Prosecutors confident conviction will stand
NORRISTOWN, Pa. — In the tense moments before a jury convicted Bill Cosby of sexual assault, the prosecutor who had branded him a “con man” and called him out for laughing during closing arguments started to worry about the global implications if the #MeToo era’s first big trial went the other way.
Accuser Andrea Constand’s allegations Cosby had drugged and molested her at his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004, revived out of nearly a decade of dormancy by another comedian’s viral joke, had coalesced into a movement of women who said he violated them, too.
Prosecutor Kristen Feden told The Associated Press she was “nervous for Andrea and for sex crime victims as a whole” at Cosby’s retrial.
“I felt like this verdict could dictate something more,” Feden said. “If they found him not guilty, I felt like they were feeding into every character assassination on sex crime victims.”
Feden and prosecutor Stewart Ryan spoke to the AP on Saturday about the nearly three-year journey from reopening the Cosby case to last Thursday’s verdict, how they restructured their approach after last year’s hung jury and the sacrifices they faced along the way.
Cosby, 80, is a prisoner in his own home and faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life behind bars as he awaits sentencing within the next three months on three counts of aggravated indecent assault. He has maintained his innocence. His publicist has declared his conviction a “public lynching,” and his lawyers have vowed to appeal.
But Feden and Ryan said they are confident Cosby’s conviction will stand.
Cosby’s first trial ended in a deadlocked jury last year. Prosecutors started thinking about a retrial as last year’s deliberations wore on for six days, Ryan said.
“We could kind of see the writing on the wall with the first jury,” he said.
Two days after Cosby’s conviction, law books and papers were still strewn on a long table in the war room where prosecutors plotted their strategy: leading with an expert to educate the jury in victim behavior, successfully fighting to call five additional accusers and fending off the defense’s allegations Constand was a scammer framing Cosby for a big payday.
The additional accusers allowed prosecutors to uncloak the man once revered as America’s Dad as a manipulative predator who used his built-in trust to trick women into taking powerful intoxicants so he could violate them. One woman pointedly called Cosby a “serial rapist,” and another asked him through her tears, “You remember, don’t you, Mr. Cosby?”
Feden said she felt “that needed to be exposed.”
“That was the most sickening part of this all,” she said. “When people in positions of power use that power to victimize people, I find that to be beyond disgusting.”
Then-District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman reopened the Cosby investigation in July 2015 after a federal judge, acting on a request from the AP, unsealed portions of Cosby’s deposition testimony from a civil lawsuit he settled with Constand in 2006 for $3.4 million. In the testimony, which was read to jurors at both trials, he described giving quaaludes to women before sex in the 1970s and his encounters with Constand, a Temple University women’s basketball administrator.
Ryan likened Cosby’s description of a purported sexual encounter with Constand to “reading some disgusting pornography novel.” He said the testimony, far more explicit than what Cosby said in his lone police statement, showed “exactly what’s going on” in his mind.
Feden questioned Constand. Ryan cross-examined star defense witness Marguerite Jackson. Together they delivered a closing argument that wrested the “con artist” label from the defense and pushed back at suggestions the case was outside the statute of limitations.