Bill Cosby's attorney on rape victims: "Women have a responsibility"

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Bill Cosby’s attorney, Monique Pressley, seems to be taking the victim-blaming approach to defending her client from rape allegations by 35 different women.

“People are willing to say many things in order to get money,” Pressley said when asked by Lamont Hill about the statistic that between 2 and 8% of accusers are lying about having survived an assault. Pressley said that extenutating factors such as “a very wealthy person who is alleged as the perpetrator of the crime,” a “prior relationship,” and whether the accusers had before “offered their bodies up for casting” or stand to make “monetary gain.”

Pressley also said that there were racial factors that needed to be addressed.

“I find it hard to believe a majority of white females saying an African-American male did this, [that] none of them would have been believed,” Pressley said, noting that they “would have been coming forward in the late ’60s and early ’70s” and “Bill Cosby was then, as he is now, a black man in America.”

“If a woman believes she was raped but doesn’t go to a hospital, even if she’s not willing to go to police stations …then we never know the truth of the matter,” Pressley said. She went on to say that a woman who says, “‘I was drugged and I think something may have happened to me, but I’m not sure'” should “never go forward in the court of law for good reason.”

“Women have a responsibility,” she concluded. “We have responsibility for our bodies, we have responsibility for our decisions, we have responsibility for the way we conduct ourselves.”