After a week off to parts unknown, John Oliver is back and he brought the big guns on the latest edition of his addictive HBO series Last Week Tonight. The big segment concerned professional sports stadiums—mainly, how sports franchises are ripping off the public by financing their souped-up arenas with billions of dollars in taxpayer money even though the franchises themselves are profitable, they’re owned by billionaires, and they don’t boost the economy of their host city.
But prior to that 19-minute investigation, Oliver aired his “And Now This” segment, and this week’s was titled, “Whoopi Goldberg Defends Ten Surprising Things.”
The montage of clips was no doubt pegged to Goldberg’s continued defense of accused serial rapist Bill Cosby. Goldberg has arguably been Cosby’s most vocal supporter not named Camille throughout this horrifying ordeal in which over 40 women over the years 1965-2008 have accused Cosby of drugging and sexually assaulting them. Last week, the Associated Press published unsealed Cosby testimony from a 2005 civil suit wherein the comedian admitted to the following: drugging a 19-year-old woman for the purpose of sex; obtaining seven prescriptions for Quaaludes to administer to women for the purpose of sex; asking his agent at William Morris to pay off a woman “no questions asked”; and offering to pay for one of his rape accusers’ educations when she and her mother asked him for an apology.
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Despite this eye-opening reveal, Goldberg lowered her head and soldiered on in her defense of Cosby, saying she “doesn’t like snap judgments,” “he has not been proven a rapist,” and cracking dismissive jokes about how “the ‘80s weren’t fun for everybody, clearly.”
So Oliver, as is his wont, thoroughly embarrassed Goldberg with a supercut of things she’s defended—mostly while serving as co-host of daytime talk show The View—including Roman Polanski (“I don’t believe it was rape-rape”); Ray Rice (“If you hit somebody, you cannot be sure you are not going to get hit back”); CIA torture (“There are other countries that have done it, and it’s reaped quite the benefits for them”); the list goes on.Watch it here:
