Comedian Roseanne Barr, in an interview with Access Hollywood, has said that she and other people working in the entertainment industry knew all about the allegations surrounding Bill Cosby.
Woah! Wait until you hear @therealroseanne‘s no holds Barr’d claims on Bill Cosby. http://t.co/6ayndpgMeG #Access pic.twitter.com/wXQscVhTih
— Access Hollywood (@accesshollywood) January 29, 2015
“We all heard it for a long time, and it surprises nobody,” she said, speaking of Bill’s sexual assaults on numerous women throughout his career.
“We all know women who know somebody, if they didn’t go through it themselves with Bill Cosby,” she said. “There are hardly any women — hairdressers, waitresses, working women — who don’t know somebody (affected by the allegations).”
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She points out that it wasn’t until a man mentioned Bill’s rape past that people and the media paid serious attention.
USAtoday.com reports:
The man in question is comedian Hannibal Buress, who condemned Cosby as a “rapist” during a performance in Philadelphia, Cosby’s hometown, in October.
When a video of Buress calling out Cosby was posted on Philadelphia Magazine’s website, it went viral, thus directing new attention to old allegations first made public nearly 10 years ago.
Now everybody’s talking about Cosby, after more than two dozen women have come forward in the past three months to accuse him of drugging and raping them in episodes dating to the late 1960s.
Barr is not alone. Comedian Patton Oswalt also says the Cosby allegations were well known among comics.
“It was a very badly kept secret in the comedian world, and a lot of us would talk about it. (Comedian/documentarian) Bobcat Goldthwait would mention it all the time,” he said on the You Make It Weird podcast with Pete Holmes in December.
Barr, who took heat on Twitter last year for joking about the Cosby allegations, is taking the matter more seriously now. She says she’s not given up hope that Cosby could repair some of the damage, including by compensating his accusers.
“I have hopes for this great comic,” she said. “I think he could make it clean, make it right. I think he could do that. There are so many ways — he’s got a billion bucks.”
He could do a lot for himself just by “saying I’m sorry,” she said.
She also tweeted about “redemption.”
