Bill Cosby was found guilty of sexual assault by a jury of his peers on Thursday.
After 14 hours of deliberations, the jury reached a verdict at about 1:30 p.m. and determined Cosby was guilty on three counts of felony aggravated indecent assault. The comedian had no visible reaction in the courtroom as his fate was announced.
Cosby could get up to 10 years in prison on each of the three counts of aggravated indecent assault. He is likely to get less than that under state sentencing guidelines, but given his age (he is 80), even a modest term could mean he will die behind bars.
The once-celebrated TV icon was found guilty of violating Andrea Constand at his suburban Philadelphia home in January 2004.
Cosby’s new legal team, which was headed by famed Michael Jackson attorney Tom Mesereau, failed to prove Constand was “greedy” and wanted to extort money out of Cosby. Cosby’s chief accuser explained in court that she was simply at the trial “for justice.” Constand, 45, gave virtually the same account when she testified at Cosby’s first trial, which ended in a mistrial on June 17, 2017, after the jury deliberated for more than 52 hours over six days and still couldn’t reach a verdict.
She testified that Cosby slipped her three blue pills he called “your friends.” She said she thought they were herbal supplements designed to help relieve her stress, but they knocked her out. When she awoke, she said, Cosby was violating her.
Cosby maintained he gave Constand the cold medicine Benadryl and that she consented to a sexual encounter. In a two-hour, tag-team closing argument, Cosby’s lawyers, Mesereau and Kathleen Bliss, painted Constand as a “pathological liar” scheming for a big payday.
Prosecutor Stewart Ryan urged the jurors to stand with Constand and look Cosby in the eye and “tell him the truth about what he did.”
“The time for the defendant to escape justice is over. It’s finally time for the defendant to dine on the banquet of his own consequences,” Ryan said.
The defense was dealt a huge blow when the judge determined there was “no persuasive” reason to let Cosby’s lawyers read Constand confidante Sheri Williams’ deposition testimony into the record. The defense expected Williams’ testimony to refute Constand’s claims that she was unaware he was romantically interested in her. They said she’d show that Constand “could not have been the unwitting victim” prosecutors have portrayed.
Another major difference in the retrial was Judge Steven O’Neill’s decision to allow prosecutors to have five additional accusers testify — including model Janice Dickinson — as they attempted to show Cosby made a habit of drugging and violating women. The judge allowed just one other accuser to take the stand last year.
O’Neill also allowed Cosby’s legal team to call as a witness a former co-worker of Constand’s at Temple University, who said Constand spoke of setting up a “high-profile person” so she could sue and enjoy a big payday. Constand’s lawyer argued the co-worker lied.
In addition, the judge decided to allow the jury to hear that Cosby paid $3.4 million to Constand to settle her lawsuit against him more than a decade ago. The two sides agreed at the first trial not to mention the lawsuit.
The comedian, who starred as Dr. Cliff Huxtable on “The Cosby Show” from 1984 to 1992, earned a reputation as “America’s Dad.” That reputation was slowly torn to pieces as dozens of women came forward, beginning in 2014, and accused him of drugging them, assaulting them, or both. Their stories were all eerily similar and eventually led to the star’s being ostracized by Hollywood.
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Before his downfall, Cosby was long known for his success as a comedian and actor. He won five Grammy Awards after breaking into the stand-up scene in the ’60s. He then paralleled that success on TV, winning three consecutive Emmy Awards from 1966 to 1968 for his role on “I Spy.” The show elevated him to a new level of stardom and led to the eventual creation of his titular sitcom, “The Cosby Show.” In 1998, he became known to a new generation as the host of “Kids Say the Darndest Things.”
He was also once lauded as a philanthropist, and received more than 50 honorary degrees from universities across the country. Cosby’s legacy of giving was topped by a $20 million gift to Spelman College in 1988 and including, among many other donations, $3 million to the Morehouse School of Medicine and $1 million in 2004 to the U.S. National Slavery Museum in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
But most of Cosby’s honorary degrees were revoked one by one as more and more women came forward to allege he had assaulted them.
In the end, it was one woman — Constand — who had the information and the statute of limitations on her side to force Cosby to trial.
This Fox News article is used by permission; the Associated Press contributed.
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