Judge: I Outed Cosby for Hypocrisy

Bill Cosby’s role as a “public moralist” is the reason a judge said he unsealed court documents that revealed Cosby admitting under oath to drugging women in order to have sex with them. Cosby’s controversial 2004 speech—in which he lambasted black parents for “getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake”—was cited by Judge Eduardo Robreno. The Associated Press had a right to see the documents not because Cosby is a public figure, Robreno wrote, but because “the defendant has donned the mantle of public moralist and mounted the proverbial electronic or print soap box to volunteer his views on, among other things, child-rearing, family life, education, and crime.” Robreno continued: “To the extent that Defendant has freely entered the public square and ‘thrust himself into the vortex of [these public issues],’ he has voluntarily narrowed the zone of privacy that he is entitled to claim.”