Kathie Lee Gifford is opening up about the time convicted sexual assaulter Bill Cosby tried to kiss her. The 67-year-old told People that she worked with Cosby for two years, and they became friends. But one night, he stepped over the line.
“He tried to kiss me,” she recalls. “He was not the first man during a multi-decade career that came on to me, and I'm just very grateful that I never let any of them take it any further than that.”
Gifford, who recently released a memoir, It’s Never Too Late, says that he is not now the man she once knew: “This was the most admired man in America for years. He was called America's dad, remember?”
She continues, “And the one and only time that he did try to kiss me, I said, ‘No. Bill, you're my friend.’ He goes, ‘You're right. Good night.’ So I found those accusations against him very painful, because that's not the man I knew.”
The 83-year-old Cosby was sentenced to 3 to 10 years in prison for during and assaulting Andrea Constand in his mansion in 2004.
“I never saw anybody personally being treated that way by him in two years, traveling all over the country, staying in the same house with him whenever we went to Harris, or in Reno,” Gifford says. “We had great fun together, and I never thought a thing of it ever. He would make me cappuccinos, he'd make the girls cappuccinos, he would pour me a glass of wine on occasion, and I would read the stories about how he would put drugs in other women's drinks and it was just foreign to me.”
But: “I didn't doubt the women's stories. I don't know why he behaved the way he did with the other women, that's their story to tell.”