The Washington Post :
Iconic entertainer Bill Cosby was convicted Thursday 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 megahit “The Cosby Show,” Cosby was recast in a suburban Philadelphia courtroom as a merciless predator and sexual deviant. 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 who the comedian lured into his home with promises of mentorship.
During 12 days of testimony and arguments in the first celebrity trial of the #MeToo era of awareness about sexual assault and harassment, Cosby was often a silent figure. He sat at the head of the defense table beneath rows of massive iron chandeliers in a marble-clad courthouse built before the Civil War in this hardscrabble city about 45 minutes northwest of Philadelphia. The 80-year-old’s face often betrayed his emotions as he sat at the head of the defense table with a pencil-thin wooden cane by his side.
But on the final day before his case went to the jury, Cosby laughed and smirked at the defense table, then in an extraordinary moment of courtroom drama engaged in an uncomfortable stare-down with prosecutor Kristen Feden, who is less than half his age.
Cosby, who ditched his signature lumpy sweaters for business suits with matching pocket handkerchiefs, glared at the purple carpet with a deep frown as Constand testified about the night in 2004 when she says the comic legend offered her three round blue pills that he called “your friends,” ostensibly to help her relax. But when a Temple academic adviser testified that Constand had confided that she could extort a celebrity with a false story of sexual assault, Cosby was almost giddy, smiling broadly with his face turned to the packed courtroom audience and occasionally laughing with one hand cupped over his mouth.
The academic adviser’s testimony fit into a narrative laid out by the defense in which Constand was a “con artist.” But prosecutors said it was actually Cosby who staged a con by using his fatherly television image to trick Constand and other alleged victims to trust him so that he could drug them.
Iconic entertainer Bill Cosby was convicted Thursday 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 megahit “The Cosby Show,” Cosby was recast in a suburban Philadelphia courtroom as a merciless predator and sexual deviant. 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 who the comedian lured into his home with promises of mentorship.
During 12 days of testimony and arguments in the first celebrity trial of the #MeToo era of awareness about sexual assault and harassment, Cosby was often a silent figure. He sat at the head of the defense table beneath rows of massive iron chandeliers in a marble-clad courthouse built before the Civil War in this hardscrabble city about 45 minutes northwest of Philadelphia. The 80-year-old’s face often betrayed his emotions as he sat at the head of the defense table with a pencil-thin wooden cane by his side.
But on the final day before his case went to the jury, Cosby laughed and smirked at the defense table, then in an extraordinary moment of courtroom drama engaged in an uncomfortable stare-down with prosecutor Kristen Feden, who is less than half his age.
Cosby, who ditched his signature lumpy sweaters for business suits with matching pocket handkerchiefs, glared at the purple carpet with a deep frown as Constand testified about the night in 2004 when she says the comic legend offered her three round blue pills that he called “your friends,” ostensibly to help her relax. But when a Temple academic adviser testified that Constand had confided that she could extort a celebrity with a false story of sexual assault, Cosby was almost giddy, smiling broadly with his face turned to the packed courtroom audience and occasionally laughing with one hand cupped over his mouth.
The academic adviser’s testimony fit into a narrative laid out by the defense in which Constand was a “con artist.” But prosecutors said it was actually Cosby who staged a con by using his fatherly television image to trick Constand and other alleged victims to trust him so that he could drug them.
