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Chasing Cosby
The Downfall of America's Dad
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Bill Cosby’s decades-long career as a sweater-wearing, wholesome TV dad came to a swift and stunning end on April 26, 2018, when he was convicted of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand. The mounting allegations against Bill Cosby–more than 60 women have come forward to accuse him of similar crimes–and his ultimate conviction were a shock to Americans, who wanted to cleave to their image of Cosby as a pudding-pop hero.
Award-winning journalist and former People magazine senior writer Nicki Weisensee Egan was the first reporter to dig into the story when Constand went to the police in 2005. Other news organizations looked away, but Egan doggedly investigated the case, developing ties with entrenched sources and discovering incriminating details that would ultimately come to influence the prosecution.
In her debut book, Chasing Cosby, Egan shares her firsthand account of Cosby’s 13-year run from justice. She tells us how Cosby planned and executed his crimes, and how Hollywood alliances and law enforcement knew what Cosby was doing but did nothing to stop him. A veteran crime reporter, Egan also explores the cultural and social issues that influenced the case, delving into the psychological calculations of a serial predator and into the psyche of a nation that fervently wanted to put their faith in the innocence of “American’s Dad.”
Rich in character and rife with dramatic revelations about popular culture, media power, and our criminal system, Egan’s account will inform and fascinate readers with its candid telling of humanity’s most enduring tale: the rise and fall of a cultural icon.
Excerpt
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
I first began covering this story on January 20, 2005, when news of Andrea Constand’s drugging and sexual assault allegations against Bill Cosby first broke in Philadelphia. After Andrea settled her civil lawsuit with Bill Cosby in November 2006, I thought the story was over. She had signed a confidentiality agreement, so she couldn’t speak; there were no new accusers; and the criminal case against him had been closed long ago.
Yet for some reason I couldn’t throw away my voluminous Cosby files—the notes I’d made while reporting on the case for the Philadelphia Daily News. One day I gathered the thousands of pages of documents, interviews, and research I’d accumulated, packed them up in a waterproof box, and carried it down to my basement. And that’s where they stayed for another eight years.
When the case resurfaced in late 2014 and the number of new accusers kept climbing, I walked down to my basement, opened that waterproof box, lugged all of those files back up to my home office, and dug back into the story. Those notes and emails were so helpful when it came to recreating what happened in 2005, when I was the lone reporter investigating the allegations against Cosby. Anything I use in this book from 2005 that is in quotations is from those notes, my published stories, or from conversations in which I was a participant, except where I explain otherwise in my notes section at the end of the book, where I cite the sources I used, including ones I don’t mention in the text.
In some instances, like with the details of what happened to Andrea in the first chapter, I’ve woven in details about the case I learned more than a decade later from court documents, courtroom testimony, official court transcripts, victim impact statements, depositions in her civil lawsuit, police reports, police interviews, and my own interviews. For my People coverage I used the reporting that is publicly available in stories in the magazine and online. For the rest of the book I relied on my own reporting from the court proceedings I attended, documents in the criminal and civil cases, articles from other journalists whose work I respect, interviews I conducted myself with more than seventy people, and, when necessary, videos of the impromptu press conferences held by Cosby’s spokespeople outside the courthouse during both trials.
I struggled with how to refer to people on second reference. In some cases, just using their last name seemed too formal. In the end, we decided that we’d use last names for everyone except the victims and their families and Cosby’s immediate family.
Some who helped me can’t be named, but I am deeply grateful to them for helping to ensure this book is accurate. Andrea and her family could not speak to me due to the confidentiality agreement they signed with Cosby when she settled her lawsuit with him. Cosby; his attorney at the time, Marty Singer; and America Media, Inc., which owns the National Enquirer, were similarly barred from speaking about the case due to the same confidentiality agreement. I still reached out to them and everyone else I could for fact checking or comment. Cosby, through his spokesman, declined to participate. Others simply never responded. If they did get back to me, I included their response or mentioned them in my notes section.
This has been a thorough investigation over the years. The full extent of the material sourced here is at the end of my book, in the List of Sources and Notes sections. I encourage the reader to read everything listed in the sources as well as the notes for each chapter at the end of the book.
Although I have included allegations from many different women in this book, only Andrea’s has resulted in a criminal case and conviction. However, their accounts are in statements to law enforcement, court filings and/or testimony related to civil and criminal court proceedings or have appeared in other media.
Cosby has denied Andrea’s drugging and sexual assault allegations as well as similar allegations against him from more than sixty other women, including those whose stories are told in this book, except where noted in the text. Cosby is currently incarcerated while appealing his conviction and his prison sentence.
INTRODUCTION: COSBY’S GIFT
One Friday night not long ago I was flipping through channels on my television when I came across a rerun of The Cosby Show. There on my screen was the loveable, sweater-clad Dr. Cliff Huxtable, sitting between his son, Theo, and his wife, Claire, in a learning specialist’s office. Theo had done poorly on a Greek mythology test that week, even though he knew the material, so all three were meeting with the specialist, who thought Theo should be tested for dyslexia. If Theo does indeed have it, she assured the Huxtables, he could get help to overcome the learning disorder.
“Dyslexia!” Cliff says with a relieved smile on his face, gratified to know why his son was struggling in school. “Now fix it!” he quips, jubilant. Cue the laugh track.
Like millions of other Americans who helped make the comedy one of the most popular shows in the history of television, I became a fan of The Cosby Show when it first aired in the 1980s. It debuted my senior year of high school, the same year my older brother died, and watching the show gave me an escape out of my own, fraught home and into the cozy normalcy of a family not traumatized by death. For me the Huxtables were a thirty-minute visit to a warm and stable world, where the kids would borrow each other’s clothes without permission and sneak out to concerts, all while the parents lovingly guided them with witty life lessons. My own mother was nearly paralyzed with grief over the loss of her only son, and my father had all he could do to hold her together while juggling the demands of a job that took him out of town two or three nights a week. The Cosby Show was steady. The Cosby Show made me feel safe.
Watching the show again brought me back for a moment to that time in my life, and I mean that in a good way. Cliff Huxtable’s tough-love parenting style, sprinkled with humor, also reminded me of my own father. And this episode was particularly tender—it revealed a dad who worried for his son while at the same time acknowledging his own flaws as a parent. When Theo tells his parents he is indeed dyslexic, Cliff and Claire erupt in cheers.
What I also appreciated, though I didn’t know it when I was a teenager, was that the show was never overly saccharine—funny, yes, but not hyper-sentimentalized. In this episode Vanessa chastises Cliff for calling Theo “lazy” all those years when it was really dyslexia holding him back, and Cliff doesn’t laugh her off; he knows she’s right. Then, when Theo later proudly reveals he got a B-plus on his next test, Cliff couldn’t be prouder. “I think he should probably finish undergraduate school in two years because there’s no sense in holding him back in going to medical school and becoming what? Dr. Huxtable Jr.!”
“Theo’s Gift” had heart, intelligence, and humor, a recipe that was the show’s hallmark. It was real and familiar. I’d watched my own father and brother engage in similar battles throughout my childhood—although, unlike Cliff and Theo, they were never able to resolve their issues before my brother’s death. When Bill Cosby’s son died young too, I couldn’t help but feel an emotional connection to him—his love for his family, the grief he must have felt. I mourned with him.
That night, watching the rerun while my husband, used to my fascination with Cosby by now, read a book, I found myself mesmerized, laughing along with the jokes, smiling at the warm-hearted moments. And horrified too. Because now, all these years later, I knew that the Bill Cosby on my screen—with his dad jokes and self-deprecating style of imparting wisdom to his kids, the man who left an entire generation wishing he was their father—was also a monster.
A monster who preyed on women, manipulating them into a false sense of security, drugging them, and assaulting them. And masquerading as Cliff Huxtable—the personification of the family-oriented, warm comedy he’d been performing for decades—was the perfect disguise.
For nearly half a century, enabled by a cadre of paid handlers and silencers who did their jobs protecting his carefully honed image, Bill Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted women who thought he was their mentor. He slowly and carefully coaxed each one into feeling safe and cared for and then left them to pick up the pieces of their lives.
I WAS STILL A believer in the Bill Cosby/Cliff Huxtable myth in 2005, when Andrea Constand first told the police what Cosby had done to her. I was working as a reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News, a tabloid-style daily that was part of the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain, when I first heard that a woman had accused Cosby of drugging and sexually assaulting her. Along with the rest of America, I was shocked. And itching to disbelieve. Not the Cos! I thought. But then my boss assigned me the story, and I began reporting.
I made calls. I asked questions. I read files.
I grew more and more astounded.
With every conversation, every interview, every new source, the validity of the charges came to light. The women who spoke out were credible. Crimes had been committed, and it didn’t matter that the perpetrator was one of America’s most beloved cultural icons. The truth had to be revealed.
So I wrote about the case. I wrote and wrote—about Andrea Constand, the court filings, the evidence, the other accusers. The more I wrote about the case, the more the story spread and other news outlets picked it up and broadcast the details I’d reported.
I was thrilled to see my stories go out on Knight-Ridder’s wire service. But Cosby, obviously, was not. It wasn’t long before Cosby’s attorney, Marty Singer, threatened to sue my newspaper. Then the prosecutor on the case made veiled threats to have me arrested.
Meanwhile other media outlets were stepping away from the scandal. Maybe they were too skeptical, I surmised at the time. Or maybe they were too afraid. Cosby had always had an uneasy, often adversarial relationship with the press, and few were eager to take him on. “Newspaper columnists have been… reluctant to join the fray,” wrote Tony Norman, a columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “Who can blame us? Nobody wants to incur the wrath of Cos over what may turn out to be a frivolous charge.”
But I couldn’t give it up. I believed Andrea. And the lies that I believed Cosby’s attorneys were telling about her infuriated me. Cosby’s power and influence may have swayed other reporters and editors, but my editors supported me as I dug deeper into the research and the slowly unfolding truth: while Cosby was enjoying the adoration of a public who loved his down-to-earth, no-profanity comedy routines, television shows, and Jell-O pudding pop commercials, cementing his image as America’s Dad, he was also leading a dark, secret life cultivating friendships with young women by promising them mentorship and connections and then waiting until they felt secure to drug and violate them.
BILL COSBY CHOSE his victims carefully, with the instincts of a predator. He chose young, vulnerable, star-struck women, many of them budding actresses, models, and singers, all of them in less powerful positions than him, blinded by his squeaky-clean reputation, and whom, he knew, would not be believed should they come forward with their tales of mentorship and betrayal run amok.
He used the same technique, over and over again.
First, he’d befriend a young woman he’d met either through their agent or by chance. She might be an aspiring model or actress or just a pretty young woman dazzled by his attention and confident he was who he seemed to be. His status as a beloved celebrity created instant trust.
He’d ask them about their lives and offer advice, auditions, and help with their careers. He might even meet their mom, flattering her with praise for her children or inviting her to a performance at which he’d roll out the red carpet with backstage passes and premium seats and pose for a picture or two. Perhaps he’d come to a family dinner, praising the home-cooked meals of a hardworking grandmother and bringing ice cream to offer the children. And Jell-O pudding pops.
Then, when the time was right, he’d entice them into an environment he controlled—a hotel room, his dressing room, his own house, or even a friend’s home that he was borrowing—and he’d slip a drug into a drink or offer “cold medicine.” Several hours, a day, or even two days later the woman would wake up, bruised and disoriented, with her clothes off and a strange sense that violence had been done.
Andrea Constand was the first to publicly accuse Cosby of both drugging and sexually assaulting her, but soon after, thirteen other women came forward with similar stories. They were drugged and then assaulted or he tried to drug or assault them. All of them said Bill Cosby—that lovable, wholesome father figure—was a not who we thought he was. They were the original #MeToo women, long before there was a movement, speaking out to support Andrea by calling out their own truth against a powerful, wealthy, influential man.
These years of reporting on Bill Cosby’s crimes have taught me the dangers of deifying celebrities. We don’t know who they truly are; we see only what they allow us to see. Their images are carefully managed. The peeks and glimpses we get through interviews they give are so well orchestrated that we never realize there is a man (or woman) behind the curtain, pulling the strings.
It’s not just celebrities, though. We assume someone is a good person just because they excel in one area, a cognitive bias called the “halo effect.” We thought O. J. Simpson was a good person because he was a football star, refusing to believe he was capable of the type of violence his wife, Nicole, reported. We assumed former Penn State defensive coach Jerry Sandusky was a saint because he adopted foster children and founded a charity for at-risk boys, never suspecting it was merely a façade he created and cultivated to cover up his sexual abuse of young boys. The same goes for Catholic priests, Boy Scout leaders, gymnastics team doctors, and others who used their positions of trust in the community to get away with unspeakable crimes for years on end.
And for Bill Cosby.
WHEN ANDREA FIRST spoke out, Cosby was one of the most famous and powerful entertainers in the country, if not the world. His long, seemingly happy marriage to Camille, the mother of their five children, only added luster to his picture-perfect image as a devoted husband and father. He counted South African president Nelson Mandela and civil rights pioneers Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton among his friends. He cherished his role as a humanitarian and educational philanthropist, donating millions to charities and colleges alike while chalking up numerous awards, including the Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime achievement in the performing arts and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Nearly sixty colleges and universities across the country had showered him with honorary degrees. (Many of these awards and more than half of these degrees would later be stripped from him, one by one.)
He broke cultural and racial barriers, becoming the first African American to costar in a TV show with his first role in I Spy, for which he won three Emmys. He’d written best-selling books about parenthood, and he based much of his Grammy Award–winning comedy routine—later used to develop The Cosby Show—on his folksy, relatable experiences as a father and husband. His fame—and wealth—continued to grow as he became the pitchman for products such as Jell-O and Coca-Cola. “The three most believable personalities are God, Walter Cronkite, and Bill Cosby,” Anthony Tortorici, Coke’s PR chief, told Black Enterprise magazine in 1981.
And Andrea’s allegations in 2005 did little to tarnish the public perception of him. He was inducted into the NAACP Image Awards Hall of Fame in 2006 and, in 2010, awarded the National Football Foundation’s gold medal, which each year recognizes “outstanding Americans” for their “honesty and integrity.” He was honored with the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2009 and the Johnny Carson Award for Comedic Excellence in 2014 and was made an honorary chief petty officer by the US Navy, which he’d served in from 1956 to 1960, in 2011.
He had amassed a mountain of accolades.
Maybe that’s why the rest of the media didn’t seem to want to believe the drugging and sexual assault accusations.
Honestly, at first, neither did I.
But I saw there was another truth.
I became as determined as ever to find out new information or get interviews no one else had. The crime itself was just so chilling, the method so diabolical. These women were powerless. They couldn’t fend him off, let alone walk away—the drugs he gave them made that impossible. And no one seemed to realize how dangerous it is to give someone a drug without their knowledge or consent. What if they were allergic to it or it interacted badly with another intoxicant or drug in their system? What if they got into a car and drove after being drugged and got into an accident? Someone could have died.
During my journey I have wrestled with so many questions about Bill Cosby, and I still do: Who is he as a human being, really? How could someone who’s done so much good in this world do so much evil at the same time?
As a journalist, I wanted the details. I wanted facts and answers. Instead of seducing women, the way most “casting couch” Hollywood stars might, why did Cosby drug them? Could he be a somnophiliac—someone who can only have sex with an unconscious person?
How many people in Hollywood knew what Cosby was doing and stayed quiet? And why? Are there other victims who have not yet come forward? How many—six more? Sixty? Why did this scandal take hold in 2014 but not in 2005?
And as a woman in America, I also have questions about the culture we live in. Why is there a visceral distrust of sexual assault claims—from the public, the media, and the criminal justice system—unlike any other violent crime?
I explore all these questions in Chasing Cosby and offer my reflections as well on how fear, bullying, and intimidation helped silence these women, as we’ve seen play out in countless other examples of powerful men who were able to keep their sexual misconduct secret for decades.
The Cosby story is a lens through which we can look inward at our own beliefs and prejudices and how it influences who we choose to believe and why, who we choose to idolize and why.
Ultimately, though, this is a David-and-Goliath–like tale of courage; of one woman who stood up to her attacker; of her mother, whose fierce love for her daughter transcended her fear of confronting a beloved national icon; of her attorneys, whose two-woman firm proved to be more than a match for some of the biggest sharks in the legal world; and of the prosecutors, who finally listened to what all of them had to say and arrested America’s Dad.
But first let me take you back to January 2005, when it all began.
PART ONE
(JANUARY 2005–OCTOBER 2014)
You took a little drop, and you put it in a drink… the girl would drink it… and hello, America!
—Bill Cosby to Larry King, 1991
CHAPTER ONE
POUND CAKE AND POLICE REPORTS
On the morning of January 13, 2005, thirty-one-year-old Andrea Constand woke up sobbing from a nightmare. Horrifying, violent dreams had plagued her for the past year, and they were growing worse. Sometimes they made her scream out so loudly that her parents could hear her from their bedroom. Other times she woke up sweating, shaken. This time her dream was so frightening that she phoned her mother, Gianna.
Gianna was on her way to work when her cell phone rang, and she answered it right away. She had been worried about her youngest daughter since she had moved back home from Philadelphia the previous April to enroll in massage school and become a massage therapist, like her father. She’d returned home a different person. “I knew something was wrong, but I could not put my finger on it,” Gianna said.
That morning, though, Andrea was finally ready to tell her mom what had been tormenting her. She’d been learning about physical boundaries in massage school, and the lessons had triggered something in her subconscious that she could no longer avoid. In her dreams she watched a woman being sexually assaulted in front of her, and it was all her fault. She was consumed with guilt that spilled over into her waking hours, terrified that other women were being similarly violated because she hadn’t spoken out.
Until that day Andrea had told no one about the night when a friend of hers—an older man who had become a father figure and, really, a mentor—had betrayed her in the most horrific way possible.
But now it was time. Lying in bed with her tears still wet on her face, she picked up the phone and called her mother, who was driving to the doctor’s office where she worked as a medical secretary.
“Mom, I think I have PTSD,” she burst out. Then she went on to say Bill Cosby drugged and raped her.
Gianna froze, then began to shake. She knew the famous entertainer had mentored Andrea when she was working as the director of operations for the women’s basketball team at Temple University. He sat on the board of trustees and was one of its most famous alumni, and Andrea had met him on campus. Cosby had taken her under his wing, inviting her to dinners with high-powered educators and out to concerts and other events, making her feel at home in a strange city, far away from her family and friends.
Gianna had met Cosby too. A couple of years before, Cosby had gotten tickets for Gianna and her older daughter, Diana, to see him perform in Toronto. They all took photos after the show, grinning for the camera. Cosby had been charming and avuncular to both as Gianna and Diana thanked him for the tickets.
But Gianna knew her daughter was telling the truth. She was so distraught about what Andrea was saying that she feared she’d get in a car accident if they kept talking while she was driving, so she asked Andrea if she could call her back once she got to work.
Andrea was insistent. It was as if she’d waited this long to tell the truth, and now that she had, she couldn’t stop. “Mom, you’ve got to hear me out,” she said. Then she said it again: Bill Cosby drugged and raped me.
THAT SENTENCE SET OFF a chain reaction of events that would change her life, her family’s lives, and, most irrevocably, that of the man she had just accused.
Cosby, then sixty-seven, was a beloved national father figure. He was one of the most powerful men in Hollywood and in his native Philadelphia, which reveled in being able to claim America’s Dad as one of their own. Andrea was terrified at the thought of reporting the crime to police, but she knew she had to. She didn’t want what had happened to her to happen to anyone else.
That day Andrea started calling lawyers.
“I was really scared, and I wanted to protect myself,” she said. “I didn’t know where to turn. I had a lot of questions. And then I thought that Mr. Cosby”—she always called him Mr. Cosby—“would retaliate against me, that he would try to hurt my family.”
After Gianna got home that evening, together they called the Durham Regional Police Department near Toronto, Ontario, where they lived. The following day the case was referred to the Philadelphia Police Department, erroneously believing that’s where Cosby lived. Four days later the case was assigned to Detective Richard Schaffer of the Cheltenham Township Police Department, which covered Elkins Park, just outside of Philadelphia, where Cosby owned a mansion—and where Andrea’s sexual assault had occurred.
That week was a surreal one for Andrea. While she was conferring with lawyers and making phone calls to law enforcement, a police source tipped off Harry Hairston, an investigative reporter for Philadelphia’s Channel 10, the NBC affiliate. The allegations against the entertainer broke on Channel 10’s five o’clock evening newscast on Thursday, January 20, and soon the world learned that a Temple University employee had accused Bill Cosby of groping her. The details were sketchy at first—the drugging part not so clear in that first story.
I was just starting to wrap up for the day at the Philadelphia Daily News when the news hit the airwaves and my boss assigned me the story. I’d been a crime investigative reporter for fourteen years and had a good head start on some of the angles I’d need to probe: in 2002, I’d written an exposé on the resurgence of drug-facilitated sexual assaults at some of the nightclubs in Philadelphia and had been horrified by what I’d discovered. Not only is it premeditated rape, in my opinion, it’s also the perfect crime. The drugs predators use wipe out the victim’s resistance and memory and move swiftly through their systems so that by the time they regain consciousness, it might already be too late to go to a hospital to get their blood and urine tested.
The story hit home in another way as well. Not long ago I’d been one of those women dancing the night away at a club on Philadelphia’s Delaware Avenue, never suspecting that someone could easily slip a drug into my drink that would leave me helpless to defend myself.
I couldn’t believe I was now looking into similar allegations about America’s Dad. Few details about the case were being released, including the alleged victim’s name, which is the norm in such cases. I needed to somehow find out all I could about her to figure out if she was credible. No one in law enforcement was talking, but thankfully I had sources at Temple who were able to fill in some blanks, including supplying me with her name, though I didn’t publish it until we had her permission, which is the usual media policy with sexual assault victims—though that would quickly change with this case.
Andrea had a stellar reputation at Temple, where she’d worked as the director of operations for the women’s basketball team from late 2001 through March 2004. “She’s straight up, stable, smart, and hardworking,” a former colleague said. “She’s very level headed, very professional.”
With her long, curly, reddish-brown hair and statuesque physique, standing six feet tall, Andrea was strikingly attractive. A former high school and college basketball star who’d once dreamed of playing for the pros, Andrea had been recruited for the job by Dawn Staley, the Temple women’s coach, who was also a close friend of Cosby.
Genre:
- "In clear, vivid prose, [Egan] illuminates how a beloved star was exposed as a violent predator, and how Cosby's conviction became the first of the #MeToo era . . . Specialists on everything from victim behavior to forensic toxicology contextualize Egan's findings. She raises zoom-out questions that Cosby's conviction alone doesn't answer, about wealth, race... the criminal justice system and 'the dangers of deifying celebrities.' And far from feeling self-indulgent or distracting, Egan's willingness to share her human connection to her professional endeavor makes her writing resonate with a greater power."—Washington Post
- "[P]ursuing the case of sexual assault allegations against Bill Cosby since 2005, [Egan] digs into the double life of 'America's Dad.'"—People
- "Most people are aware that actor Bill Cosby was convicted of sexual assault in 2018; however, many may be surprised to learn that the victim in that case reported the assault to law enforcement back in 2005 . . . Egan, who worked for the Philadelphia Daily News at the time, followed the story from the beginning... [S]he traces some allegations back to the 1970s, then examines the factors that allowed Cosby to continue these behaviors for so long . . . VERDICT: The shocking details of the calculated, predatory crimes committed by a formerly beloved American icon are sure to draw wide interest."—Library Journal
- "Egan's harrowing, meticulously reported book reveals how, for half a century, one of our most respected, most beloved entertainers got away with brazenly drugging and raping more than sixty women, abetted by prominent figures in law enforcement, the news media, and Hollywood. Although Cosby seemed to believe he was untouchable, Egan documents how he was eventually brought to justice by dogged prosecutors, some very courageous women, and the #MeToo movement."—Jon Krakauer, New York Times bestselling author of Into the Wild, Into Thin Air, Under the Banner of Heaven, and Where Men Win Glory
- "Veteran crime writer Nicole Weisensee Egan takes apart one of the first great cases of the #MeToo era with finesse and ace reporting. She brings years of up-close reportage on the Cosby case, plus dozens of new interviews with accusers and back room accounts of the endless court battles, to expose the secret life of America's Dad, a premeditated sex predator and the trail of private wreckage he inflicted for decades."—Nina Burleigh, award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author of Golden Handcuffs: The Secret History of Trump's Women
- "You might think you know the story of Bill Cosby's downfall. But until you've read investigative journalist Nicole Weisensee Egan's book, you don't know the whole story. Reporting on the case for more than a decade, Egan takes readers on a riveting journey documenting how numerous women came forward with horrific accounts of abuse leading to Cosby's arrest and ultimate conviction. The book is incredibly researched, compellingly written, and a must-read for anyone who followed the Cosby case or who wants to know the insider account of the unbelievable true story."—Shanna Hogan, New York Times bestselling author of Picture Perfect
- "Riveting, page-turning."—Christina Baker Kline, #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Piece of the World and Orphan Train
- "Egan's fascinating account of Cosby's 13-year run from justice, including how he planned and executed his crimes, and how Hollywood and the law looked the other way. She delves into the psychological calculations of a serial predator and into the psyche of a nation that fervently wanted to put their faith in the innocence of 'American's Dad.'"—Mary Kay Andrews, New York Times bestselling author of Beach Town
- "The power of Chasing Cosby flows from Nicole Weisensee Egan's steadfast resolve to ascertain the truth. Her dogged reporting and deft storytelling paints a worthy portrait of those who suffered at the hands of 'America's Dad.' Egan's work reminds us of the great price our society pays when fame protects the mighty, and what it means to not be believed."—Chelsia Rose Marcius, author of Wild Escape: The Prison Break from Dannemora and the Manhunt that Captured America
- "Nicole Weisensee Egan's powerful, personal account of the Cosby case is a perfect cautionary tale for our time. In the middle of the #MeToo movement, this riveting look at the shattered nice-guy facade of a man once dubbed 'America's Dad' unearths a greater truth: that the celebrities and leaders we exalt on TV (and elsewhere) are not always the people we want them to be; and sometimes the truth one finds behind the curtain of a public persona is much darker than we ever want to believe."—Mark Dagostino, New York Times bestselling co-author of Accused: My Fight for Truth, Justice, and the Strength to Forgive
- On Sale
- Apr 23, 2019
- Page Count
- 352 pages
- Publisher
- Seal Press
- ISBN-13
- 9781580058971
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