PHILADELPHIA _ Speaking out for the first time since a jury convicted Bill Cosby, the entertainer's publicists compared him Friday to Emmett Till, the black teen whose 1955 lynching in Mississippi _ and whose killers were acquitted _ became a signature moment in the Civil Rights era.
"This became a public lynching," Cosby spokesman Andrew Wyatt said on ABC's "Good Morning America."
Wyatt and fellow publicist Ebonee Benson spoke to host George Stephanopolous in an interview from Norristown, the morning after jurors convicted Cosby of three counts of aggravated indecent assault. They continued maintain that Cosby has done nothing wrong, despite accusations from dozens of women over the years and a jury's verdict that he drugged and molested Andrea Constand in 2004.
"You're saying all these women, all 60 women are lying?" Stephanopolous asked.
"May I ask a question?" Benson replied. "Since when are all people honest? Since when are all women honest? We can take a look at Emmett Till, for example. Not all people are honest."
Wyatt suggested that lawyer Gloria Allred, who represents more than 30 Cosby accusers, worked to help women fabricate allegations.
"What Gloria Allred was able to do, what she did, was take a salt and pepper shaker _ she shaked out a lot of salt and sprinkled in a little black pepper," Wyatt said. "And the south came east. And that's what we saw."
Three of Allred's clients were among the five women who took the witness stand at trial and told jurors that Cosby had drugged and sexually assaulted them.
Till was 14 and visiting relatives in Mississippi when he was lynched in August 1955, after a white woman claimed that he had grabbed her waist and made crude comments in an encounter at a grocery store. His killers were arrested and charged with murder, but acquitted by a jury of 12 white men. The following year, the defendants admitted the killing in a magazine interview. Decades later, the woman spoke out and said her claims against Till were false.
One of Cosby's lawyers, Kathleen Bliss, had also compared the accusations during her closing argument to a lynching _ as well as a witch hunt and McCarthyism.
Constand, meanwhile, spoke out for the first time since the verdict by tweeting a thank you message to Montgomery County prosecutors. "Truth prevails," she wrote.
