Bill Cosby rape case: What you need to know

Is rape a crime?

That’s the question at the center of Michelle Bowdler’s provocative 2020 book with that title — and in light of the news on June 30 that a conviction against Bill Cosby, accused by 60 women of sexual assault and rape, would be vacated on constitutional grounds, Bowdler’s question takes on a new urgency.

Bill Cosby, the disgraced comedian who was convicted of sexual assault in 2018, is no longer in prison, due to a state supreme court decision in Commonwealth v. Cosby.

The circumstances that freed him involve a stunning display of prosecutorial incompetence, a divided Pennsylvania Supreme Court that split three ways on what should become of Cosby, and a long, rambling judicial opinion that is often difficult to parse.

When Bill Cosby was sentenced last week to three to 10 years in prison, some observers saw it as a #MeToo milestone.

Jenny Jarvie of the Los Angeles Times called Cosby “the first celebrity of the #MeToo era to be locked up.” Kevin Fallon, a reporter for the Daily Beast, tweeted that Cosby was “the first man to be prosecuted and sentenced during the #MeToo movement.”

Editor’s note, June 30: On June 30, 2021, Bill Cosby was released from prison when his sexual assault conviction was overturned by a Pennsylvania appeals court. The text below, originally published on September 26, 2018, has not been updated.

The April conviction of Bill Cosby fueled a wave of assessments about the comedian’s tarnished legacy — and how that legacy was long wielded as a cudgel against poor black Americans. With the news that he will be classified as a “sexually violent predator” and will immediately begin serving three to 10 years in prison for sexual assault, that conversation continues to remain relevant.

Shortly after Bill Cosby was sentenced to three to 10 years in state prison for sexual assault and taken away in handcuffs, his spokesperson Andrew Wyatt told reporters that Cosby — along with embattled Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh — was the victim of a “sex war.”

“What is going on in Washington today with Judge Kavanaugh is part of that sex war that Judge [Steven] O’Neill and his wife are a part of,” Wyatt said, referring to the judge who oversaw Cosby’s trial.

After a two-day hearing, Bill Cosby has been sentenced to three to 10 years in state prison for assaulting Andrea Constand 14 years ago, and he will have to register as a sex offender, a Pennsylvania judge announced Tuesday.

Cosby was convicted of three counts of aggravated indecent assault in April 2018, stemming from allegations that the comedian drugged and sexually assaulted Constand, then a Temple University employee, in 2004. He’s been on house arrest since the conviction.

For the past two days, Bill Cosby’s lawyers have defended his legacy during the actor’s sentencing hearing for sexual assault.

Now the woman at the center of the case, Andrea Constand, has shared what her life has been like since Cosby sexually assaulted her in 2004 in a five-page victim impact statement submitted during the sentencing hearing and released on Tuesday.

For more than two decades, Bill Cosby was “America’s Dad.” These days, though, he’s come to represent powerful men facing major repercussions for hideous misdeeds. Now, five months after being convicted on charges stemming from the 2004 sexual assault of Andrea Constand, the 81-year-old awaits a sentencing decision that could see him spend the rest of his life behind bars.

Monday marked the beginning of a two-day sentencing hearing for Cosby, who faces up to 30 years in prison, 10 years for each charge, following his conviction on three counts of aggravated indecent assault. The sentencing is being overseen by Judge Steven T. O’Neill, who also ruled in Cosby’s April trial. O’Neill can condense that sentence into a maximum of 10 years served concurrently, a move that the prosecution requested on Monday, according to the Associated Press. Cosby’s legal team is committed to appealing any prison time.

Bill Cosby, let me say this: I believe you.

I believe you when you say in a 2005 deposition that “yes,” you give women Quaaludes. “I give her quaaludes. We then have sex.”

Bill Cosby’s legal team was never afraid to invoke America’s history of anti-black racism. During the closing arguments of his trial on sexual assault charges —which just ended with a guilty verdict on three counts of indecent sexual assault — they referred to the #MeToo movement as a “witch hunt” and likened the men who had been accused of criminal behavior to the victims of lynchings. Earlier, they had sought sympathy for Cosby by suggesting he was the victim of the racist justice system.

Many of the complaints against Cosby predated #MeToo, but he became the first celebrity to be tried during this era of heightened awareness. While Andrea Constand, whose accusations led to the recent trial, is white, his dozens of accusers over the years were women of many races. The judge allowed testimony from five other women besides Constand as the prosecution set out to prove Cosby’s pattern of sexual predation.

A Pennsylvania jury found Bill Cosby guilty of three counts of aggravated indecent assault on Thursday, one of the first major criminal convictions since the beginning of the #MeToo movement and a vindication for the dozens of women who said that the comedian known as “America’s Dad” drugged and sexually abused them.

In most of those cases, the statute of limitations passed long before the women came forward. But in 2015, Cosby was charged with the 2004 assault of Andrea Costand, who said Cosby had given her pills in his suburban Pennsylvania home that left her incapacitated and then molested her.

A jury found Bill Cosby guilty of three counts of sexual assault on Thursday in a retrial that could be the closest we’ll get to a controlled experiment on the power of the #MeToo movement.

A jury failed to reach a verdict a year ago, six months before the New York Times published an exposé on Harvey Weinstein and set fire to a brewing movement that’s led us to a significant cultural reckoning around sexual harassment and assault.

As Eden Tirl watched a procession of celebrity women voicing their support for the #MeToo movement at this year’s Golden Globe Awards, she had one question: Where was all this support when the first Bill Cosby accusers came forward?

Tirl was a 22-year-old model who had landed a bit part on The Cosby Show when, she says, Cosby sexually harassed her in his dressing room. Decades later, around 60 women have come forward alleging rape, assault, and harassment by Cosby.

Andrea Constand, the woman at the center of the Bill Cosby retrial, faced another round of grueling cross-examination on Monday.

It was her second day on the witness stand. On Friday, she testified that, in 2004, Bill Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted her. It was the same story she told 10 months ago, in a trial that ended with a deadlocked jury.

How many women is enough?

That’s one of the biggest questions looming as Bill Cosby stands trial for sexual assault a second time, after a mistrial in June 2017.

One of Bill Cosby’s accusers confronted Cosby from the witness stand on the third day of his sexual assault trial on Wednesday. “You remember, don’t you, Mr. Cosby?” Chelan Lasha said tearfully to him from the stand.

Lasha’s testimony anchored what was perhaps the most intense, emotional day of Cosby’s trial so far. Cosby is charged with drugging and assaulting former Temple University employee Andrea Constand in 2004. The prosecution is calling five additional accusers, including Lasha, to the stand to establish a pattern for Cosby.

The first time Bill Cosby went to trial on charges that he drugged and molested a woman, his lawyers went with a classic defense: “She’s a liar.”

On Tuesday, Cosby’s lawyer argued in his opening statement in a retrial of the same case that the accuser, Andrea Constand, is a “con artist” who crafted an elaborate story to bilk Cosby out of millions of dollars.

Bill Cosby paid Andrea Constand nearly $3.4 million in a 2006 settlement, a Pennsylvania district attorney revealed during open statements on the first day of Cosby’s retrial Monday.

The amount of that settlement — $3.38 million — had not been made public before Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele addressed it on day one of the retrial centered on allegations that Cosby drugged and molested Constand in his Pennsylvania home in 2004. Judge Steven O’Neill agreed last week to allow the jury to hear the details and the previously undisclosed sum of the settlement.

Bill Cosby is back in a Pennsylvania court Monday, facing a retrial after a jury failed to reach a verdict last year. The charges — aggravated indecent assault, for allegedly drugging and molesting former Temple University employee Andrea Constand — are the same. But this time, Cosby is on trial in a post-#MeToo world.

Cosby’s trial, which could last about a month, may be the first real test of the power of the #MeToo movement. A year ago, a jury heard testimony from Constand and one other woman who said the comedian had drugged them and engaged in sexual acts. Now, in this second trial, the judge will allow five of Cosby’s other accusers to testify in court about their encounter with the comedian.

It initially appeared that Bill Cosby was wasting no time firming up his summer plans, after a jury couldn’t decide this month as to whether he drugged and sexually assaulted accuser Andrea Constand in 2004.

Shortly after the case against Cosby ended in a mistrial, Cosby spokespeople Andrew Wyatt and Ebonee Benson announced he would embark on a town hall tour across the country to educate young people on how to avoid being accused of sexual assault.

After jurors in the Bill Cosby trial had deliberated for about 31 hours, they told the judge they were deadlocked. The judge told them to “keep trying,” but on Saturday morning the jurors declared that they were still deadlocked, and the judge declared a mistrial.

The jurors had heard five days of testimony from prosecution witnesses, and a six-minute defense from Cosby’s lawyers. They had heard transcripts from police interviews in which Cosby admitted to giving sedatives to women with whom he wanted to have sex.

After six days of deliberations regarding accusations that comedian Bill Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted a woman, a jury in Pennsylvania could not come to an agreement on whether he drugged and sexually assaulted Andrea Constand, resulting in a mistrial, the New York Times reports.

On Thursday, the jury told Judge Steven T. O’Neill they were deadlocked, but he urged them to continue working on the case. Now with a hung jury, the prosecution will have to decide whether to retry the case involving the alleged assault on Constand, a former Temple University employee who first made the allegations more than a decade ago.

Editor’s note, June 30: On June 30, 2021, Bill Cosby was released from prison when his sexual assault conviction was overturned by a Pennsylvania appeals court. The text below, originally published on July 19, 2015, has not been updated.

In what might be the most telling moment of the deposition, Cosby says he did not believe his sexual contact with Constand had been unwelcome because of her behavior afterward. He says:

This week, the Associated Press obtained court documents that showed Bill Cosby admitted under oath in 2005 that he had procured Quaaludes, a sedative, to give to women he was planning to have sex with. Cosby’s admission came during his deposition for a lawsuit filed by Andrea Constand, who accused Cosby of drugging and sexually assaulting her. According to the AP, Cosby also admitted to giving Constand three half-pills of Benadryl.

The admission seems particularly significant because many women have now come forward to accuse Cosby of sexual assaults that follow a similar, disturbing pattern: that Cosby had offered them a drink that was laced with some type of sedative, and then raped or sexually assaulted them after they were impaired or unconscious. (Several women have also accused Cosby of drugging them but not sexually assaulting them, or of kissing or fondling them against their will without drugging them.) Cosby’s testimony about procuring drugs to give to women he was planning to have sex with isn’t an admission that the women’s allegations were true — according to the AP, when Constand’s lawyers asked if he ever gave women the Quaaludes without their knowledge, he refused to answer — but it does seem damning.

Here’s how US District Judge Eduardo Robreno explained his July 2015 decision to unseal a deposition from a 2005 lawsuit in which Bill Cosby admitted to obtaining Quaaludes to give to women he wanted to have sex with: “The stark contrast between Bill Cosby, the public moralist and Bill Cosby, the subject of serious allegations concerning improper (and perhaps criminal) conduct is a matter as to which the [Associated Press] — and by extension the public — has a significant interest,” he wrote.

He was reacting to the growing list of women who had come forward over the past year to accuse Cosby of sexual misconduct. Their stories were nearly impossible to square with the Cosby Show character, Kids Say the Darndest Things persona, and Jell-O Pudding Pop commercial antics for which Cosby was best known before he was engulfed in scandal.