BILL COSBY’S 44-YEAR-OLD daughter Ensa Cosby has died in Massachusetts from kidney disease.
Andrew Wyatt, a spokesman for the comedian, did not immediately offer other details about her death, which occurred on Friday.
“Please keep the Cosby family in your prayers and give them peace at this time,” he said.
Bill Cosby lost another of his five children in 1997 when his 27-year-old son, Ennis, a graduate student at Columbia University, was shot dead while changing a flat tyre in Los Angeles. A 22-year-old man was later convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Bill Cosby, 80, owns a home in the western Massachusetts town of Shelburne Falls.
Ensa Cosby spoke out on her father’s behalf before his trial last year on charges he drugged and molested a woman at his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004. He has pleaded not guilty and remains free on bail ahead of his retrial, which is scheduled for 2 April. His first trial ended with a hung jury last year.
Ensa and her sister, Erinn, recorded statements that aired on New York hip-hop radio station Power 105. Ensa said she strongly believed in her father’s innocence and believed that racism played a big role in aspects of the scandal.
“How my father is being punished by a society that still believes black men rape white women but passes off ‘boys will be boys’ when white men are accused, and how the politics of our country prove my disgust. My father has been publicly lynched in the media,” she said.
“Boys will be boys” was an apparent reference to US President Donald Trump excusing as “locker room talk” lewd remarks about grabbing women’s genitals he was recorded making in footage released during the 2016 presidential campaign by Access Hollywood.
Pretrial hearing
Bill Cosby is due in court on Monday for a pretrial hearing as his lawyers and prosecutors clash over how many other accusers can testify at his retrial.
In the wake of Ensa’s death, Cosby could ask to postpone the pretrial hearing or waive his right to be in court for it. Cosby’s lead attorney, Tom Mesereau, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
A defamation lawsuit filed by seven women who have accused Cosby of sexual misconduct is also pending in Massachusetts.
Ensa largely stayed out of the public spotlight during her life though she did appear in an episode of her father’s popular sitcom The Cosby Show, which ran from 1984-1992, in 1989.
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