DEFENSE

Cosby Lawyer: Rape Claims Are a ‘Witch Hunt’

Says they’re legally irrelevant.

On Friday, Bill Cosbys lawyer Monique Pressley said that the more than 35 women who’ve come forward to accuse him of rape going back to the 1960s are engaged in “persecution tantamount to witch hunt” because the allegations are legally irrelevant today. Pressley explained her reasoning on Huffington Post Live (at about the 40-minute mark):

“In a court of law, the entire situation will never be brought forward for the purposes of justice. So the only way for a woman to get the justice that she seeks... is to come forward. Even if the reasons that the woman did not do that [earlier] are legitimate ones, what cannot happen in my opinion in the United States is that 40 years later there is a persecution tantamount to a witch hunt where there was no prosecution timely and there was no civil suit timely. And there’s not any testimony or any accusation from any of these women that Mr. Cosby bound them, gagged them, prevented them in any way from coming forward and saying what their truth was at the time.”