Cosby’s lawyers slammed by advocates for women

NORRISTOWN, PA. >> The sexual assault case against Bill Cosby went to the jury Wednesday as his lawyers came under heavy criticism for what some called a blatant attempt to “victim-shame” the parade of women who have leveled accusations against the 80-year-old comedian.

In the first big celebrity trial of the #MeToo era, the panel of seven men and five women began weighing charges that Cosby drugged and molested a woman at his suburban Philadelphia home 14 years ago. He says his encounter with former Temple University women’s basketball executive Andrea Constand was consensual.

Trying to keep him out of prison, Cosby’s lawyers launched a withering attack on Constand and five other women who told the jury that the former TV star had drugged and assaulted them, too.

Defense attorney Kathleen Bliss chastised Constand for “cavorting around with a married man old enough to be her grandfather.” She derided the other women as home-wreckers and suggested they made up their stories in a bid for money and fame.

She questioned the “personal morality” of one accuser and called another, model Janice Dickinson, a “failed starlet” and “agedout model” who “sounds as though she slept with every man on the planet.”

And she slammed the #MeToo movement itself, calling Cosby its victim and likening it to a witch hunt or a lynching.

Critics said the defense team went too far.

“They’re playing on the same old myths that have been protecting perpetrators for centuries,” said Kristen Houser of the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. She said the defense’s closing argument was filled with “rampant and ingrained” misconceptions about sexual assault and victim behavior.

“It was not only an attack on these six accusers,” Houser said, “it was a verbal slap to survivors all across this country.”

Gloria Allred, the lawyer for three of the women who testified, blasted the defense closing as “victimshaming and victim-blaming” and said Cosby’s lawyers had smeared her clients in a win-at-all-costs effort at an acquittal.

Perhaps anticipating the criticism, Bliss told jurors in her closing that “questioning an accuser is not blaming the victim.”

Cosby spokeswoman Ebonee Benson echoed that sentiment when asked Wednesday about the criticism of the defense approach.

“There is no assassination of any character,” Benson said. “It is evidence that the commonwealth either selectively, deliberately or just didn’t want to take a look into.”