The case sets the stage for perhaps
the biggest Hollywood celebrity trial
of the mobile-all-the-time era and
could send the 78-year-old Cosby to
prison in the twilight of his life and
barrier-breaking career.
In bringing the case, Montgomery
County District Attorney Risa Vetri
Ferman overruled her predecessor,
who declined to charge Cosby in
2005 when Temple University
employee Andrea Constand first told
police that the comic drugged her
and violated her by putting his hands
down her pants at his mansion in
suburban Philadelphia.
Cosby was charged with aggravated
indecent assault and was to be
arraigned in the afternoon.
The TV star acknowledged under
oath a decade ago that he had sexual
contact with Constand but said it
was consensual.
The charges were announced just
days before the 12-year statute of
limitations for bringing charges was
set to run out.
Prosecutors reopened the case over
the summer as damaging testimony
was unsealed in Constand's related
civil lawsuit against Cosby and as
dozens of other women came
forward with similar accusations that
made a mockery of his image as the
wise and understanding Dr. Cliff
Huxtable from TV's " The Cosby
Show."
Many of those alleged assaults date
back decades, and the statute of
limitations for bringing charges has
expired in nearly every case.
‘A strong lady'
Constand, who is now 42 and works
as a massage therapist in her native
Canada, is ready to face Cosby in
court, her attorney, Dolores Troiani,
said this fall.
"She's a very strong lady," Troiani
said. "She'll do whatever they request
of her."
The charges add to the towering list
of legal problems facing the actor,
including defamation and sex-abuse
lawsuits filed in Boston, Los Angeles
and Pennsylvania.
Cosby in 1965 became the first black
actor to land a leading role in a
network drama, "I Spy," and he went
on to earn three straight Emmys.
Over the next three decades, the
Philadelphia-born comic created TV's
animated "Fat Albert" and the top-
rated "Cosby Show," the 1980s
sitcom celebrated as groundbreaking
television for its depiction of a warm
and loving family headed by two
black professionals - one a lawyer,
the other a doctor.
He was a fatherly figure off camera
as well, serving as a public moralist
and public scold, urging young
people to pull up their saggy pants
and start acting responsibly.
Constand, who worked for the
women's basketball team at Temple,
where Cosby was a trustee and proud
alumnus, said she was assaulted
after going to his home in January
2004 for some career advice.
Then-District Attorney Bruce Castor
declined to charge Cosby, saying at
the time that both the TV star and
his accuser could be portrayed in "a
less than flattering light." This year,
Castor said the allegations in
Constand's lawsuit were more
serious than the account she gave
police, and if that information had
been known at the time, "we might
have been able to make a case."
Castor tried to make a comeback as
district attorney in the November
election but lost to Ferman's top
deputy.
After the criminal case went
nowhere, Constand settled her
lawsuit against Cosby in 2006 on
confidential terms.
‘She didn’t say anything’
Her allegations and similar ones from
other women in the years that
followed did not receive wide
attention but exploded into view in
late 2014, first online, then in the
wider media, after comedian Hannibal
Buress mocked Cosby as a hypocrite
and called him a rapist during a
standup routine. That opened the
floodgates on even more allegations.
Women mostly from the world of
modeling, acting or other
entertainment fields came forward
and described being offered a drink
by Cosby and waking up to find they
had apparently been sexually
assaulted. Cosby, through his
representatives, accused some of the
women of trying to extract money
from him or get ahead in show
business.
Earlier this year, The Associated
Press persuaded a judge to unseal
documents from the Constand
lawsuit, and they showed the long-
married Cosby acknowledging a
string of affairs and sexual
encounters.
Cosby testified that he obtained
quaaludes in the 1970s to give to
women he wanted to have sex with.
He denied giving women drugs
without their knowledge and said he
had used the now-banned sedative
"the same as a person would say,
'Have a drink.'"
In the deposition, Cosby said he put
his hands down Constand's pants
that night and fondled her, taking her
silence as a green light. Constand
maintains she was semi-conscious
after he gave her pills he said would
relax her.
"I don't hear her say anything. And I
don't feel her say anything. And so I
continue and I go into the area that
is somewhere between permission
and rejection. I am not stopped,"
Cosby testified.
He said Constand was not upset
when she left that night. She went to
police a year later.
Her lawyer has said Constand is gay
and was dating a woman around the
time she met Cosby in the early
2000s.
The AP generally does not identify
people who say they have been
sexually assaulted unless they agree
to have their names published, as
Constand has done.
Laurie Levenson, a criminal law
professor at Loyola Law School in
Los Angeles, said Cosby no longer
enjoys the celebrity appeal that might
sway a jury.
"His reputation has already been
tarnished, so I doubt that jurors
would be inclined to believe him just
because of his prior image," she said
in September. She said the judge in
the case will have to decide whether
to allow other accusers to testify or
whether that would be too
prejudicial.
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