“If you’re going to be a public moralist, you accept
a moral obligation: Be what you said you were. You don’t have to be perfect;
perfection is not within the human repertoire. But there is a vast gulf between
‘not perfect’ and ‘accused serial rapist.’
“Cosby’s failure leaves his career, reputation and
legacy in shambles — and increases cynicism in a nation where that quality is
not in short supply. He has left us with one fewer repository for public
trust.”— Leonard Pitts Jr., “Bill Cosby’s Moralizing Undercut by Immoral Acts,” The Miami Herald, July 11, 2015
Pitts’ summary of Bill Cosby is not in the past tense, but it might as well be. The
last details of the comedian-actor’s obituary remain to be written, but his
career as an entertainer is effectively over, following release of a deposition
in which he admitted to the act that he and his retinue had adamantly denied
for years: i.e., supplying Quaaludes to women with the intention of having sex
with them.
Given Cosby’s age (78), his multi-decade sexual
offenses, and the most egregious blame-the-victim strategy in many a year, he
won’t live long enough to be part of our cultural discourse anymore, let alone
earn public forgiveness. If the stress doesn’t get him in the meantime, he’ll
be an unwilling witness to the division of his own spoils, as enough women to
fill the Playboy Mansion line up for a cut of a fortune accumulated over a
half century.
The latest revelation, which attracted as much news
coverage as the arms deal with Iran, should not have come as a surprise—indeed,
in a prior post, I noted just what a
suspension of disbelief was required to accept Cosby’s denial of the claims of
more than 20 different women.
But the news seems to have broken the back of even last-ditch defenders such as Whoopi Goldberg, in much the same way that the release of the
“smoking gun” Watergate tape destroyed any chance that Richard Nixon could
survive an impeachment attempt.
Yet, while our understanding of what happened with
the celebrity has concluded, Act II of this legal drama has just begun. Now,
his courtroom handlers will have to explain what possessed them to abet what in
retrospect looks like a scorched-earth policy.
Specifically, they themselves this time should
provide answers under oath—about how, despite a confidentiality agreement,
Cosby and his representatives continued to mischaracterize his testimony in the
2006 case involving former Temple University employee Andrea Constand. These misrepresentations involved nothing more or
less than spinning the truth until it was downright dizzy.
Lawyers do not ask themselves too many questions
about the guilt of the people they represent; the profession, after all,
believes that the client is entitled to the best defense (and if guilty clients
were never represented, the entire legal profession would go hungry).
But somewhere along the line, a hyperaggressive
defense in Cosby’s case increasingly came close to shading into what attorneys
call “prevarication.”
This is what happens with the art of spin. We have
seen it happen all too often already, in politics, starting with Richard Nixon
and Watergate, then practiced to varying degrees by all Presidents since then.
In this media age, lawyers have become not just cunning courtroom practitioners
but, in effect, spokespeople for their silenced and cowed clients.
But now, the defense of the indefensible has taken a
dangerous turn. Public trust corrodes when representatives of our legal system
not only file superfluous motions or sow doubt among jurors about a witness’s
recollections, but also offer misleading accounts about legal outcomes.
Comments late last year by Cosby lawyer Martin
Singer were taken apart in a devastating post by Jack Marshall on his blog “Ethics Alarms.” Far from being “fantastical,”
as Singer had claimed, Marshall pointed out just how many victims' claims against Cosby there were. And,
questioning in 2014 why so many women had “made no reports to law enforcement
or asserted civil claims,” as Singer did, is a stretch of the circumstances,
given that Cosby settled Constand’s lawsuit—as well the entertainer might,
given that the plaintiff had 13 alleged Cosby victims prepared to testify on
her behalf.
“If the only way a lawyer can represent his client
zealously is to actively endorse and abet the client’s lies, then the lawyer
should withdraw from the representation,” Marshall wrote then. Singer’s bashing
of Cosby’s accusers earned an “Unethical Quote of the Week” post from Marshall.
When Cosby’s victims are done with him, they should
turn on his legal jackal. Singer’s Web site links to articles hailing him as
being among the “Attack Dogs of LA Law” and “Guard Dog to the Stars (Legally
Speaking).” More and more, these headlines look less like compliments and more like evidence to be presented before an ethics panel.
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