Bill Cosby is facing foreclosure as proceedings move forward on one of his New York City townhouses, which he has listed for $7 million. The disgraced comedian stopped making mortgage payments in June 2024, and CitiMortgage sued his LLC—not Cosby personally—in connection with a $4.2 million loan default.
Cosby purchased the Upper East Side property at 243 E. 61st St. in Lenox Hill back in April 1980 for $1.2 million. The four-story, six-bedroom townhouse spans 5,000 square feet and was once shared with his wife, Camille. It also housed their late son, Ennis.
Exactly 45 years after he bought the home, Cosby—once celebrated as “America’s Dad”—is now forced to offload the luxury property as he faces financial and reputational fallout from decades of sexual assault allegations.
Timing of the lawsuit paints Cosby’s fall from grace: the loan was taken out in 2010, but public pushback of his sexual allegations took place in 2014 when approximately 60 women came forward and made claims that Cosby had had nonconsensual sex with them, with some of them reiterating accusations that previously been resolved years earlier by settlements paid by Cosby. The allegations gained fresh traction in October 2014 after comedian Hannibal Buress referred to Cosby’s history of sexual misconduct allegations in stand-up set that went viral after it was recorded by an audience member.
Bill Cosby was sentenced to 3 to 10 years in prison in September 2018 after being convicted of sexual assault in Pennsylvania.
He served nearly 3 years before his conviction was overturned, and he was released from prison on June 30, 2021, after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that his due process rights had been violated due to a prior non-prosecution agreement.
The CitiMortgage foreclosure lawsuit was filed on Dec. 2, 2024, in Manhattan Supreme Court.
Of the $4.2 million loan, $3.7 million was the principal amount, with the remainder being interest and fees.
Cosby’s dire financial problems were present before his 2018 conviction; in the 2015 filing season, he owed $1.8 million in back taxes.
Trouble only persisted in 2019 and 2020, as he owed nearly $650,000 in back taxes those years, and he had two tax liens, one for $88,566.88 and the other for $559,573.77, filed against him.
With a net worth once reported to be around $400 million, according to some media outlets, being the highest-paid television actor in Hollywood during the peak of his 1980s hit TV series “The Cosby Show,” the defaulting on his properties comes as a sign of his downfall.
The Lenox Hill property is just one of the pair of properties Cosby owned, another UES property also defaulting on loans.
Located at 18 E. 71st St., a six-story, 12,060-square-foot home built in 1899 that he has owned since 1987, the building, close in proximity to Central Park, has led Cosby to be $17.5 million in debt, according to the New York Post.
It is not certain if Cosby will be selling this property, but he originally bought it in for $6.2 million.
Well you see sometimes you have to just derka derka the grunka grunka, and then try to move the unca-wunka to the gurga-ganya, according to local tax laws. In this case the oompa loompas weren’t doing their jobs good enough so now we’re having to deal with some dumpa-doo and the friggilty-fraggle rockers, if you know what I mean.