Cosby prosecutors tell of nerves

Two had concerns of harm to #Metoo in case of acquittal

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 that Cosby had drugged and molested her at his suburban Philadelphia mansion in 2004 had coalesced into a movement of women who said he had violated them, too.

Prosecutor Kristen Feden said she was “nervous for Andrea and for sex crime victims as a whole” at Cosby’s retrial.

Feden and prosecutor Stewart Ryan spoke Saturday about the nearly three-year journey from the reopening of the Cosby case to Thursday’s verdict.

Cosby, 80, 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.

Two days after the verdict, law books and papers were still strewn on a long table in the war room where prosecutors had plotted their strategy: leading off with an expert to educate the jury in victim behavior, successfully fighting to call five additional accusers and fending off the defense’s allegations that 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.

Then-district Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman reopened the Cosby investigation in July 2015 after a federal judge 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.