Cosby convicted on three counts of sexual assault
NORRISTOWN, Pennsylvania: Iconic entertainer Bill Cosby was convicted on three counts of sexual assault on Thursday, a decision that punctuates one of the most thundering falls from grace in American cultural history.
The courtroom rocked with emotion as the jury foreperson, a slender woman with long greying hair and glasses, said those three words — guilty, guilty, guilty — for assaulting Andrea Constand, the only woman among dozens of accusers to bring criminal charges against the disgraced comedian. Two women who have accused Cosby of sexual assault but did not testify at the trial, burst out in loud sobs from their seats in one of the back rows of the cramped and tension-filled courtroom.
They were escorted from the courtroom by security officials. But their tears — tears of joy, sadness and exhaustion after a frustrating years-long struggle — still filtered into the courtroom through the heavy closed wooden doors.
Once one of the nation’s most admired men, a pioneering African-American actor beloved for his role as Dr. Cliff Huxtable on the 1980s megahit “The Cosby Show,” Cosby was recast in a suburban Philadelphia courtroom as a merciless predator and sexual deviant in the first celebrity trial of the #MeToo era of awareness about sexual assault and harassment. A 7-man, 5-woman jury took less than two days to convict Cosby of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand, a Temple University women’s basketball operations director more than three decades his junior whom the comedian lured into his home with promises of mentorship. No sentencing date has been set. The conviction comes in a retrial of a 2017 case in which a mistrial was declared.
When Cosby received the message about his fate — a conviction that could send him to prison for as many as 30 years, essentially a life sentence for a man his age — the old comic’s jaw muscles pulsed. He sat rigidly still.
But Cosby’s composure slipped when the jury filed out. The comedian exploded in anger as District Attorney Kevin Steele argued that Cosby has access to a private plane and should have his US$1 million bail revoked because he might be a flight risk.
“He doesn’t have a plane, you a ****** !” Cosby shouted in an ear-splitting roar that startled the courtroom and sent necks craning for a glimpse of his moment of distilled rage. “He doesn’t know!”
Steven O’Neill, the Montgomery County judge who oversaw the case, declined to revoke Cosby’s bail but ordered him not to leave his estate in nearby Elkins Park, Pennsylvania.
Cosby paused for a moment before leaving the courtroom. He slumped ever so slightly at the defence table. He leaned on a slender cane, his constant companion during the long courtroom battles. His public relations agent extended a hand. But the funnyman, the curmudgeonly father figure of TV lore, was surrounded only by people on his payroll. Attorneys and publicists encircled him, but his two adult daughters — absent throughout the trial — were nowhere to be seen. His wife, Camille, who’d appeared only for closing arguments, was not there, either.
Moments before the verdict was read, as Cosby awaited the jury’s decision, he sat motionless at the defence table in a dark blue suit and red tie, staring into space. He’d often been chatty and jovial with his defence team before the court day began. But on Thursday, the face of the ageing comedian — his head shaved close to his scalp — bore a grim aspect, his eyelids heavy.
Across the room, the main witness against him — Constand — stood nodding as the district attorney spoke in a hushed whisper to her. She’d slipped into the same white blazer she’d worn on the witness stand, the colour contrasting with her deeply tanned face. When she took her place on the courtroom bench, she closed her eyes for a long time, sitting arrow straight as if she were meditating. Four rows behind her, Therese Serignese — a Cosby accuser who was not called to testify — dabbed tears from her face.
During 12 days of testimony, Cosby was often a silent figure. He sat at the head of the defence table beneath rows of massive brass chandeliers in a marbleclad courthouse built before the Civil War in this hardscrabble city about 45 minutes northwest of Philadelphia. But the 80-yearold’s face only infrequently betrayed his emotions as he sat at the head of the defence table with a pencil-thin wooden cane by his side. But on the final day before his case went to the jury, Cosby laughed and smirked at the defence table, then in an extraordinary moment of courtroom drama engaged in an uncomfortable stare-down with prosecutor Kristen Feden, who is less than half his age.
Cosby, who ditched his signature lumpy sweaters for business suits with matching pocket handkerchiefs, glared at the purple carpet with a deep frown as Constand testified about the night in 2004 when she says the comic legend offered her three round blue pills that he called “your friends,” ostensibly to help her relax. But when a Temple academic adviser testified that Constand had confided that she could extort a celebrity with a false story of sexual assault, Cosby was almost giddy, smiling broadly with his face turned to the packed courtroom audience and occasionally laughing with one hand cupped over his mouth.
The academic adviser’s testimony fit into a narrative laid out by the defence in which Constand was a “con artiste.” But prosecutors said it was actually Cosby who staged a con by using his fatherly television image to trick Constand and other alleged victims to trust him so that he could drug them.
Cosby was charged with three counts of aggravated indecent assault in December 2015 — just before a statute of limitations was set to expire. Cosby’s reputation had suffered for years — initially because of his scolding moralising to African-American youth in the 2000s, then due to the avalanche of sexual accusers that began in late 2014 and now numbers at least 60. — WP-Bloomberg