Whoopi Goldberg is supporting Bill Cosby even in the face of threats she says she has received.
“The View” co-host has long defended Cosby amid accusations of sexual assault from multiple women. But on Wednesday, she said on the show that she is increasingly taking heat for that stance.
“People have been coming after me and saying they’re going to snatch my family,” Goldberg said. “It’s like being Frankenstein, people coming after you with the fire, and they’re going to burn you.”
Cosby has never been criminally charged and has consistently denied any wrongdoing, and Goldberg invoked the legal phrase “innocent until proven guilty” in talking about the controversy. She also cited the 2006 case in which members of the Duke University men’s lacrosse team were falsely accused of rape.
“If you are the mother of a son, you want to keep innocent until proven guilty,” she said.
Goldberg is not the only celeb supporting Cosby.
Comedian Faizon Love defended him in November in a stream of expletive-laced tweets in which he took the alleged victims to task.
After the recent revelation that Cosby admitted in a deposition that he got prescription Quaaludes to give to women he wanted to have sex with, Love once again took to his Twitter account to berate people — especially the African-American community — for not supporting the legendary actor.
But not everyone is supporting the beleaguered star.
Singer and actress Jill Scott had been a vocal proponent of Cosby’s but recently changed her stance, tweeting, “Sadly his own testimony offers PROOF of terrible deeds, which is ALL I have ever required to believe the accusations.”