Cosby’s jury decides between affair or crime
Defence slams accuser for being ‘untruthful’
NORRISTOWN: A jury entered its second day of deliberations yesterday, deciding whether Bill Cosby is guilty of sexual assault. His lawyer acknowledged in court that Cosby is a deeply flawed man, an unfaithful husband who may have shattered his fans’ illusions, but insisted that what he characterised as a dalliance with a much younger woman was an affair, not a crime.
In closing arguments in Cosby’s criminal trial, the lead defence attorney, Brian McMonagle, acknowledged that revelations of Cosby’s womanising, depictions of him as a philanderer who plied women with charm and drugs, have overtaken his image as a genial comedian and beloved TV dad.
But that is no crime, Mr McMonagle said, arguing that the entertainer’s 2004 encounter with Andrea Constand, the woman Cosby, 79, is accused of sexually assaulting, was consensual.
“They’ve been intimate,” he said. “Why are we trying to make it something it’s not?”
As if to show that he, too, was disappointed in Cosby — and perhaps offer the jury the catharsis of a public shaming — Mr McMonagle pointed at his client and declared angrily: “You danced outside your marriage.” Turning to Cosby’s wife of more than 50 years, Camille, making her first appearance at the trial and sitting in the front row, he added: “And you deserved better.”
Kevin Steele, the Montgomery County district attorney, also addressed Cosby directly, in a closing argument that lasted more than two hours on just the sixth day of a fast-moving case, originally anticipated to have taken weeks, not days, to present. Mr Steele said Cosby, a Temple University trustee and the university’s most famous alumnus, set his sights on Ms Constand, an employee in the university’s athletic department who was 36 years younger than him.
“You ingratiated yourself into this woman’s life,” he said. “You treated her well. You paid her attention. And then you drugged her and you did what you wanted.”
Judge Steven O’Neill turned it over to the 12-member jury to decide whether Cosby is guilty of three counts of aggravated
indecent assault, each punishable by 10 years in prison. The case will turn largely on how credible the panel finds Ms Constand, who testified that in a visit to Cosby’s home
near Philadelphia, he gave her pills that he said were herbal, but that left her immobile and drifting in and out of consciousness, and sexually assaulted her. He later said
he had given her Benadryl.
She took the witness stand last week as a proxy for the dozens of women who have since stepped forward to say that Cosby had
assaulted them, often with details remarkably similar to Ms Constand’s story. Adding weight to the allegations was the revelation in 2015 that Cosby in a deposition for a 2005 civil suit filed by Ms Constand had admitted to obtaining quaaludes to help him in his pursuit of sex with women.
The defence seized on inconsistencies in the version of events Ms Constand gave when she went first went to police, and statements she made later on: She said the assault took place in March 2004, after dinner at a restaurant, then said it occurred earlier, unconnected to the restaurant outing; she said it was first time she had been alone with Cosby in his home, then said it was the third time, and that she had rebuffed his sexual advances the first two times; she said she had minimal communication with him after the incident, then acknowledged many contacts.
“Ms Constand was untruthful time and time and time again,” Mr McMonagle told the jury. “There is one contradictory story after another.”
He questioned why an assault victim would have continued to have contact with her assailant, and as evidence of an intimate relationship, he cited a trip Ms Constand took to a resort to see Cosby perform, when she visited him in his hotel room. “Why on earth would you go to Foxwoods casino in Connecticut after he has already unbuttoned your pants and put his hands down your pants?” he demanded.
During the trial, the prosecution called one expert who testified that victims’ accounts are often disjointed and inconsistent, and another who said that Benadryl, in a high dose, could be a powerful sedative. Under cross-examination, Ms Constand explained her lapses as innocent mistakes, and said her contacts with Cosby after the incident were mostly cursory, the unavoidable result of her job duties.
Mr Steele told the jury Cosby took away Ms Constand’s ability to consent with the pills, that their later contacts were irrelevant, and that jurors should ignore what he said were myths about how sexual assault victims are supposed to behave.
When Ms Constand’s mother called to confront Cosby about a year after the incident, he said, the defendant’s apology, and his offer to pay for her schooling, therapy and a trip to Florida, were evidence that he knew he had done something wrong.
“Andrea Constand’s own words, just what she told you, should sustain a conviction in this case,” Mr Steele said. “But under the defendant’s own words, you must convict.”