The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Cosby guilty of drugging and sexually assaulting woman
#Metoo era: Conviction in first big celebrity trial
US comedian Bill Cosby has been convicted of drugging and sexually assaulting a woman in the first big celebrity trial of the #Metoo era.
A jury outside Philadelphia convicted the Cosby Show star of three counts of aggravated indecent assault.
The guilty verdict came less than a year after another jury was deadlocked on the charges.
Cosby, 80, was charged with assaulting Temple University employee Andrea Constand at his Philadelphia home in 2004.
His lawyer called Ms Constand a “con artist” who levelled false accusations against Cosby so she could sue him.
Cosby could get up to 10 years in prison on each of the counts.
Dozens of women have come forward in recent years to say he drugged and assaulted them. Five of the other accusers testified against him at the retrial.
The panel of seven men and five women reached a verdict after deliberating for 14 hours over two days, vindicating prosecutors’ decision to retry the 80-year-old after his first trial ended with a hung jury less than a year ago.
Ms Constand, 45, a former Temple women’s basketball administrator, told jurors that Cosby knocked her out with three blue pills he called “your friends” before attacking her.
It was the only criminal case to arise from a barrage of allegations from more than 60 women who said the former TV star drugged and molested them over a span of five decades.
“The time for the defendant to escape justice is over,” prosecutor Stewart Ryan said in his closing argument. Another prosecutor, Kristen Feden, said Cosby was “nothing like the image that he played on TV” as sweater-wearing, wisdom-dispensing father of five Dr Cliff Huxtable on The Cosby Show.
Cosby’s retrial took place against the backdrop of #Metoo, the movement against sexual misconduct that has taken down powerful men in rapid succession, among them Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, Kevin Spacey and Senator Al Franken.