US top court rules against review of Cosby case
Prosecutors appealed after comedian had conviction for sexual assault overturned
The US Supreme Court has declined to revive the sexual assault case against comedian Bill Cosby, who was released last year when his 2018 conviction was overturned.
Prosecutors had filed an appeal with the court last year to review the decision of a lower court to overturn Cosby’s conviction for drugging and sexually assaulting a woman 17 years ago.
The lower court said that he had been denied a fair trial, in what was seen by many as a setback for the #MeToo movement.
The Supreme Court did not give a reason for its ruling, posted on its website, saying only that it was “denied”.
Cosby, who shattered racial barriers with his Emmy-winning role on the television show I Spy in the 1960s, was convicted in 2018 of assaulting Andrea Constand at his Philadelphia mansion in 2004.
His conviction was the first guilty verdict for sexual assault against a celebrity since the advent of the worldwide reckoning against sexual violence and abuse of power dubbed the #MeToo movement.
Although more than 60 women charged that they had been victims of sexual assault by Cosby, he was tried criminally only for Constand’s assault, since the statute of limitations had expired in the other cases.
Cosby – who also starred as a dad and doctor on the hit television series The Cosby Show in the 1980s – has insisted that the encounter with Constand, who was then a Temple University employee, was consensual.
He served more than two years of a three-to-10-year sentence for aggravated indecent assault and always maintained his innocence.
The lower court ruled last year that a non-prosecution agreement between a former district attorney and Cosby over evidence he gave in a civil case meant the actor should not have been charged, paving the way for his release in June.