Closing arguments feature contentious moments

NORRISTOWN, PA.» On Day 12 of his sexual assault retrial, deep into a prosecutor’s heated closing argument, Bill Cosby was laughing.

Some in the packed courtroom might have missed it, but his chuckles and his earto-ear smile caught the eye of Assistant District Attorney Kristen Feden on the opposite side of the room. And she exploded. “He’s laughing like it’s funny!” Feden said Tuesday in a booming voice, stalking toward the comic legend and extending a long, slender, accusatory forefinger. “But there’s absolutely nothing funny about stripping a woman of her capacity to consent.”

Cosby stared right back, unblinking, a smile etched on his face. He kept laughing — his demeanor belittling Feden’s argument that he had engaged in a decades-long pattern of drugging and sexual assault.

The extraordinary confrontation — a stare-down between the 80-year-old pioneering African-American entertainer and a much younger African-American prosecutor — punctuated a volcanic day of closing arguments that sent the jury into deliberations with vastly contrasting portraits.

Both the prosecution and the defense want jurors to believe that someone got conned.

Prosecutors portrayed Cosby as a sinister presence who “conned” Cosby’s primary accuser, Andrea Constand — as well as five other witnesses - into trusting him before he drugged them. Cosby, Feden said, tricked the women into thinking he was the embodiment of the wholesome father figure he played on television.

“The perpetrator of that con is that man sitting right here,” said Feden, who crossed the well of the courtroom and stood over Cosby, jabbing her finger so close to his face that he shifted forward in his chair.

Defense attorneys want jurors to believe that the “con artist” is Constand, the former Temple University women’s basketball official who they’ve accused of lying about a consensual sexual encounter to extort a $3,380,000 settlement of a 2006 lawsuit from the wealthy comedian.

“She hit pay dirt,” said Thomas Mesereau, Cosby’s lead attorney. Constand, whose statements to police include multiple inconsistencies, is a “pathological liar,” Mesereau said.

The retrial of Cosby, whose first trial ended last June with a hung jury, has played out against the backdrop of the #MeToo movement in which dozens of women have publicly made sexual assault accusations, toppling some of the biggest names in American entertainment, politics and media. But Cosby attorney Kathleen Bliss sought to disentangle his case from the cultural moment.