bill Cosby says he doesn’t expect to show remorse at parole time
Nov 26, 2019, 6:15 AM
In his first interview since he was sentenced to prison for sexual assault, comedian Bill Cosby said he doesn't expect to express remorse when it comes time for his parole. Mark Makela/POOL/AP
(CNN) — In his first interview since he was sentenced to prison for sexual assault, comedian Bill Cosby said he doesn’t expect to express remorse when it comes time for his parole.
“I have eight years and nine months left,” Cosby said, according to an article by National Newspaper Publishers Association’s BlackPressUSA.com. “When I come up for parole, they’re not going to hear me say that I have remorse. I was there. I don’t care what group of people come along and talk about this when they weren’t there. They don’t know.”
Cosby, 82, gave the website the exclusive interview from SCI Phoenix, a state prison near Collegeville, Pennsylvania, where he is serving three to 10 years for drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand at his home in 2004.
In the article, Cosby referred to his jail cell as “my penthouse,” and said he was in good spirits in the prison.
Cosby filed an appeal in June arguing his criminal conviction was flawed because the testimony of five accusers was “strikingly dissimilar” to that of Constand.
Cosby said unless he is successful in his appeal, he expects to serve his full sentence, according to the article. Cosby said he wasn’t guilty, the article reported.
Cosby called back multiple times to conduct the interview with BlackPressUSA.com because of time restrictions on inmate phone calls, the article said. The website posted a portion of the interview online. In that clip, Cosby talked about his work with black inmates.
The actor works with them through a prison reform program called Mann Up, the article said.
“I’ve got a wife and a family, and friends, not in prison, who are so happy that I have something, that my spirit is up,” Cosby said, according to a recording posted with the article.
Referring to his session with prisoners, Cosby told BlackPressUSA.com, “I go into my penthouse and I lay down and I start to think, now how can I repeat the message, and say it and give it to them on Saturday … so that they will hear and feel things.”
Cosby’s spokesman, Andrew Wyatt, told CNN in a phone interview on Monday the actor “feels that he is a privileged man in that prison. Because they cannot break him or his mind.”
Wyatt was on the phone call, the BlackPressUSA.com article said.
In 2004, Cosby, a Temple University trustee, gave Constand, a Temple employee, pills to incapacitate her and then sexually assaulted her. She told police in 2005 about the incident but prosecutors declined to press charges, and they settled the case in civil court a year later.
A decade later, dozens of women came forward to say Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted them over his decades as a powerful media figure.
Constand’s was the only one of those cases that occurred within the statute of limitations. A new team of prosecutors took up the case and, relying on Constand’s and Cosby’s statements in a civil deposition, arrested him in December 2015.
Cosby’s first criminal trial ended in a hung jury. He was convicted in April 2018 of three counts of aggravated indecent assault for drugging and assaulting Constand in the first high-profile celebrity criminal trial of the #MeToo era.
Cosby was sentenced in September 2018.
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