Newsmaker: Camille Cosby

Bill Cosby’s wife this week postponed an attempt to force her to give evidence about her husband’s alleged sexual offences, but it may only be delaying the inevitable.

Kagan McLeod for The National

In all 197 episodes of The Cosby Show, the family sitcom that ran on American television from 1984 to 1992, Camille Cosby, the wife of the star and the woman who inspired the matriarchal character Clair Huxtable, appeared in front of the cameras just once.

It was a walk-on part, as a spectator passing through a shot in the 1986 episode Off to the ­Races, but it was remarkable nevertheless.

The uncredited appearance was out of character for a woman who has spent much of her 50 years of marriage shunning the spotlight trained on her husband, Bill.

But as the rising torrent of accusations of sexual impropriety has swept her 78-year-old husband from his pedestal as “America’s dad”, so that spotlight has fallen relentlessly on her, too.

On Wednesday, Camille, drawn into the ever-escalating legal slanging match between her husband and his accusers, successfully postponed an attempt to force her to give evidence in an action for defamation being brought by seven alleged assault victims, who say Cosby has defamed them as liars.

She could yet find herself under oath. But however this latest round in the saga plays out, Camille’s persistent defence of her husband has painted a portrait of a woman determined to stand by her man, come hell or high water.

But Camille is more than just “another victim of the controversy”, as CNN suggested when fresh allegations began to surface towards the end of 2014.

Right from the earliest days of Cosby’s success, Camille has played a significant role, acting as his savvy manager while forging a career as a producer and working as a tireless champion of black education, while at the same time returning to college to achieve her own educational goals.

Even Oprah Winfrey, who interviewed her in 2000, admitted she was awed by her presence. Camille “exudes the kind of splendour attendant with royalty”, she wrote. “Even hearing her name – Dr Camille Olivia Hanks Cosby – makes you think: ‘I want to be like that.’”

The eldest of four children, Camille Olivia Hanks was born into an affluent family in Washington on March 20, 1944.

Her parents, Guy and Catherine, were both college graduates. Educated by nuns at a ­Roman Catholic school, she grew up, in the words of The Washington Post, in "a rarefied 1940s, upper-­middle-class world of debutantes and weekend horseback rides".

In short, “a girl like Camille Olivia Hanks wasn’t supposed to meet a boy like Bill Cosby”, a dropout whose “mother was a maid, and his father an ­alcoholic”.

They did meet, however, on a blind date at a bowling alley in 1963, while Cosby was down from New York for a comedy gig in Washington.

Camille, studying psychology at the University of Maryland, was just 19. Cosby, seven years her senior and on the cusp of the big time, bowled her over with his quick wit.

He proposed two weeks after they met. They married in ­January 1964, and Camille dropped out of college to follow her husband on the road.

It was a road that led quickly to fame and fortune. In 1965, after a series of stand-up appearances on prestigious network TV programmes, Cosby was cast opposite Robert Culp in the hit action-comedy series I Spy – at the time, a rare prime-time role for a black actor.

It was, as Camille once recalled, “quite a beginning for two married people”.

But according to allegations that surfaced in 2014, it was also the beginning of the problems that now beset the couple in their twilight years.

While his wife was having babies – between 1965 and 1976 she gave birth to five children – Cosby was flitting between New York and Los Angeles, spending his evenings "hanging out with celebrity swingers and comely bunnies at Hugh Hefner's Playboy Mansion", according to a 2014 biography by the former Newsweek editor Mark ­Whitaker.

“Decades later,” Whitaker wrote, Camille “would confess to the pain that her husband’s ‘selfish’ behaviour caused her in their LA years, as he indulged a roving eye”.

In 1971, the couple moved to Massachusetts, but with Cosby frequently on the road, his west-coast lifestyle continued to dog Camille.

It was during this time that Cosby had an affair with Shawn Berkes, a woman he met in an LA nightclub. Berkes would later claim the comedian was the father of her daughter, Autumn, born in September 1974.

Cosby, who had admitted the affair to his wife, denied paternity. Camille forgave him, but the affair would come back to haunt the couple at the very worst possible time in her life.

After Camille’s fifth child, Evin, was born in 1976, she took stock of her life, and realised that dropping out of college had been a mistake.

“I didn’t feel fulfilled educationally,” she said in an interview in 2000. “I went back, and when I did, my self-esteem grew … education helped me to come out of myself.”

In 1980, she earned a master’s in education from the University of Massachusetts, and went on to study for a doctorate.

In 1986, now in her 40s and two years after The Cosby Show first hit TV screens, Camille made the conscious decision to embrace a public role. Becoming deeply involved in educational philanthropy, in 1988, she and her husband donated US$20 million to Spelman ­College in Atlanta, one of the US's "historically black" education institutions for women.

A flurry of personal achievements followed – Camille founded her own film, TV and stage production companies, and set about generating a personal fortune estimated today at $20m (Dh73.5m).

Then, in January 1997, Ennis, the Cosbys’ 27-year-old only son, was shot dead in an attempted robbery as he changed a flat tyre on an LA highway.

Two days after the murder, while the hunt for the killer was still under way, Autumn Jackson, by now 22, and three other people were arrested by the FBI for ­attempting to extort $24 million from Cosby by threatening to tell the media he was her father.

Cosby admitted publicly to the Berkes affair, and overnight media coverage switched from sympathy over the killing to focus on, in ­Whitaker’s words, “the irony of TV’s ultimate family man confessing that he had cheated on his wife”.

“Somehow we got through that,” Camille told Winfrey in an off-­camera interview in 2000. “We just fought together.”

The episode had been “embarrassing … I already knew, but it wasn’t for the whole world to know”.

Jackson was jailed for extortion. But soon more allegations surfaced. In 2004, Andrea Constand, a Canadian former basketball player, accused the comedian of having drugged and assaulted her. No charges were brought, but in 2006, Cosby settled out of court when Constand brought a civil case that listed 13 other women as witnesses.

More accusers came forward in October 2014, apparently emboldened after Hannibal Buress, a comedian, described Cosby as a rapist during a stand-up routine that went viral on social media.

It was the deposition Cosby gave during the civil Constand proceedings, sealed in 2006 but reopened by the court in 2015, that has opened the floodgates to allegations of assault, and will now see Cosby in criminal court.

In all, more than 50 women now accuse Cosby of offences dating back to 1965, and in ­December, criminal charges relating to the Constand case were finally brought against the comedian.

Throughout the storm that has engulfed her family, Camille has stood by her man – to the increasing dismay of black commentators in the media. Her loyalty, wrote Stacia Brown in the New Republic in August last year, "confounds a new generation".

In November 2014, Camille sat silently alongside Cosby in a rare public appearance as he gave a brief televised interview. It had been arranged to mark the opening at the Smithsonian of an exhibition of African-American art she had organised, but instead the focus fell on the allegations.

His wife said nothing as her husband tried to fend off the interviewer. But, in the words of The Washington Post, "this woman who has sought to 'self-define' as more than the wife of a famous man" became at once "an object of empathy and an enigma; another in a long line of wives placed in uncomfortable proximity to a husband entangled in a sex ­scandal".

But Camille held the party line. The following month, she finally went public, issuing a statement backing Cosby to the hilt.

“The man I met, and fell in love with, and whom I continue to love, is the man … you thought you knew,” she said.

Over the past two months, “a different man has been portrayed in the media … it is the portrait of a man I do not know”.

In 2000, Winfrey asked Camille why she hadn’t been able “to settle” for being only Mrs Bill Cosby.

Before she had returned to college, she replied, she had lived in the shadow of her famous husband, and “never felt I had anything to contribute, something that people would want to hear … and, of course, my name is Camille, not Bill”.

Today, it must be clear even to the publicly devoted Camille that, despite all she has achieved as an individual, the later years of her life are destined to be lived out under the dark shadow cast by the multiple allegations about her husband’s behaviour.

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