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Bill Cosby Found Guilty of Sexual Assault After Years of Accusations
Bill Cosby arriving Wednesday at the Montgomery County Courthouse as the jury begins deliberating his fate at his retrial on sexual assault charges.Matt Rourke/Associated Press
By Graham Bowley and Jon Hurdle
April 26, 2018
NORRISTOWN, Pa. — A jury found Bill Cosby guilty Thursday of drugging and sexually assaulting a young woman at his home near here 14 years ago, capping the downfall of one of the world’s best-known entertainers, and offering a measure of satisfaction to the dozens of women who for years have accused him of similar assaults against them.
On the second day of its deliberations at the Montgomery County Courthouse in this town northwest of Philadelphia, the jury returned to convict Mr. Cosby of aggravated indecent assault against Andrea Constand, at the time a Temple University employee he had mentored.
It was the second time a jury had considered Mr. Cosby’s fate. His first trial last summer ended with a deadlocked jury after six days of deliberations.
In recent years, Mr. Cosby, 80, had admitted to decades of philandering, and to giving quaaludes to women as part of an effort to have sex, smashing the image he had built as a moralizing public figure and the upstanding paterfamilias in the wildly popular 1980s and ’90s sitcom “The Cosby Show.” He did not testify in his own defense, avoiding a grilling about those admissions, but he and his lawyers have insisted that his encounter with Ms. Constand was part of a consensual affair, not an assault.
The verdict now marks the bottom of a fall as precipitous as any in show business history and leaves in limbo a large slice of American popular culture from Mr. Cosby’s six-decade career as a comedian and actor. For the last few years, his TV shows, films, and recorded stand-up performances, one-time broadcast staples, have largely been shunned and with the conviction, they are likely to remain so.
At his retrial in the same courthouse and before the same judge as last summer, a new defense team argued unsuccessfully that Ms. Constand, now 45, was a desperate “con artist” with financial problems who steadily worked her famous but lonely mark for a lucrative payday.
Andrea Constand exits the courtroom during a break in the Cosby retrial on Tuesday. She is the only woman whose complaint of sexual assault against Mr. Cosby resulted in a criminal trial.
Pool photo by Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The prosecution countered that it was Mr. Cosby who had been a deceiver, hiding behind his amiable image as America’s Dad to prey on women that he first incapacitated with intoxicants. During closing arguments Tuesday, a special prosecutor, Kristen Gibbons Feden, had told the jury: “She is not the con. He is.”
The defense’s star witness was a veteran academic adviser at Temple, Mr. Cosby’s alma mater, who said Ms. Constand had confided in her in 2004 that she could make money by falsely claiming that she had been molested by a prominent person. Mr. Cosby paid Ms. Constand $3.38 million in 2006 as part of the confidential financial settlement of a lawsuit she had brought against him after prosecutors had originally declined to bring charges.
Kathleen Bliss, left, and Thomas A. Mesereau, two lawyers for Mr. Cosby, at the courthouse on Wednesday.
Tracie Van Auken/EPA, via Shutterstock
None of the other accusations had resulted in prosecution. In many of the cases, too much time had passed for criminal charges to be considered, so Ms. Constand’s case emerged as the only criminal test of Mr. Cosby’s guilt.
But Mr. Cosby is facing civil actions from several accusers, many of whom are suing him for defamation because, they say, he or his staff branded them as liars by dismissing their allegations as fabrications.
The suits have mostly been delayed, pending the outcome of the criminal trial and are likely to draw momentum from the guilty verdict.
Ms. Constand, who testified that in a visit in early 2004 to Mr. Cosby’s home near Philadelphia, when she was 30 and he was 66, Mr. Cosby gave her pills that left her immobile and drifting in and out of consciousness. He said he had only given her Benadryl.
Mr. Cosby and his wife, Camille, arriving Tuesday at the courthouse for closing arguments. It was the only day Mrs. Cosby appeared at the trial.
Tracie Van Auken/EPA, via Shutterstock
“I was kind of jolted awake and felt Mr. Cosby on the couch beside me, behind me, and my vagina was being penetrated quite forcefully, and I felt my breast being touched,” Ms. Constand said. “I was limp, and I could not fight him off.”
Adding weight to her accusations was the revelation that a decade earlier, in a deposition in Ms. Constand’s lawsuit against him, Mr. Cosby had admitted to having given women quaaludes in an effort to have sex with them.
But perhaps most damaging was the testimony by the five additional accusers, which took up several days of testimony. In Mr. Cosby’s first trial, last summer, only one other accuser had been allowed to add her voice to that of Ms. Constand’s. At the retrial, the accusers included the former model Janice Dickinson, who told jurors Mr. Cosby assaulted her in a Lake Tahoe hotel room in 1982, after giving her a pill to help with menstrual cramps. “Here was America’s Dad on top of me,” she told the courtroom, “a happily married man with five children, on top of me.”
The jury deliberating the Cosby case inside the Montgomery County Courthouse was asked to decide on three counts of sexual assault.
Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters
As in the first trial, Mr. Cosby’s legal team insisted Ms. Constand was lying about a consensual, sexual relationship. But while his lawyers last summer had depicted Mr. Cosby as a flawed man, an unfaithful husband who shattered his fans’ illusions, but committed no crime, his lawyers this time focused on the financial struggles they said Ms. Constand was experiencing that led her to to extort money from a man who had been trying to help her with a career in broadcasting.
Bill Cosby arriving Wednesday at the Montgomery County Courthouse as the jury begins deliberating his fate at his retrial on sexual assault charges.Matt Rourke/Associated Press
By Graham Bowley and Jon Hurdle
April 26, 2018
NORRISTOWN, Pa. — A jury found Bill Cosby guilty Thursday of drugging and sexually assaulting a young woman at his home near here 14 years ago, capping the downfall of one of the world’s best-known entertainers, and offering a measure of satisfaction to the dozens of women who for years have accused him of similar assaults against them.
On the second day of its deliberations at the Montgomery County Courthouse in this town northwest of Philadelphia, the jury returned to convict Mr. Cosby of aggravated indecent assault against Andrea Constand, at the time a Temple University employee he had mentored.
It was the second time a jury had considered Mr. Cosby’s fate. His first trial last summer ended with a deadlocked jury after six days of deliberations.
In recent years, Mr. Cosby, 80, had admitted to decades of philandering, and to giving quaaludes to women as part of an effort to have sex, smashing the image he had built as a moralizing public figure and the upstanding paterfamilias in the wildly popular 1980s and ’90s sitcom “The Cosby Show.” He did not testify in his own defense, avoiding a grilling about those admissions, but he and his lawyers have insisted that his encounter with Ms. Constand was part of a consensual affair, not an assault.
The verdict now marks the bottom of a fall as precipitous as any in show business history and leaves in limbo a large slice of American popular culture from Mr. Cosby’s six-decade career as a comedian and actor. For the last few years, his TV shows, films, and recorded stand-up performances, one-time broadcast staples, have largely been shunned and with the conviction, they are likely to remain so.
At his retrial in the same courthouse and before the same judge as last summer, a new defense team argued unsuccessfully that Ms. Constand, now 45, was a desperate “con artist” with financial problems who steadily worked her famous but lonely mark for a lucrative payday.
Andrea Constand exits the courtroom during a break in the Cosby retrial on Tuesday. She is the only woman whose complaint of sexual assault against Mr. Cosby resulted in a criminal trial.
Pool photo by Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The prosecution countered that it was Mr. Cosby who had been a deceiver, hiding behind his amiable image as America’s Dad to prey on women that he first incapacitated with intoxicants. During closing arguments Tuesday, a special prosecutor, Kristen Gibbons Feden, had told the jury: “She is not the con. He is.”
The defense’s star witness was a veteran academic adviser at Temple, Mr. Cosby’s alma mater, who said Ms. Constand had confided in her in 2004 that she could make money by falsely claiming that she had been molested by a prominent person. Mr. Cosby paid Ms. Constand $3.38 million in 2006 as part of the confidential financial settlement of a lawsuit she had brought against him after prosecutors had originally declined to bring charges.
Kathleen Bliss, left, and Thomas A. Mesereau, two lawyers for Mr. Cosby, at the courthouse on Wednesday.
Tracie Van Auken/EPA, via Shutterstock
None of the other accusations had resulted in prosecution. In many of the cases, too much time had passed for criminal charges to be considered, so Ms. Constand’s case emerged as the only criminal test of Mr. Cosby’s guilt.
But Mr. Cosby is facing civil actions from several accusers, many of whom are suing him for defamation because, they say, he or his staff branded them as liars by dismissing their allegations as fabrications.
The suits have mostly been delayed, pending the outcome of the criminal trial and are likely to draw momentum from the guilty verdict.
Ms. Constand, who testified that in a visit in early 2004 to Mr. Cosby’s home near Philadelphia, when she was 30 and he was 66, Mr. Cosby gave her pills that left her immobile and drifting in and out of consciousness. He said he had only given her Benadryl.
Mr. Cosby and his wife, Camille, arriving Tuesday at the courthouse for closing arguments. It was the only day Mrs. Cosby appeared at the trial.
Tracie Van Auken/EPA, via Shutterstock
“I was kind of jolted awake and felt Mr. Cosby on the couch beside me, behind me, and my vagina was being penetrated quite forcefully, and I felt my breast being touched,” Ms. Constand said. “I was limp, and I could not fight him off.”
Adding weight to her accusations was the revelation that a decade earlier, in a deposition in Ms. Constand’s lawsuit against him, Mr. Cosby had admitted to having given women quaaludes in an effort to have sex with them.
But perhaps most damaging was the testimony by the five additional accusers, which took up several days of testimony. In Mr. Cosby’s first trial, last summer, only one other accuser had been allowed to add her voice to that of Ms. Constand’s. At the retrial, the accusers included the former model Janice Dickinson, who told jurors Mr. Cosby assaulted her in a Lake Tahoe hotel room in 1982, after giving her a pill to help with menstrual cramps. “Here was America’s Dad on top of me,” she told the courtroom, “a happily married man with five children, on top of me.”
The jury deliberating the Cosby case inside the Montgomery County Courthouse was asked to decide on three counts of sexual assault.
Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters
As in the first trial, Mr. Cosby’s legal team insisted Ms. Constand was lying about a consensual, sexual relationship. But while his lawyers last summer had depicted Mr. Cosby as a flawed man, an unfaithful husband who shattered his fans’ illusions, but committed no crime, his lawyers this time focused on the financial struggles they said Ms. Constand was experiencing that led her to to extort money from a man who had been trying to help her with a career in broadcasting.
