NORRISTOWN, Pa. — Bill Cosby was convicted Thursday of drugging and molesting a former Arizona Wildcats women's basketball player.
Cosby, 80, could end up spending his final years in prison after a jury concluded he sexually violated Andrea Constand at his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004. He claimed the encounter with Constand, then a Temple University basketball staffer, was consensual.
Constand, 45, told jurors that Cosby knocked her out with three blue pills he called "your friends" and then penetrated her with his fingers as she lay immobilized, unable to resist or say no. It was the only criminal case to arise from a barrage of allegations from more than 60 women who said the former TV star drugged and molested them over a span of five decades.
"The time for the defendant to escape justice is over," prosecutor Stewart Ryan said in his closing argument. "It's finally time for the defendant to dine on the banquet of his own consequences."
Trying to keep him out of prison, Cosby’s lawyers launched a withering attack on Constand and five other women who told the jury that the former TV star had drugged and assaulted them, too.
Defense attorney Kathleen Bliss chastised Constand for “cavorting around with a married man old enough to be her grandfather.” She derided the other women as home-wreckers and suggested they made up their stories in a bid for money and fame.
She questioned the “personal morality” of one accuser and called another, model Janice Dickinson, a “failed starlet” and “aged-out model” who “sounds as though she slept with every man on the planet.”
And she slammed the #MeToo movement itself, calling Cosby its victim and likening it to a witch hunt or a lynching.
Critics said the defense team went too far.
“They’re playing on the same old myths that have been protecting perpetrators for centuries,” said Kristen Houser of the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. She said the defense’s closing argument was filled with “rampant and ingrained” misconceptions about sexual assault and victim behavior.
“It was not only an attack on these six accusers,” Houser said, “it was a verbal slap to survivors all across this country.”
Gloria Allred, the lawyer for three of the women who testified, blasted the defense closing as “victim-shaming and victim-blaming” and said Cosby’s lawyers had smeared her clients in a win-at-all-costs effort at an acquittal.
Perhaps anticipating the criticism, Bliss told jurors in her closing that “questioning an accuser is not blaming the victim.”
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