Bill Cosby Speaks from Prison: When I Come Up For Parole, They Will NOT Hear ME Say I Have Remorse

Bill Cosby

Bill Cosby Speaks from Prison: When I Come Up For Parole, They Will NOT Hear ME Say I Have Remorse

Bill Cosby is breaking his silence. The 82-year-old is currently sentenced at SCI-Phoenix, a maximum-security Pennsylvania penitentiary near Philadelphia. During the conversation, Bill Cosby’s spokesman Andrew Wyatt remained on the call as the legendary comedian and actor explained that he fully anticipates serving his entire sentence, saying he’s not guilty and will never admit to something he didn’t do. He tells Black Press USA,

“I have eight years and nine months left. 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.”

Bill Cosby mugshot

He said his trials were unfair:

“It’s all a set up. That whole jury thing. They were imposters.

“Look at the woman who blew the whistle,” he said, alluding to the potential juror who overheard a seated juror proclaim before the trial that,

“he’s guilty, we can all go home now.”

Cosby continued,

“Then she went in and came out smiling, it’s something attorneys will tell you is called a payoff. I know what they’ve done to my people. But my people are going to view me and say, ‘that boy looks good. That boy is strong.’ I have too many heroes that I’ve sat with. Too many heroes whom I listened to like John Henrik Clarke, Kenneth Clark, and Dorothy Height. Those people are very strong, and they saw the rejection of their people. This is political. I can see the whole thing.”

During the conversation, he refers to his small cell as ‘my penthouse’ and says,

“I am a privileged man in prison”.

He also says he remains concerned for all of Black America.

“They are under siege. This thing with the drugs and the different pockets of the neighborhoods where it’s going on. When you look at what drugs are doing… things that make these people drive around and shoot into crowds. The insanity of what is the cause to the brain by all the drugs these people are dealing with. It’s exactly what I warned them about in 2004. They’ve thrown education out the window. They’ve thrown respect for the family out the window, and they’re blaming each other for what’s going on. There is post-traumatic stress syndrome, and there are also bad manners.”

A weekly highlight for Cosby since his incarceration, has been the reform program, Mann Up, where he is often the featured speaker.

“I don’t belong to the Mann Up Association, but it’s a privilege to come in and speak. I never wanted them to lord me up (be put on a pedestal). This is a great privilege.”

The program serves to encourage and empower African American men to strive for self-respect and dignity, and to put their family first.

Cosby stated that he believes he’s in the right place at the right time because he’s spent his life and career trying to reach African American men.

“I’m looking at a state [Pennsylvania] that has a huge number of prisons, and the one I’m in, thankfully, has the largest population of African Americans. These are guys who are also from Philadelphia, where I grew up. Many of them are from the neighborhood. Michael Eric Dyson said ‘Bill Cosby is rich and forgot where he came from.’ That’s not true. I’m not calling him a liar; I’m saying that’s not true. What I’m saying is that it’s not the same neighborhood as it was when I was coming up. The influx of drugs and what they’ve done with their own history. If they would pay attention to these things and put education first and respect for others first…it’s almost insane to hear someone say they don’t know how to be a father. As I said earlier, the revolution is in the home, and we’ve got to put it there. Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On,’ is very prophetic in that too many of us are dying in these neighborhoods. Too many of us dying and, another quote from the song, is ‘we’ve got to find a way.’”

He said the shelving of his iconic “The Cosby Show” is proof that those in power have long conspired to remove anything positive from the Black community.

“When ‘The Cosby Show’ came on with the Huxtables, just think about it. While it was running, other networks and even the media were doing jobs on trying to belittle whatever it represented. While new shows were coming and we had gone off the air – this is the worst time in the history of television – I remember hearing shows coming on advertising saying this is not ‘The Cosby Show,’ which is an indictment in itself. They did not like what ‘The Cosby Show’ looked like for us, and many of us traded into it. Now, look at what has happened. They’ve taken everything that I’ve done and swept it into a place where it would not be shown. Thank goodness for TV One and BET, but we’ve got to respect ourselves. We’ve got to have a very, very strong respect for our history.”

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