Tactics out of sync with #MeToo

Time and again during Bill Cosby’s second trial, the comedian’s lawyers launched blistering attacks on the six women who told a Pennsylvania jury that he had sexually abused them, questioning their motives and assailing their characters in stark terms.

Lead attorney Tom Mesereau called Andrea Constand, the victim in the case, a “con artist” and “pathological liar” and grilled another woman on her past drug use. His colleague Kathleen Bliss described former supermodel Janice Dickinson, who was a witness for the prosecution and testified that Cosby had sexually assaulted her, as a “failed starlet” who sounded like she had “slept with every man on the planet”.

The tactic, not uncommon in cases involving sex crimes, appeared out of sync with the #MeToo movement and a national shift in sentiment toward sexual assault victims since Cosby’s first trial ended with a hung jury last summer.

The withering tone and inflammatory words of the defence may have backfired with the jury of seven men and five women, which voted unanimously to convict Cosby.

“I can understand people doing vigorous cross-examination, but calling people names and trying to characterise them in the most negative light struck me as a bridge too far. And I wonder if there was a boomerang effect in the minds of the jury,” said Valerie Hans, a law professor at Cornell University who studies the jury system.

“The defence may have been less able to rely on those stock narratives of lying women,” said Deborah Tuerkheimer, a law professor at Northwestern University. “It may have backfired because jurors are more sensitive to this.”

Dennis McAndrews, a former Pennsylvania prosecutor who attended the trial, said: “We’re in a different world now.”