Comedian dodges direct questions like a pro

May 15, 2015 15:05 GMT  ·  By

It’s been many months since the Bill Cosby rape scandal blew up, but it seems that he’s determined not to say anything else that his attorneys haven’t said already - even on those occasions when he specifically promises to answer questions about the rape allegations made against him.

ABC’s Good Morning America secured an interview with Cosby on the occasion of a new charity partnership between him and Black Belt Community Foundation, and they managed to get his permission to ask him questions about the scandal.

He agreed, but he must have planned not to answer them.

Cosby dodges questions like a pro

Asked point-blank what he’d say if kids came up and told him that their mother had told them she’d been raped by the comedian, Cosby almost got tangled and tripped on words in his attempt to avoid an answer.

His message was that the almost 40 women who have come out of the woodwork to accuse him of drugging and abusing them were lying. He’d advise anyone not to believe anything in the media, just the things that came directly from him; so if kids came up to him and told him that, he’d urge them to listen to him.

“I have been in this business 52 years and I've never seen anything like this,” the comedian continues, as you can see in the video below. “Reality is the situation and I can't speak.”

Cosby avoids terms like “victim” or any other that might convey the idea that he considers himself some sort of target of a vicious attack, but that’s what he’s saying: he is innocent but people are still coming after him, and they must be in cahoots with the haters online.

This begs the question: if he’s innocent, why doesn’t he just say so directly?

An old but still very controversial case

Rumors about Cosby’s behavior around women have been around for a very long time, for years, but they picked up last year, through an Internet meme. In the following months and up to the present day, more accusers have stepped forward, some of them recalling incidents as old as 30 years.

Cosby never addressed the accusations personally, but his wife did say that he was being discriminated against because he was black, arguing that he was the real victim in this. His attorneys insisted there was no truth to the claims, while struggling to settle the cases out of court.

That Cosby was a victim of some sort of extortion plot would have made sense if his accusers weren’t in the dozens, and of course, if they’d asked for money or some kind of settlement. They didn’t.

So what to you make of his noncommittal denial?