Michael Eric Dyson

by Is Bill Cosby Right?: Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?

  Despite his landmark television show, and despite writing the best-selling book Fatherhood, Cosby’s relationship to his daughter reflected the tensions that beset millions of other families, rich and poor, suburban and inner-city, and black and white—and brown, red and yellow, too.22 As it turns out, Cosby didn’t discover his daughter’s drug habit until she informed him.23 Cosby checked Erinn into Rhode Island’s Edgehill Newport Hospital and sought the advice of drug counselors and therapists for the proper response he should adopt. It was then that he decided that “tough love” was called for. “We love her and want her to get better, but we have to take a very firm, very tough stand that forces her to realize that no-one can fix her problems but her,” Cosby said. “She has to beat this on her own.”24

  Erinn admitted that she began experimenting with drugs at an early age.25 Her problems began at boarding school when her peers introduced her to marijuana, beer and vodka. When her parents insisted that she enroll at Spelman College—she took a year off before matriculating at the college her parents eventually blessed with an awe-inspiring contribution of $20 million—Erinn partied hard and eventually dropped out of school.26 At nineteen, she headed to New York to work as a waitress and continued her drug use before retreating to Rhode Island. When she left rehab, she fell back into her bad habits and began once more to take drugs.27 Cosby admitted that “he was at his wit’s end”—a position many parents come to—and told Redbook magazine that parents “have a dream of how to raise a child then all of a sudden they see it being crushed.”28

  But perhaps his family situation was a bit more complicated than good parent and bad child. When Erinn read what her father had to say about her to Christon in 1989, she was pained, but didn’t speak out until three years later. “All that stuff is his perspective,” Erinn claimed. “He was not there… . I had already hit my rock bottom without [my parents’] knowing about it. The only reason they knew I was doing drugs is because I told them. These aren’t things that are abnormal in any other family, but because of who I am, it’s a big deal.”29 But she couldn’t hide the hurt she felt when she read her father’s comments. “I think it’s really awful that he can say something like that, that makes him look like a saint and me look like a piece of shit. I didn’t use my boyfriends, they used me.”30 Erinn admitted that her parents had expectations that “didn’t fit my goals.” She also warned against conflating the Huxtables and the Cosby family. “The average family, if they’re not divorced, has a mother and father who come home every day. Mine didn’t… . When I’d see him, it was always about school. It wasn’t like, ‘Let’s talk, Dad… .’ We never were stable. During the week, you’d go to school, then you’re off on the weekend to wherever he was working.”31

  As a result, Erinn got very close to her grandparents, who offered love and care. After graduating from a Quaker boarding school and attending, and then leaving, Spelman—“I don’t like being in an environment with one race,” she said, while also detesting the efforts of sororities to recruit her and the spite of jealous classmates—she returned to Manhattan and continued her drug abuse. But where Cosby dismissed his daughter’s problem as behavioral, she saw in her drug use a quest for her father’s love. “I found myself surrounded by the wrong people. I used to live with wanting the … validation, especially from my dad, because he wasn’t there. I guess I wasn’t feeling confident, so you get involved with drugs.”32

  Erinn said that in treatment at the rehabilitation center, she owned up to many of her weaknesses and, equally important, discovered that she didn’t need her father’s validation, a prospect that, ironically, may have infuriated him more. “I think that’s what made him even more mad.” Although her parents were invited to join in family therapy, she claims they “never showed up… . I thought, ‘Who were the best people to go to when you’re crying out for help … ? He never had any interest in what I was doing… . Even the people at the rehab center were surprised, because they thought my parents would really want to know.” Despite the troubles they had been through, and despite talking mostly by phone—Erinn moved to Miami in the early 1990s—she still contended in 1992 that she and her parents loved each other.33

  Erinn’s move to Miami wasn’t motivated only by the desire to escape family troubles and a history of drug abuse, but also by the constant specter of paparazzi angling in trees outside her window for a shot—and a failed marriage in 1990. She was also trying to put behind her the memory of a tragic event that sent her to therapy: an alleged November 1989 sexual assault by boxer Mike Tyson when she was twenty-three years old. Erinn claimed that she and a female friend met the pugilist at a New York nightclub in the company of one of Erinn’s male friends. At 11:30 P.M., the foursome headed off in Tyson’s car to talk, and ended up at his New Jersey home for what she was told was a get-together. She felt safe because she was with friends, it wasn’t too late, and when they arrived at Tyson’s home, several cars were parked outside. But once inside, there was no one there; the cars obviously all belonged to Tyson. The boxer invited his guests to look around, and when Erinn stopped in a room to ask about boxing memorabilia, Tyson left the room. “I was still looking. I heard the door lock, and I turned around and the next thing I knew I was on the ground,” Erinn claimed. “He was groping.”34 Erinn said that Tyson kept her face to the floor, holding her down by the arms and covering her mouth. “He didn’t say anything to me basically. It was a lot of struggling and at one point I was able to scream. I had been trying to scream all the time. I was fighting for my life. I was terrified and I knew I had to do something. I am not going to sit there and let this guy do this.”35

  Erinn said that when a female member of Tyson’s household staff heard Erinn’s scream, she knocked on the door, prompting the boxer to let Erinn up, and she quickly ran away. Once downstairs, Erinn said she told her girlfriend she wanted to leave, even as she claimed that Tyson offered her and the household staff member money to keep quiet. When Erinn arrived at her parents’ home in New York, where she was living, she told them what had happened and they pledged to handle it. A couple of weeks later, Erinn claimed that Tyson confronted her in the same club, angry that she had told her parents and outraged that part of the agreement they allegedly extracted from him was to attend therapy for a year—an agreement Erinn claimed Tyson didn’t keep.36 Tyson was asked to leave the club. For a long time, Erinn did not speak publicly about the alleged incident, even when Tyson was on trial in 1992 for allegedly raping beauty contestant Desiree Washington, a silence she regretted. “I knew and I believed her. It stays with you. Seeing him every day on TV, I get angry. It is always going to be there… . I wish I had possibly gone to the police and pressed charges and maybe this would have prevented the whole thing from happening. At that time I was scared … and really didn’t want to deal with it.”37 Tyson denied the claim and his lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, issued a statement, saying that “Erinn Cosby’s three-year-old allegations are demonstrably false. We are reliably informed that Mike Tyson and Erinn Cosby were never alone in the same room together, and there are a number of witnesses who would so testify.”38 Erinn finally came forward after a former boyfriend threatened to sell the story to a tabloid if he wasn’t paid off. When she refused, the National Enquirer ran the story in April 1992, under the headline, “Bill Cosby’s Daughter—Mike Tyson Tried to Rape Me, Too!”39 When asked to comment, Cosby declined, saying through a spokesman, “It’s a family matter.”40

  Out of Erinn’s tragedy came some good: She appeared on a few talk shows, including Donahue, to give her side of the alleged Tyson assault, which forged a renewed relation with her father. “After I did Donahue, my dad thanked him for making it easier for me to say what I had to say, and was very proud of the way I came across. I think for the first time … he’s beginning to understand something. He has a lot of pride, and he’s not one to tell me, ‘Oh, Erinn, I’m really proud of you.’ He’ll have eight other people tell me before he would.”41

  Erinn’s strug
gles with alcohol and drug abuse point to internal issues she needed to confront, since, as both she and her father concluded, her problems grew less from addiction than from the personal choices she made. And her rebellion may have indeed called for the tough-love measures that Cosby sought to apply. It also appears that, at crucial points in her story, Erinn sought the love and affection of a father who, contrary to his public image, was endlessly absent and forbiddingly distant. Of course, that is often the price paid by the children of any prominent figure. But it seems that Cosby’s unwillingness to own even part of her drug drama—and his insistence that Erinn’s problems were wholly self-created, despite her contention that her abuse of alcohol and drugs was in part an attempt to fill in the void left by her father’s absence—suggest Cosby’s inability to believe that anything he did might have contributed to his daughter’s actions. This in no way relieves Erinn of responsibility for her actions, but it need not be an either-or proposition, so that Cosby fails to come to grips with the notion that actions he took—or, as it were, didn’t take—may have made his daughter more vulnerable to her demons. To own up to one’s direct, or even indirect, influence in another’s fate or fortune, without assuming undue praise or scorn for either, is a sign of moral maturity.

  If Cosby found it difficult to attend therapy with his daughter, as she claims, it might have stemmed from the fear of losing absolute parental authority in a therapeutic setting, which demands all participants be equal partners in struggling toward wholeness and truth. The therapeutic setting might encourage an empathy that one otherwise resists, or is incapable of achieving alone. While Cliff Huxtable may have been more willing to acknowledge his culpability while demanding responsibility from his child, Bill Cosby appears to have been incapable of such an admission. And if what Erinn says is true, that Cosby found it nearly impossible to tell her that he was proud of her, and it’s evident that he was, then he may have been plagued by the syndrome of the difficult admission—of love, of pride, of longing, of regret, of grief, of pain, of whatever emotion claims one’s attention—that affects so many parents and partners.

  It would be too easy to overinterpret, and hence misinterpret, the relation between Cosby’s apparent difficulties in his family life and his current assault on the poor. After all, he has been remarkably generous in giving millions to black colleges and causes. But it would not be contradictory to suggest that Cosby’s resistance to viewing shared responsibility as a mode of moral survival has an effect on how he has held the poor accountable for their plight without calculating the role of other factors—structural racism, economic inequality, public policy decisions and the like, factors I address in the last chapter. And neither would it require dime or pop psychology to conclude that the social scold possesses an unshakable belief in his correctness, an admirable trait in forging one’s path in the world when few others believe in you, as Cosby did in his early comedy career, but a less desirable feature as one tries to understand and address social phenomena like poverty. A lot more empathy—the kind that may have been helpful in his dealings with Erinn, a privileged child—is surely called for when addressing a population of severely underprivileged folk.

  Happily, Erinn’s relationship with her parents improved considerably; in October 1998, Jet magazine reported that Erinn wed Michael Canaday, an internal medicine physician, in a private ceremony at her parents’ Philadelphia home.42 And she has taken an active part in the “Hello Friend” foundation the Cosbys established in memory of their murdered son, Ennis, to help children with learning differences.43

  If Cosby was able to reconcile with Erinn, the failure to come to successful terms with another woman claiming to be his daughter led to a trial in court and perhaps Cosby’s most embarrassing episode: the allegation that he fathered a child out of wedlock—a claim he denied, but which forced him to confess his adultery. In a tragic confluence of sordid events, on the day Cosby lost his beloved son, Ennis, a doctoral student in education at Columbia University, in a racially charged murder in Los Angeles, Autumn Jackson, a twenty-two-year-old woman who claimed to be Cosby’s illegitimate daughter, demanded on the phone that the comedian pay her millions so she wouldn’t sell her story to the tabloid Globe. Two days later, Jackson and an acquaintance, Jose Medina, a fifty-one-year-old writer, were lured from their Los Angeles base to the New York offices of Cosby’s lawyer to sign what they believed was a multimillion-dollar settlement. They were arrested on the spot for extortion. Jackson had begun her extortion efforts in November of 1996, after she placed a call to one of Cosby’s representatives saying she had run out of money. (Cosby had been sending her money for years.) Cosby arranged for Jackson to receive $3,000, but that didn’t satisfy her, and she demanded more money in exchange for her silence.44 Jackson and Medina eventually concocted a scheme to extort $40 million from Cosby, but after he refused to pay, Jackson lowered the price to $30 million, and, ultimately, to $24 million.45

  Initially, Cosby and his spokesman David Brokaw “unequivocally and absolutely” denied that Jackson was his daughter, saying they had a birth certificate to prove their claim. Brokaw admitted that Cosby had paid Jackson’s educational expenses, as he had for numerous young people, but that he didn’t know how Cosby chose scholarship recipients or even how Jackson had been selected.46 Brokaw was even more emphatic in dismissing Jackson’s claim and suggesting Cosby’s ease in denying paternity. “This woman is claiming to be his daughter, and she tried to extort $40 million from him, and she’s now in custody, so what’s the implication. Obviously, if Bill Cosby allowed the process to unfold as he has, then he is comfortable with what he’s maintaining, which is that he’s not the father.”47

  Eventually, however, it leaked out that Cosby had had an affair with Jackson’s mother. At Jackson’s trial in a Manhattan Federal District Court in July 1997, Cosby was forced to admit to a “single sexual encounter” in Las Vegas in the early ’70s with a fan named Shawn Thompson.48 Later, Cosby said that Thompson visited him and showed the star a child’s picture. “Doesn’t she look like Ensa?” she asked Cosby, referring to one of his daughters. “This is your daughter.” Cosby’s reply was short and simple. “I said, ‘That’s not my daughter,’ and that was it.”49 (Thompson claimed that she had no other lovers besides Cosby at the time and that Jackson was born nine months after their fling.) Cosby says that Thompson promised to keep quiet about their tryst to spare Mrs. Cosby any embarrassment. (He eventually told her in the early ’80s.) Later, however, according to Cosby, Thompson constantly “borrowed” money from Cosby with an implied threat of telling Camille, a threat Thompson denied making. Over the years, Cosby gave Thompson more than $100,000, either in cash or by checks in the names of friends whom he would reimburse. “Obviously, with the threats going and going,” Cosby said in court, “I just didn’t want her to have any sort of evidence that she could say, ‘Well you paid this to me.’”50

  Cosby testified that, despite his troubles with Ms. Thompson, he made an effort to support Autumn with her educational and living expenses, even though he was careful to point out to her that he wasn’t her father. “Autumn, I will tell you this: I am not your father, I will be for you a father figure—a father figure—but I am not your father.”51 Robert M. Baum, one of Jackson’s defense attorneys, was barred by Judge Barbara S. Jones from eliciting testimony on the issue of paternity. He was granted permission by the judge to try to prove that Autumn believed she was Cosby’s child, hoping to explain Autumn’s actions as “a lawful negotiation of her rights as a daughter.”52 To bolster his claim, Baum told the jury that when Autumn was a child, her mother Shawn shared with her a secret as she watched a Saturday morning cartoon. “You know who that man is who you are watching on TV?” Shawn asked Autumn. “The voice of Fat Albert? That man is Bill Cosby. He’s your father.”53 Baum seemed to imply that Cosby had sent mixed messages to Autumn: On the one hand, he denied being her father, and on the other hand, he appeared to behave in a way that suggested he was. For example,
Cosby admitted in court that he told Autumn he loved her, and he spent time with her—like the time Cosby described taking a high-school-age Autumn to the taping of an episode of The Cosby Show in New York, and placing her photo on a piece of furniture on the set so that she could view it when she watched at home. Cosby made her feel special and encouraged. “You will see this picture of you, and this is to inspire you to go and become somebody.”54

  Cosby also admitted that he had scrapped taking a paternity test in Chicago several years before the trial began because he feared that the results would leak out to the tabloids. (Before the start of the trial, Cosby had once again declined to take a paternity test, but after it was finished, he offered to take the test, and gave his blood, but Autumn refused to participate.)55 In an interview outside of court, Baum cited Cosby’s decision to forgo the paternity test, and his admission that he loved Autumn, as factors reinforcing Autumn’s belief that Cosby was her father. Baum said that “under the circumstances, where he’s paying for everything and the mother is saying, ‘He’s your father,’ how could she believe anything else?”56 Baum contended that Autumn kept her secret until she became desperate, until she was homeless and living in a car—and that only after making repeated requests to Cosby for more money did she attempt to sell her story, believing, in Baum’s words, that “it is the only property I have to sell in order to survive.”57