VICTIMS GET ‘LAST LAUGH’
WOMEN CHEER END TO COSBY’S ‘REIGN OF TERROR’
As Bill Cosby was sentenced the jail, Andrea Constand, the Canadian woman who brought about his downfall, smiled broadly and was hugged by others in the courtroom.
In a statement submitted to the court and released Tuesday, Constand, 45, a Toronto native, said that she had to cope with years of anxiety and self-doubt after being sexually assaulted by Cosby. She said she now lived alone with her two dogs and had trouble trusting people.
“When the sexual assault happened, I was a young woman brimming with confidence and looking forward to a future bright with possibilities,” she wrote in her five-page statement. “Now, almost 15 years later, I’m a middle-aged woman who’s been stuck in a holding pattern for most of her adult life, unable to heal fully or to move forward.”
She also wrote of Cosby: “We may never know the full extent of his double life as a sexual predator, but his decades-long reign of terror as a serial rapist is over.”
Constand, then a 31-yearold Temple University women’s basketball official, went to police a year after waking up in a fog at Cosby’s gated estate, her clothes askew, only to have the district attorney pass on the case.
Another district attorney reopened the file a decade later and charged the TV star after standup comic Hannibal Buress’ riff about Cosby being a rapist prompted more accusers to come forward.
More than 60 women accused Cosby of sexual assault or harassment. In countless media interviews, the women — including aspiring actresses and models, flight attendants, singers and, in one instance, a doughnutshop clerk — gave similar accounts of being dazzled by Cosby’s fame.
Most said they never thought anyone would believe them, so they stayed quiet, privately harbouring experiences that many said had scarred them for life.
On Tuesday, more than a dozen of those women crowded into the suburban Philadelphia courtroom. Tamara Green, a model who said Cosby drugged and groped her around 1969 or 1970, drove alone crosscountry in an RV from her home in the San Diego area.
When her vehicle broke down in rural Tennessee, Green — now an attorney — left it there, hopping a plane to Pennsylvania. Linda Kirkpatrick, who said Cosby drugged her after a tennis tournament in 1981, stepped away from her Bundt cake bakery in Costa Mesa, Calif., to witness a historic moment.
“This is seriously closure,” said Green. “I feel like a cloud has been lifted.”
“Justice for one is justice for all,” said Therese Serignese, now a Florida nurse.
Another woman, former model Janice Dickinson, looked at Cosby after he was sentenced. “Here’s the last laugh pal,” she told him.