Jury will begin deliberating today in Cosby retrial

NORRISTOWN — Montgomery County prosecutors lashed into Bill Cosby in their final pitch to jurors Tuesday, painting him as a serial sexual predator who hid for decades behind his reputation as “America’s Dad” to lure women into situations where they were powerless to resist his advances.

“He is nothing like the image he plays on TV,” assistant district attorney Kristen Feden said in an impassioned address to the panel of seven men and five women hearing the case. “He utilized that image and cloaked it around himself, so he could gain the trust of young, unsuspecting women to sexually assault them and strip their ability to say no.”

Ms. Feden and her co-counsel, M. Stewart Ryan, pushed back hard against defense attacks lobbed earlier in the day against Andrea Constand, the case’s central accuser.

They responded contemptuously to what they described as “utterly shameful” and “filthy” efforts by Mr. Cosby’s lawyers to tear down the five other women who testified against the 80-year-old entertainer.

“She’s the exact reason that women and victims of sexual assault don’t report this crime,” Ms. Feden said, pointing at defense lawyer Kathleen Bliss, who had in her own closing argument hours earlier dismissed each of the women one by one as “failed starlets,” gold diggers or sexually promiscuous liars.”

As for Mr. Cosby, Ms. Feden stood feet from the comedy legend, pointing directly at the uncomfortable smile playing across his face.

“There’s nothing funny about that, Mr. Cosby,” she said. “And there’s nothing funny about five different women plus Ms. Constand being incapacitated, stripped of their autonomy, and being unable to say, ‘I don’t want to engage in sexual contact.’ There’s nothing funny about ‘No.’”

That animosity-filled atmosphere infused the 12th day of Mr. Cosby’s retrial. Jurors will begin their deliberations Wednesday. He is charged with three counts of aggravated indecent assault.

At one point, tensions became so heated between District Attorney Kevin R. Steele and Ms. Bliss that Montgomery County Judge Steven T. O’Neill had to break up their shouting match himself with a sign he held up from the bench that read “QUIET PLEASE!”

Earlier in the day, Ms. Bliss and her co-counsel Tom Mesereau had likened their client’s legal woes to a “lynching” and dismissed outright the #MeToo movement whose shadow has loomed large over the proceedings.

“Questioning an accuser is not shaming a victim. Gut feelings are not rational decisions. Mob rule is not due process,” Ms. Bliss said. “When you join a movement based primarily on emotion and anger, you don’t change a damn thing.”

The defense urged jurors to reject Ms. Constand’s account of being drugged and assaulted in 2004 at Mr. Cosby’s Cheltenham home, insisting she made it all up for the $3.4 million settlement she would receive in a suit she later filed against him. They pointed to numerous inconsistencies in reports she gave to police over the past 13 years, calling her a “pathological liar.”

But it was Ms. Bliss’ attacks on the trial’s other accusers — five women who testified earlier in the trial that Mr. Cosby approached them as a mentor in the ‘80s only to sexually assault them — that drew the brunt of prosecutors’ ire Tuesday.

Ms. Bliss maintained there was a difference between “victim shaming” and the type of scrutiny the defense team has applied to those accusers throughout the trial.

Then, one by one, she picked apart their characters, called them names and insisted each had piled on with false accusations in a conspiracy to tear down an American icon.

Of Heidi Thomas, a former aspiring actress who testified Mr. Cosby drugged and attacked her in Reno, Nev., in 1984, Ms. Bliss said: “She wants Mr. Cosby. And what does she find? There’s another woman there? Oops, not good.”

She scoffed at Janice Baker-Kinney, a former casino bartender who told jurors earlier that she made a stupid mistake taking party drugs from Mr. Cosby before she was assaulted. “Where is her morality? Where are her values? Where is a little personal responsibility?” Ms. Bliss asked

And when it came to Janice Dickinson – the former supermodel and reality TV show staple who accused Mr. Cosby of raping her in a Lake Tahoe hotel room in 1982 — Ms. Bliss did not hold back. “It sounds as if she slept with almost every single man on the planet,” the lawyer said. “Is Ms. Dickinson really the moral beacon the women’s movement wants?”