Taken verbatim from attorney Richard B. Herman, on CNN (excerpted, June 17, 2017):
Q (CNN) : So, Richard, uhm–would he stand a better chance to retry?
A (Herman): No, not necessarily, Fred. He (Kevin Steele, District Attorney) never looked at the case like a true district attorney. This was a politically motivated prosecution. The prior district attorney made the determination (that) they could not get the conviction, and therefore they did not allow Ms. Constand to be the witness in criminal charges against Mr. Cosby although that DA encouraged her to bring a civil litigation where the burden of proof is less. This district attorney (Steele) ran on a platform of indicting and prosecuting Mr. Cosby…He won, maybe on that provision alone–
CNN: Yeah.
Herman: And so he brings this litigation on facts and circumstances that took place fourteen years ago, where people have to testify to what happened then and after. There’s a lot of contradiction in (the) testimony and statements that were given, and the problem with the retrial here, Fred, is the problem they had during this trial. Ms. Constand had a relationship with Mr. Cosby. She had some 72 phone calls with him before the event took place–
CNN: That’s right.
Herman: Three meetings in his house, before the event took place.
CNN: That’s right.
Herman: Then subsequent to the alleged attack, Fred, six months later, she reached out to get tickets for her parents to see his show. That’s not consistent with someone who was sexually assaulted. No forensic evidence to prove Quaaludes, nothing at all.* This is a very difficult case to ever obtain a 12-0 conviction. (It’s) not gonna happen next time…
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*So in other words, this so-called “trial” was just another one of those good old fashioned, all-American, O.J. style legal lynchings that have been so popular throughout American history. In fact (as it turns out) the goddamned DA himself, Mr. Steele, ran his entire political campaign on putting a high profile black man behind bars, which to me sounds like the kind of shit that white Southern demagogues (like Cotton Ed Smith and his ilk)
used to do about a century ago. This trial is simply the 21st Century version of the notorious Scottsboro Boys case. Professor Black Truth, a vlogger on YouTube, put it very succinctly when he said that Cosby could have been any high profile black man–the whole idea was to disgrace black men across the board by picking one of the most powerful. “It’s the symbolism of it,” he said. “After all, you go after some Pookie or Ray Ray nobody’s going to care. But if you go after a black man who’s got some name recognition and notoriety, that’s the kind of racial coding white people understand and go for. They like that, they know what that means.”
What that means, of course, is that if a black man goes too far in American society–if he dare imagine himself to be the equal to a white man in all respects, or just any respect–white (colonial) society will attempt to slap him back down in “his place,” which could be anything from a job in a dishroom to a prison cell to a six foot hole in the ground. (Or, he could shine shoes at your local Greyhound bus station, grinning and giggling the whole time. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?) Cosby’s own elitism and snobbery notwithstanding, many whites loathed the fact that he was wealthy and powerful (nothing new there: many, if not most, of the lynchings that took place in America in the Bad Old Days were motivated out of economic jealousy, and not only of Blacks), and above all, the thought that Cosby actually had the money to buy NBC must have infuriated many white Americans beyond reason, though they tried not to show it.
Speaking of the Scottsboro Boys case (they are pictured above)–Mychal Denzel Smith, a NYT bestselling author and sometime writer for The Guardian (UK), said in a tweet that we should not make the Cosby case out to be another Scottsboro. Maybe such a comparison is jumping the gun, but it sure as hell smells like Scottsboro all over again: Scottsboro lite. Cosby himself has said as much without making that exact reference, which, given Cosby’s myopia on the true nature of American race prejudice, seems almost funny. (Three years earlier Smith had this to say concerning Cosby’s refusal to see yet another race-tinged court case–that of George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin–for what it really was: “What Cosby, and others who would have us focus less on Martin’s race and more on other factors contributing to his death, would prefer is that we operate as a color-blind society. But if we choose not to see race, then it is impossible to see actual racism – and there is plenty of it to go around.”)
Right-winger Newt Gingrich once talked “on code” to his white settler constituency with his feigned outrage at then-President Barack Obama for saying that if had a son, “he would look just like Trayvon.” (Of course, Moldy-fig Newton.) Gingrich and his ilk don’t mean what they say when they insist–in Newt’s words–“we should talk about being Americans.” Newt’s own track record, of course, suggests otherwise. In reality Gingrich and Company refuse to tell the difference between Cosby, Obama and Trayvon Martin, not to mention me, Mychal Smith, Professor Black Truth, Tupac, Pookie, Ray Ray and Rastus the Cream of Wheat man. All “coons” look alike to redneck settlers and those cuddly, soft-spoken, well-meaning, paternalistic center-left petty bourgies who love to call themselves our “friends.” We won’t get into the fact that all too often, less blacks can be found living in neighborhoods where the latter (left) congregate than among the former (hard right): even fucking Jim Goad can point that out. Besides, that is not the point at all.
There is an absurd irony of Dr. Cosby (we already forgot he was a doctor) being caught in a race-tinged scandal organized by a troupe of America’s ugliest white women (with one
of America’s most crooked high-profile DAs). Cosby is now legally blind. There is a sad comeuppance (once again) in this fact. Cosby had long blinded himself–by public admission, anyway–as to just how virulent, deep-rooted, and tightly structured American racism really is–the kind of racism that historically reduced able-bodied black men to the point where they felt they needed to steal–perhaps to eat, perhaps just for kicks: either way, it really doesn’t matter, since it all adds up to the same thing. That a man would lose his life over such a thing–that U.S. law enforcement would see more value in a goddamned 99-cent slice of half-stale pound cake than an actual human being speaks volumes about the absolute inhumanity of American society. It should come as no surprise to anyone who has seen the US military’s actions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and countless other places. We do not need to go over US history with even a fine comb to turn up still more examples of the sheer callousness of these people (meaning Americans, of course, and certainly not just white Americans). But Cosby’s pound-cake speech treated the matter as if it were just a pathetic joke. “What,” said Cosby, “was he doing with a piece of pound cake in his hand?” Well, Cosby, why take a man’s life over a shitty piece of cake? Better yet–why is Kevin Steele trying to jug you based on a pack of convoluted lies?
A Black Writer in Berlin 