Keshia Knight Pulliam is speaking out following her Celebrity Apprentice firing, and the Bill Cosby rape scandal, which her firing indirectly breathed new life into. Pulliam was fired on Celebrity Apprentice after Donald Trump criticized her decision not to call up The Cosby Show patriarch for a charitable donation. Keshia’s team lost the competition, a charity camp fund drive, as a result of her refusal to reach out Cosby, now embroiled in a firestorm of rape allegations. The episode was filmed many months before that scandal broke, but her decision, and its role in her dismissal by Trump, cast things in a very different light. “I know The Cosby Show is in reruns,” said Pulliam, 35, this morning on Today . “And everyone thinks that we’re this family that has dinner every Friday night.” “The reality was I hadn’t spoken to Mr. Cosby. I felt it would be tactless, very rude, to call someone and be like, ‘Hey, so, let me have some money right now.'” On the show, she offered a similar explanation to Donald Trump, saying: “So for me to pick up the phone, having not talked to [Cosby] for five years, except when we run into each other for an event … I feel that’s not my place to do.” Trump, in large part because he disagreed with this, dismissed Pulliam, his first firing of the new season starring Kate Gosselin and the like (see cast pics below). Celebrity Apprentice Cast Photos: Who’s In? 1. Kate Gosselin Kate Gosselin as a cast member of Celebrity Apprentice?!? We NEVER could have seen this coming! As for the current allegations made against her former TV father? “What I can say is this: I wasn’t there. No one was there except for the two people who know exactly what happened. All I can speak to is the man that I know and I love.” She went on to further address the claims made by more than 20 women against Cosby, including big names such as Janice Dickinson and Beverly Johnson . “Ultimately, they’re just that, allegations,” Pulliam told NBC’s Savannah Guthrie. “You know, it’s very much been played out in the court of public opinion.” “But we’re still in America, where ultimately you are innocent until proven guilty. I wasn’t there . That’s just not the man I know. So I can’t speak to it.” “The fact that he’s been such an example, you can’t take away from the great that he has done,” she said, refusing to throw him under the bus whatsoever. “You know, the millions that he has given back to colleges and education, and what he did with The Cosby Show and how groundbreaking that was.”
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Keshia Knight Pulliam Responds to Celebrity Apprentice Firing, Bill Cosby Scandal
