Jury finds Cosby guilty
Sexual assault conviction caps precipitous fall
NORRISTOWN, Pa. — A jury found Bill Cosby guilty Thursday of drugging and sexually assaulting a woman at his home near here 14 years ago, capping the downfall of one of the world’s best-known entertainers, and offering a measure of satisfaction to the dozens of women who for years have accused him of similar assaults against them.
On the second day of its deliberations at the Montgomery County Courthouse in this town northwest of Philadelphia, the jury returned to convict Cosby of three counts of aggravated indecent assault against Andrea Constand, at the time a Temple University employee he had mentored.
The three counts — penetration with lack of consent, penetration while unconscious, and penetration after administering an intoxicant — are felonies, each punishable by up to 10 years in state prison, though the sentences could be served concurrently.
Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin R. Steele asked that Cosby’s $1 million bail be revoked, suggesting he had been convicted of a serious crime, owned a plane and could flee, prompting an angry outburst from Cosby, who shout-
ed, “He doesn’t have a plane, you asshole.”
“Enough of that,” said Judge Steven T. O’Neill. He did not view Cosby as a flight risk, he said, adding that Cosby could be released on bail, but authorities would continue to hold his passport and he would have to remain in his nearby home. He did not set a sentencing date.
Cosby sat back in his chair after the verdict was announced and quietly stared down. But several women who have accused Cosby of abusing them, and attended the trial each day, briefly cheered. O’Neill praised the jurors, calling it “an extraordinarily difficult case” and adding, “You have sacrificed much, but you have sacrificed in the service of justice.”
When he was finished, Constand, who had been quiet throughout, stood up and was hugged by several people, including her lawyer.
Did not testify
Cosby did not comment as he left the courthouse, but his lead lawyer, Thomas A. Mesereau Jr., said his client would appeal. “We are very disappointed by the verdict,” he said. “We don’t believe Mr. Cosby is guilty of anything.”
It was the second time a jury had considered Cosby’s fate. His first trial last summer ended with a deadlocked jury after six days of deliberations.
In recent years, Cosby, 80, had admitted to decades of philandering, and to giving quaaludes to women as part of an effort to have sex, smashing the image he had built as a moralizing public figure and the upstanding paterfamilias in the wildly popular 1980s and ’90s sitcom “The Cosby Show.” He did not testify in his own defense, avoiding a grilling about those admissions, but he and his lawyers have insisted that his encounter with Constand was part of a consensual affair, not an assault.
The verdict now marks the bottom of a fall as precipitous as any in show business history and leaves in limbo a large slice of American popular culture from Cosby’s six-decade career as a comedian and actor. For the last few years, his TV shows, films and recorded stand-up performances, one-time broadcast staples, have largely been shunned, and with the conviction, they are likely to remain so.
At his retrial in the same courthouse and before the same judge as last summer, a new defense team argued unsuccessfully that Constand, now 45, was a desperate “con artist” with financial problems who steadily worked her famous but lonely mark for a lucrative payday.
The prosecution countered that it was Cosby who had been a deceiver, hiding behind his amiable image as America’s Dad to prey on women that he first incapacitated with intoxicants. During closing arguments Tuesday, a special prosecutor, Kristen Gibbons Feden, had told the jury: “She is not the con. He is.”
The defense’s star witness was a veteran academic adviser at Temple, Cosby’s alma mater, who said Constand had confided in her in 2004 that she could make money by falsely claiming that she had been molested by a prominent person. Cosby paid Constand $3.38 million in 2006 as part of the confidential financial settlement of a lawsuit she had brought against him after prosecutors had originally declined to bring charges.
But Constand said she had never spoken with the adviser and prosecutors rebutted the characterization of Constand as a schemer. Perhaps most damaging to Cosby, they were able to introduce testimony from five other women who told jurors they believed they too had been drugged and sexually assaulted by Cosby in separate incidents in the 1980s. The powerful drumbeat of accounts allowed prosecutors to argue that Constand’s assault was part of a signature pattern of predatory behavior.
When Constand testified, she took the stand as something of a proxy for the other women, more than 50, who have accused Cosby of abuses, often with details remarkably similar to Constand’s account. A few of those women attended the trial.
None of the other accusations had resulted in prosecution. In many of the cases, too much time had passed for criminal charges to be considered, so Constand’s case emerged as the only criminal test of Cosby’s guilt.
Defamation suits
But Cosby is facing civil actions from several accusers, many of whom are suing him for defamation because, they say, he or his staff branded them as liars by dismissing their allegations as fabrications.
The suits have mostly been delayed, pending the outcome of the criminal trial and are likely to draw momentum from the guilty verdict.
The case largely turned on the credibility of Constand, who testified that in a visit in early 2004 to Cosby’s home near Philadelphia, when she was 30 and he was 66, Cosby gave her pills that left her immobile and drifting in and out of consciousness. He said he had only given her Benadryl.
“I was kind of jolted awake and felt Mr. Cosby on the couch beside me, behind me, and my vagina was being penetrated quite forcefully, and I felt my breast being touched,” Constand said. “I was limp, and I could not fight him off.”
Adding weight to her accusations was the revelation that a decade earlier, in a deposition in Constand’s lawsuit against him, Cosby had admitted to having given women quaaludes in an effort to have sex with them.
But perhaps most damaging was the testimony by the five additional accusers, which took up several days of testimony. In Cosby’s first trial, last summer, only one other accuser had been allowed to add her voice to that of Constand.
At the retrial, the accusers included former model Janice Dickinson, who told jurors Cosby assaulted her in a Lake Tahoe hotel room in 1982, after giving her a pill to help with menstrual cramps. “Here was America’s Dad on top of me,” she told the courtroom, “a happily married man with five children, on top of me.”