11:47
Steele's office issued a brief statement on Tuesday, saying, \"The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has narrowed the issues on appeal, limiting them to prior bad acts and the sovereign edict. We look forward to briefing and arguing these issues and remain confident in the Trial Court and Superior Court's previous decisions.\"
![\"PHOTO:](\"http://a.abcnews.com/images/US/cosby-02-as-gty-200616_hpEmbed_17x12_384.jpg\")
'I don't care what they feel'
Cosby told ABC News that she is unconcerned about the #MeToo cancel culture, much of which believes that Cosby is on the wrong side of history when it comes to sexual assault victims' rights.
\"First of all, I don't care what they feel,\" she said.
As to her second point, Cosby cited the final line of a famous quote from the 1972 nonfiction tome \"No Name in the Street\" by her friend, the late novelist and civil rights activist James Baldwin, that \"ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.\"
\"The #MeToo movement and movements like them have intentional ignorance pertaining to the history of particular white women -- not all white women -- but particular white women, who have from the very beginning, pertaining to the enslavement of African people, accused black males of sexual assault without any proof whatsoever, no proof, anywhere on the face of the earth.\"
\"And by ignoring that history, they have put out a lie in itself and that is, 'Because I'm female, I'm telling the truth.' Well history disproves that, as well, and gender has never, ever equated with truth. So, they need to clean up their acts. And it's all of us as women who have not participated anything nefarious -- we know how women can lie. We know how they can do the same things that men do -- that some men do -- because there are good men and bad men. There are good women and bad women.\"
Cosby also defended previous comparisons she has made between accusations against her husband and the lynching of Emmett Till, the 14-year old Mississippi child brutalized and murdered in 1955 for whistling at a white woman -- a false claim debunked years after the murder by the woman who made the claim in the first place.
She also drew comparisons of her husband's treatment to the massacre of hundreds of African Americans in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921 -- widely considered by scholars to be one of the lowest points of in the nation's history of racial violence.
Cosby contended that the comparison is apt.
\"The parallel is that the same age-old thing about particular white women making accusations against black men that are unproven -- Emmett Till's outcome, to mutilate his body in the way that it was, was just really so deeply horrendous,\" she told Davis.
\"I mean -- there's a lack of words for that kind of hatefulness. But see, years ago, I interviewed the survivors from the Tulsa Oklahoma riots in 1921. And that was another case of a wife female making a claim of sexual assault claim against a black male, which we all know if we know about the Tulsa, Oklahoma riots. It gave license to mobs of white people converging on a very independent economically independent educationally independent black community, named Greenwood and Topher, and hundreds of people were killed.\"
\"So you boil this all down to racism?\" Davis asked Cosby. \"You feel that if your husband were not a black man that these accusations would not have been made and he would not be in prison?\"
\"I don't know that,\" Cosby responded, \"because some white men have … there are some who have been sent to prison. But … it's not the same situation as the history [of] a particular white women with black men.
\"We've seen them hanging from trees,\" she said of the men, \"once they make those accusations. We've seen them being incarcerated … those accusations are made and -- once again – unproven. Unproven.\"
Cosby said she speaks to her husband daily, but does not visit him in prison. \"In terms of visiting him, no, I do not want to see my husband in that kind of an environment -- and he doesn't want me to see him in that kind of environment,\" she said. \"So we are in sync with that but I speak to him every single day.
Groundbreaking television
A close look at Camille Cosby's life and interviews with her friends and Cosby scholars suggest the key role she played in her husband's groundbreaking career. After receiving her Ph.D., she combined her scholarly work and her passion for African American issues to produce a Broadway play and an extensive African American oral history project. She has spoken out consistently over decades about the need for better educational opportunities and empowerment through voting for minority communities.
The groundbreaking \"Cosby Show\" debuted on NBC in 1984 and at its height in the late 1980s, it was the most popular show on U.S. television for five years running. Beyond reimagining the flagging sitcom format, it was the first national TV show to feature a stable, well-educated, two-parent African American family, according to biographer Ronald L. Smith, author of \"Cosby, The Life of a Comedy Legend.\"
\"'Sanford & Son,' 'The Jeffersons,' 'Good Times' -- there wasn't a real [African American] family unit that wasn't some sort of caricature,\" Smith said.
Cosby has also said she wants to relaunch the animated cartoon “Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids,” which debuted in 1972, breaking new ground in children’s television programming by featuring positive images of both an overweight teenager – Albert – and, Mushmouth, a boy with a speech impediment.
Cosby initially declined an interview request with ABC News last week before ultimately agreeing. Her friends said that given the turbulent civil rights demonstrations unfolding from coast to coast in the wake of Floyd's death, the time is right for her voice to be heard.
\"It's like a moment I've been waiting for -- to hear from her!\" said Jacqueline Jackson, wife of Rev. Jesse Jackson. \"I feel this is her moment.\"
Cosby has said her daughters are urging her to write a book, but she told ABC News that she's also deeply concerned about the direction of contemporary civil rights protests.
\"I do believe that these young people are very energetic,\" Cosby said. \"We need their energy. We need their intelligence within the movements that are comprised of people of different generations.\"
Still, she expressed the concern of a veteran educator -- and a mother.
\"But they have to be focused,\" she insisted. \"And I'm very concerned about so many young people with nanosecond attention spans. They cannot be just jumping around from the movement to another.\"
![\"PHOTO:](\"http://a.abcnews.com/images/US/cosby-04-as-gty-200616_hpEmbed_11x15_384.jpg\")
\"You have to stick with a movement, and with a goal of the movement,\" she said, \"and the others with their agendas have their own movements to move forward, but not to weaken a strong movement like this.\"
ABC News' Natalie Savits contributed to this report.
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