Lawyer: Bill Cosby Documents Not The "Smoking Gun" Everyone Making Out To Be
By Chris Stigall
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Documents from a 2005 testimony have been released by the Associated Press(AP) that showed Bill Cosby obtained quaaludes with the intent to give them to women.
Director and chief counsel at Balanced Scales Legal Services out of Pittsburgh, Josh Smith told Talk Radio 1210 WPHT morning host Chris Stigall that the does not feel that these documents get you any closer to proving that Bill Cosby's guilty of raping women, saying that we still only have allegations and nothing in the released testimony "provides any kind of evidence of his guilt."
"One of the biggest problems is none of these allegations can be litigated anymore. Some are thirty years old, forty years old. When someone is raped, you have two ways of dealing with that, you can pursue a criminal complaint with the police—the police did investigate a lot of these charges, they didn't bring any charges—or you can bring a civil case. Those are your remedies. If you wait too long, you lose those remedies. See the problem now, is that anyone can say anything, he can be accused of anything, these allegations cannot be sort of verified under oath in any way and he can't defend himself. ...It really sort of puts Bill Cosby in an unfair position here. A lot of these allegations are are very vague. We have a lot of this, 'I was drugged so I don't remember anything.' Well, that's very convenient."
Smith compares it to the Michael Jackson child molestation case, saying that "Was he a child molester? Absolutely. Was there enough evidence to convict him? No, the jury made the right call on that. There simply wasn't enough evidence to rise to the level of guilty beyond a reasonable doubt."
He feels that somebody at the AP wanted to make this story appear more concrete and damaging to Bill Cosby than it actually is.
"What I saw was a pattern of behavior on the part of the AP, that leads me to believe that they were trying to sell this as a smoking gun and it really isn't...All that we can gather from this transcript is that Bill Cosby likes to get high before he has sex."