http://www.thedailybeast.com/articl...ortrait-from-track-star-to-ugly-sweaters.html
The biographer talking in September:
The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal reviews both dinged you for not including the sexual assault allegations against Cosby and the fact that he had settled a lawsuit with at least one of the accusers. Why didn’t you include that?
Three reasons: One, I didn’t want to write a tell-all. I wanted to write mostly about his professional career and the impact that has had.
Two, his representatives were very clear that to the degree I did get into his private life that I had to have iron-clad, independent reporting. In the case of his relationship with the mother of Autumn Jackson, who claimed to be his daughter and tried to extort money from him and was eventually convicted, I wrote at length about that case. I obtained court records, and
a long, confessional interview he did with Dan Rather that CNN never aired. With the other allegations, there were no other witnesses.
The third reason is that I knew that apart from the legal issues involved,
if I got into any detail about those allegations in a he-said-she-said way, it would open the door for everyone who writes about this book to just repeat those allegations, and I didn’t want to be responsible for that.
Did you get the impression that Cosby would litigate anything he found in your book to be controversial?
I got the shot across the bow at the beginning, and I knew from his history that he tended to be very litigious. I knew from his representatives that he was not going to talk about sexual matters.
They were clear that if I was going to say anything about it, I had to be on very solid ground. I sent his publicist a galley of the book after it was finished. They weren’t wild about the fact that I was writing about Autumn Jackson, but they didn’t try to make me take it out. They knew I had solid sources. I personally took that as a vindication of the care I had taken in making sure I had solid, independent sourcing.
I can't imagine anyone getting in any legal trouble over sources if they refer to court documents, formerly published DA statements, MSM interviews and that kind of thing that was already in the press before, and remember to include comments from Cosby's lawyers?
It sounds to me like he was scared into silence, it's not like there weren't acceptable sources from the Constand case. Not as proof of rapes but as proof of allegations and proof of legal proceedings. There was a woman accusing him of rape, the case was not prosecuted due to lack of evidence, the civil case was settled and Cosby was never convicted of anything, that sort of thing. Pretty well documented I'd think.
