Glowing quotes from celebrities including Jerry Seinfeld and David Letterman have been pulled from a biography of Bill Cosby which hit bestseller lists last year.
Mark Whitaker’s Cosby: His Life and Times was released last autumn and made the second spot on the New York Times’ culture chart, garlanded with endorsements on its cover from names including Seinfeld (whose quote read: “I know certain religions forbid idol worship. If anyone ever told me I had to stop idolising Bill Cosby, I would say, ‘Sorry, but I’m out of this religion’”), along with Billy Crystal, Letterman and Mary Tyler Moore.
But in the wake of claims by more than 40 women that they were sexually assaulted by Cosby, its American publisher Simon & Schuster confirmed to the Associated Press that “recent events” meant the comments had been pulled from online retailers offering the book for sale, and that no paperback version of the book was scheduled. The Amazon.com site now shows a black image of the back cover of the biography, which displayed the blurbs – although they remain on Simon & Schuster’s own site.
“We were unaware that those quotes were still in circulation, and are asking the publisher to refrain from their future use,” a spokesman for Seinfeld and Letterman told The Hollywood Reporter.
Whitaker’s biography was well reviewed on its release last September – the New York Times Book Review called it a “wonderfully thorough biography of America’s most accomplished comedian [which] provides context and depth as he analyses Bill Cosby’s work”, and it was an Amazon’s “best book of the month” – but questions were raised about its failure to address the charges of rape which had been made against Cosby, particularly after a clip of comedian Hannibal Buress calling Cosby a predator went viral. Cosby and his lawyers have denied allegations of sexual misconduct.
Whitaker later tweeted, in response to a piece by David Carr in the New York Times, titled Calling Out Bill Cosby’s Media Enablers, Including Myself, “David you are right. I was wrong to not deal with the sexual assault charges against Cosby and pursue them more aggressively … I am following new developments and will address them at the appropriate time. If true the stories are shocking and horrible.”
