‘SEXUALLY VIOLENT PREDATOR’
Cosby sentenced to 3 to 10 years
His Hollywood career and good-guy image in ruins, Bill Cosby was led away to prison in handcuffs Tuesday at age 81 for perhaps the rest of his days, sentenced to three to 10 years behind bars for drugging and sexually assaulting a woman at his gated estate.
The punishment made him the first celebrity of the #MeToo era to be sent to prison and all but completed the dizzying, late-in-life fall from grace for the comedian, TV star and breaker of racial barriers.
“It is time for justice. Mr. Cosby, this has all circled back to you. The time has come,” Montgomery County Judge Steven O’Neill said. He quoted from Canadian victim Andrea Constand’s statement to the court, in which she said Cosby took her “beautiful, young spirit and crushed it.”
Cosby declined the opportunity to speak before the sentence came down, and afterward sat laughing and chatting with his defence team. His wife of 54 years, Camille, was not in court. Constand smiled broadly upon hearing the punishment.
In a blistering statement, Cosby spokesman Andrew Wyatt said the comic was subjected to the “most racist and sexist trial in the history of the United States.”
Among other things, Wyatt said all three of the psychologists who testified against Cosby were “white women who make money off of accusing black men of being sexual predators,” and he accused prosecutors of using a doctored recording of a telephone conversation between Constand’s mother and Cosby.
Cosby’s lawyers asked that he be allowed to remain free on bail while he appeals his conviction, but the judge appeared incredulous over the request and ordered him locked up immediately, saying that “he could quite possibly be a danger to the community.”
The comedian — who is legally blind and uses a cane — removed his watch, tie and jacket and walked out in a white dress shirt and red suspenders, his hands cuffed in front of him. He must serve the minimum of three years before becoming eligible for parole.
“For decades, the defendant has been able to hide his true self and hide his crimes using his fame and fortune. He’s hidden behind a character created, Dr. Cliff Huxtable,” Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele said at a news conference, referring to Cosby’s best-known role. But “now, finally, Bill Cosby has been unmasked, and we have seen the real man as he is headed off to prison.”
The punishment, which also included a US$25,000 fine, came at the end of a twoday hearing at which the judge declared Cosby a “sexually violent predator” — a modern-day scarlet letter that subjects him to monthly counselling for the rest of his life and requires that neighbours and schools be notified of his whereabouts.
The comic once known as America’s Dad for his role on the top-rated “Cosby Show” in the 1980s was convicted in April of violating Constand, Temple University women’s basketball administrator, at his suburban Philadelphia mansion in 2004.
A 400-year-old merchant ship laden with bronze cannons and cowrie shells, which were used as currency in the African slave trade, has been discovered on the seabed off the coast of Portugal.
Archeologists believe the ship was returning from India on the spice route when it was wrecked off the town of Cascais, west of Lisbon. Divers found Chinese ceramics, cowrie shells, bronze cannons engraved with the Portuguese coat of arms and the remains of spices in and around the wreck, Finding the ship, which is thought to have sunk between 1575 and 1625, is of great significance, said Jorge Freire, scientific director of the archeological project.
“From a heritage perspective, this is the discovery of the decade,” he told Reuters.