NORRISTOWN, Pa. — A jury found Bill Cosby guilty on
Thursday of drugging and sexually assaulting a woman at his home near
here 14 years ago, capping the downfall of one of the world’s best-known
entertainers, and offering a measure of satisfaction to the dozens of
women who for years have accused him of similar assaults against them.
. —
Iconic entertainer Bill Cosby was convicted on three counts of sexual
assault, a decision that punctuates one of the most thundering
falls from grace in American cultural history.
Once one of the nation’s most admired men, a
pioneering African American actor beloved for his role as Dr. Cliff
Huxtable, on the 1980s mega-hit “The Cosby Show,” Cosby was recast in a
suburban Philadelphia courtroom as a merciless predator and sexual
deviant in the first celebrity trial of the "#MeToo' era of awareness
about sexual assault and harassment. A 7-man, 5-woman jury took less
than two days to convict Cosby of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea
Constand, a Temple University women’s basketball operations director
more than three decades his junior whom the comedian lured, into his home
with promises of mentorship. No sentencing date has been set. The
conviction comes in a retrial of a 2017 case in which a mistrial was
declared.
The courtroom rocked with emotion as the jury
foreperson, a slender woman with long graying hair and glasses, said
those three words — guilty, guilty, guilty — for assaulting Andrea
Constand, the only woman among dozens of accusers to bring criminal
charges against the disgraced comedian. Two women who have accused Cosby
of sexual assault but did not testify at the trial burst out in loud
sobs from their seats in one of the back rows of the cramped and
tension-filed courtroom.
They were escorted from the courtroom by security
officials, but their tears — tears of joy, sadness and exhaustion after a
frustrating years-long struggle — still filtered into the courtroom
through the closed, heavy wooden doors.
When Cosby received the message about his fate — a
conviction that could send him to prison for as many 30 years,
essentially a life sentence for a man his age — the old comic’s jaw
muscles pulsed. He sat rigidly still.
Cosby paused for a moment before leaving the
courtroom. He slumped ever so slightly at the defense table. He leaned
on a slender cane, his constant companion during the long courtroom
battles. His public relations agent extended a hand. But the funnyman,
the curmudgeonly father figure of TV lore, was surrounded only by people
on his payroll. Attorneys and publicists encircled him, but his two
adult daughters — absent throughout the trial — were nowhere to be seen.
His wife, Camille, who’d appeared only for closing arguments, was not
there, either.
Steven T. O’Neill, the Montgomery County judge who
oversaw the case, declined to revoke Cosby’s bail but ordered him not to
leave his estate in nearby Elkins Park, Pa......
