I'm Roberta Glass and you're listening to my True Crime Report. My guest today, Nikki Egan,

is an award-winning journalist whose career has spanned nearly three decades. Egan first broke

the story of Andrea Constance, drugging and rape at the hands of Bill Cosby in 2005,

and she stayed on the story attending both of his trials.

She is the executive producer of the excellent podcast chasing Cosby and the author of the book

by the same name. Welcome, Nikki Egan. Thank you. You wrote about Cosby in 2005 and you continued writing

about it for a decade and a half. What made you stay on the story? I think the main thing that made

me stay on the story is the way that I saw the media back off the story, the rest of the media

back off the story in 2005,

I saw how much Cosby was able to control the media and get them not to write certain stories

or report certain things and in fact used the media to put out negative information on these women.

In many cases, some of this information wasn't even true, like an Andrea Constance case. So that was one of the main things that kept me on because I just couldn't trust the other media to report what was going on and give these victims a voice. I mean, I, you know, I didn't want to believe it either when this first broke. I was a Cosby fan. I grew up watching Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids and the Cosby show, and my

reaction was not the past, but I had to put my personal feelings aside and find out who this

person was that was accusing him and what her background was and what the allegations were. And I

quickly found through my own reporting how credible she was and that she had taped phone calls

that supported what she was saying. And instead, you know, Cosby's people leaked to the media had taped phone calls that supported what she was saying and instead, you know, Cosby's

people leaked to the media that these phone calls, it was very interesting because they,

Celebrity Justice was reporting that these phone calls were Andrea's mother shaking down Cosby

for money, trying to shake down Cosby for money and that they happened before she went to police,

none of which was true. And I reported, you know, my own exclusive stories that they happened before, after she went to police and that she did not take them up on this offer. Those stories didn't get picked up, but the ones, the other ones did. And so I just really saw how he was able to control the media. And I found out later, too, Bruce Castor, at the time, the DA, could say these phone calls were illegal wiretaps. And I found out really only the last year and a half that he knew back then that they weren't because he had had his first assistant, Rusa Furman, research the issue. And she came to him and told him, these are legal. And yet even the press release he put

out saying he wasn't going to charge, Cosby, he said that these were illegal wiretaps. And I only found

out because Risa was deposed in Andrea's defamation lawsuit against Castor. And she says that in

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