i told you he’d get YEARS in prison. There’s a reason.
Bill Cosby sentenced to 3 to 10 years in state prison
Bill Cosby arrives at the Montgomery County Courthouse for the sentencing hearings in his sexual assault trial in Norristown, Pennsylvania. (JESSICA KOURKOUNIS/Reuters)
By Manuel Roig-Franzia
September 25 at 11:19 AM PT
NORRISTOWN, Pa. — Comic legend Bill Cosby, a once-beloved father figure and moralizing African American cultural icon, was sentenced to 3 to 10 years in state prison Tuesday in a sexual assault case that was capped by the first celebrity trial of the #MeToo era.
In his ruling, Judge Steven O’Neill said the evidence that Cosby planned the drugging and sexual assault of his victim was “overwhelming,” based on Cosby’s own words in a civil deposition.
Cosby was convicted April 26 of three counts of aggravated indecent assault for the 2004 drugging and sexual assault of Andrea Constand, a 31-year-old Temple women’s basketball official he was mentoring. Constand, a former college and professional basketball player, testified in harrowing detail at the trial about losing control of her limbs after taking pills given to her by Cosby, who served on Temple’s board of trustees and was the public face of the university. The pills, Constand said, left her unable to stop him from violating her at his suburban Philadelphia estate. At Cosby’s sentencing hearing, she asked merely for “justice.”
Before the sentence was announced, the judge quoted Constand, who in a written statement released Tuesday said Cosby “took my beautiful, healthy, young spirit & crushed it.” As the judge spoke those words, Cosby grumbled in a scoffing manner loudly enough to be heard by the audience.
When it came time to hear his sentence, Cosby sat with his head slightly tilted back and his chin jutting out. He remained expressionless until a few moments later when his attorney made vague references to a damning tape that Cosby’s investigators had supposedly uncovered that might be a reason to forestall the entertainer being sent immediately to prison. O’Neill was clearly miffed, and as he spoke, Cosby chuckled with a mocking look on his face.
Bill Cosby arrived at a Pennsylvania courthouse on Sept. 25 for his sentencing hearing. He will learn whether he will go to prison for sexual assault. (Reuters)
Constand was the only woman whose case led to criminal charges against the comedian. More than 60 women have accused Cosby of sexual assault or harassment, stretching back to the 1960s, when he was launching his comedy career and became the first African American actor to star on a network television show with his role on the hit program “I Spy.” In countless media interviews, the women — including aspiring actresses and models; flight attendants; singers; and, in one instance, a doughnut-shop clerk — gave similar accounts of being dazzled by Cosby’s fame. Most said they never thought anyone would believe them, so they stayed quiet, privately harboring experiences that many said had scarred them for life.
Cosby once commanded an empire — a thriving entertainment behemoth, and the personal assistants, valets, publicists and personal chefs that kept his luxe life and businesses running. He traveled by private plane between well-appointed homes in Manhattan, suburban Philadelphia, Los Angeles and rural Massachusetts.
But on Tuesday, after officially he was designated a sexually violent predator, his power was stripped from him. He was not in command, and he was forced to listen quietly as a young prosecutor ran through a series of restrictions that will be imposed on him for the rest of his life.
Cosby, who never testified during the case, answered “Yes” over and over. Yes, he understood that he would have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life. Yes, he understood that he’d have to let the state know about any job he took or anytime he changed residences.
But a puzzled look crossed Cosby’s face when Assistant District Attorney Stewart Ryan asked Cosby whether he understood that he would need to notify the state about his travels.
“One question,” Cosby interjected, speaking slowly, emphatically enunciating each word in a booming voice that filled the room. “If I went from a city to another city, do I have to — even if it’s just overnight — I would have to advise the state police?”
The prosecutor said he would need to.
A jury in Pennsylvania convicted comedian Bill Cosby on all three counts of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand in 2004. (Patrick Martin,Ashleigh Joplin/The Washington Post)
Another condition clearly concerned Cosby. He seemed to misunderstand a requirement that his victim be notified if he moved to another house.
“I have to notify?” Cosby said with a hint of disdain.
Assured by Ryan that the state would do the notifying, Cosby sat back in his big leather swivel chair at the defense table.
“Good, good,” he said.
During court breaks, Cosby bantered breezily with two of his attorneys and Ed Ford, a pal from his Temple University days who is the only friend who attended the two-day sentencing hearing. With the judge outside the courtroom, Cosby smiled and laughed, tilting back in his chair.
On Tuesday, more than a dozen of those women — no longer doubting that the world would take them seriously — crowded into the ornate courtroom where Cosby finally had his comeuppance. Tamara Green, a model who says Cosby drugged and groped her around 1969 or 1970, drove alone cross-country in an RV from her home in the San Diego area. When her vehicle broke down in rural Tennessee, Green — now an attorney — left it there, hopping a plane to Pennsylvania. Linda Kirkpatrick, who says Cosby drugged her after a tennis tournament in 1981, stepped away from her Bundt cake bakery in Costa Mesa, Calif., to witness a historic moment.
Many of the women lined up in the predawn hours to get a seat in the courtroom had been willing to testify; Judge O’Neill decided against allowing their testimony. Still, just being in the courtroom felt, for some, like therapy. They have come to call each other “sister survivors.”
“This is seriously closure,” Green, one of the first women to publicly accuse Cosby of sexually assault, said in an interview. “I feel like a cloud has been lifted.”
“Justice for one is justice for all,” said Therese Serignese, now a Florida nurse who says Cosby assaulted her after giving her a quaalude in the mid-1970s, and later was involved in an on-again-off-again relationship with the comedian.
Green and Serignese are among several plaintiffs in an ongoing defamation lawsuit against Cosby, which was filed by D.C.-based attorney Joe Cammarata, who once represented Paula Jones in a sex-fueled case involving then-President Bill Clinton. The lawsuit says Cosby defamed the women by saying they were lying about their sexual assault allegations.
“Today we celebrate the rule of law,” said Cammarata, who attended the sentencing. “The jury spoke through its verdict that abhorrent sexual behavior is not to be tolerated in a civilized society.”
Even before Tuesday’s decision, Cosby was living in a prison of his own making, a shadowy world of serial infidelity and deception. By his own admission, Cosby — who says he did not drink — acquired quaaludes, a powerful sedative, to give to women with whom he wanted to have sex. He also admitted to using his vast wealth to silence women who might have exposed his secret life. It was a real-life existence dramatically out of step with the wholesome image he projected on television as Dr. Cliff Huxtable on “The Cosby Show,” a megahit program that broke new cultural ground with its depiction of an upper-middle-class African American family.
The same year that Cosby assaulted Constand, the comedian gave his infamous “poundcake speech,” in which he chided young African Americans, saying that people were getting shot over a “piece of poundcake.” Cosby’s moralizing tone in the speech, and in other public appearances at which he criticized African Americans for their use of vernacular language and their fashion choices, led to much resentment among the very people ge was hoping to inspire.
Cosby staunchly refused to admit doing anything wrong to Constand, whom his legal team sometimes described as his lover. His attorney, Thomas Mesereau, portrayed Constand as a greedy schemer who wanted to trick Cosby to enrich herself. Cosby, who did not testify at his April trial or in a previous trial that ended with a hung jury, had testified in a civil deposition that he gave Constand 1½ Benadryl pills, an over-the-counter allergy medication.
By the time Cosby’s sentencing hearing arrived, Mesereau — a Los Angeles-based attorney famed for winning an acquittal on molestation charges for pop star Michael Jackson — had left the case. The departure was just the latest in a revolving door of attorneys for Cosby, who was represented by his 16th attorney, a suburban Philadelphia lawyer named Joseph P. Green at the sentencing hearing.
Constand’s case traces back to the 2005 when she made her allegation public, asking prosecutors in Montgomery County, Pa., where Cosby’s Elkins Park mansion is located, to investigate. She later sued Cosby after authorities refused to bring charges. She settled that lawsuit for more than $3.8 million. It wasn’t until nine years later that Cosby’s sexual conduct swelled into a full-blown national scandal after a comedian, Hannibal Buress, told an audience in Philadelphia to conduct an Internet search for the words “Cosby and rape.” His remarks, captured by chance by a Philadelphia Magazine reporter, went viral, and dozens of women came forward to tell their stories of alleged assaults.
The jurors who convicted Cosby in April heard testimony from six women who say Cosby drugged and assaulted them: Constand and five women, known as “prior bad act witnesses” who prosecutors brought to the witness stand to establish a pattern of behavior. Two of those women — Lise-Lotte Lublin and Chelan Lasha — appeared at a news conference on Sunday, the day before the sentencing hearing began, to urge the judge to sentence Cosby to prison time.
“I really think it’s important that he spend some time behind bars,” said Lublin, a music teacher who was a model when she met Cosby in the late 1980s, according to the Associated Press. “At some point, he should acknowledge what he’s done, and do the time for the crime.”
Cosby’s wife of more than 50 years, Camille, had a waged an eleventh-hour campaign to undercut Judge O’Neill in the days before the trial. The week before the sentencing, she announced that she had hired a former prosecutor to investigate her allegations that O’Neill held a grudge against the former district attorney, Bruce Castor, who had declined to charge Cosby. Castor defeated O’Neill in a long-ago race for district attorney. Cosby’s legal team has said O’Neill should have recused himself because of alleged lingering resentments from that race, and because O’Neill had allegedly had a romantic relationship with a women in Castor’s office. O’Neill declined to do so.
Camille Cosby was absent on Tuesday when her husband was sentenced. So were his three adult daughters. The court saved two full rows in the packed courtroom for Cosby’s personal use — enough to hold at least 16 people. In the first row sat an attorney, two publicists and one old friend. The second row was empty.
Manuel Roig-Franzia is a feature writer in The Washington Post’s Style section, where he profiles national figures in the worlds of politics, the law and the arts. He previously served as bureau chief in Miami for The Post's National staff and in Mexico City for the Post's Foreign staff. He is the author of a biography of Sen. Marco Rubio.
Democracy Dies in Darkness
Bill Cosby sentenced to 3 to 10 years in state prison
Bill Cosby arrives at the Montgomery County Courthouse for the sentencing hearings in his sexual assault trial in Norristown, Pennsylvania. (JESSICA KOURKOUNIS/Reuters)
By Manuel Roig-Franzia
September 25 at 11:19 AM PT
NORRISTOWN, Pa. — Comic legend Bill Cosby, a once-beloved father figure and moralizing African American cultural icon, was sentenced to 3 to 10 years in state prison Tuesday in a sexual assault case that was capped by the first celebrity trial of the #MeToo era.
In his ruling, Judge Steven O’Neill said the evidence that Cosby planned the drugging and sexual assault of his victim was “overwhelming,” based on Cosby’s own words in a civil deposition.
Cosby was convicted April 26 of three counts of aggravated indecent assault for the 2004 drugging and sexual assault of Andrea Constand, a 31-year-old Temple women’s basketball official he was mentoring. Constand, a former college and professional basketball player, testified in harrowing detail at the trial about losing control of her limbs after taking pills given to her by Cosby, who served on Temple’s board of trustees and was the public face of the university. The pills, Constand said, left her unable to stop him from violating her at his suburban Philadelphia estate. At Cosby’s sentencing hearing, she asked merely for “justice.”
Before the sentence was announced, the judge quoted Constand, who in a written statement released Tuesday said Cosby “took my beautiful, healthy, young spirit & crushed it.” As the judge spoke those words, Cosby grumbled in a scoffing manner loudly enough to be heard by the audience.
When it came time to hear his sentence, Cosby sat with his head slightly tilted back and his chin jutting out. He remained expressionless until a few moments later when his attorney made vague references to a damning tape that Cosby’s investigators had supposedly uncovered that might be a reason to forestall the entertainer being sent immediately to prison. O’Neill was clearly miffed, and as he spoke, Cosby chuckled with a mocking look on his face.
Bill Cosby arrived at a Pennsylvania courthouse on Sept. 25 for his sentencing hearing. He will learn whether he will go to prison for sexual assault. (Reuters)
Constand was the only woman whose case led to criminal charges against the comedian. More than 60 women have accused Cosby of sexual assault or harassment, stretching back to the 1960s, when he was launching his comedy career and became the first African American actor to star on a network television show with his role on the hit program “I Spy.” In countless media interviews, the women — including aspiring actresses and models; flight attendants; singers; and, in one instance, a doughnut-shop clerk — gave similar accounts of being dazzled by Cosby’s fame. Most said they never thought anyone would believe them, so they stayed quiet, privately harboring experiences that many said had scarred them for life.
Cosby once commanded an empire — a thriving entertainment behemoth, and the personal assistants, valets, publicists and personal chefs that kept his luxe life and businesses running. He traveled by private plane between well-appointed homes in Manhattan, suburban Philadelphia, Los Angeles and rural Massachusetts.
But on Tuesday, after officially he was designated a sexually violent predator, his power was stripped from him. He was not in command, and he was forced to listen quietly as a young prosecutor ran through a series of restrictions that will be imposed on him for the rest of his life.
Cosby, who never testified during the case, answered “Yes” over and over. Yes, he understood that he would have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life. Yes, he understood that he’d have to let the state know about any job he took or anytime he changed residences.
But a puzzled look crossed Cosby’s face when Assistant District Attorney Stewart Ryan asked Cosby whether he understood that he would need to notify the state about his travels.
“One question,” Cosby interjected, speaking slowly, emphatically enunciating each word in a booming voice that filled the room. “If I went from a city to another city, do I have to — even if it’s just overnight — I would have to advise the state police?”
The prosecutor said he would need to.
A jury in Pennsylvania convicted comedian Bill Cosby on all three counts of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand in 2004. (Patrick Martin,Ashleigh Joplin/The Washington Post)
Another condition clearly concerned Cosby. He seemed to misunderstand a requirement that his victim be notified if he moved to another house.
“I have to notify?” Cosby said with a hint of disdain.
Assured by Ryan that the state would do the notifying, Cosby sat back in his big leather swivel chair at the defense table.
“Good, good,” he said.
During court breaks, Cosby bantered breezily with two of his attorneys and Ed Ford, a pal from his Temple University days who is the only friend who attended the two-day sentencing hearing. With the judge outside the courtroom, Cosby smiled and laughed, tilting back in his chair.
On Tuesday, more than a dozen of those women — no longer doubting that the world would take them seriously — crowded into the ornate courtroom where Cosby finally had his comeuppance. Tamara Green, a model who says Cosby drugged and groped her around 1969 or 1970, drove alone cross-country in an RV from her home in the San Diego area. When her vehicle broke down in rural Tennessee, Green — now an attorney — left it there, hopping a plane to Pennsylvania. Linda Kirkpatrick, who says Cosby drugged her after a tennis tournament in 1981, stepped away from her Bundt cake bakery in Costa Mesa, Calif., to witness a historic moment.
Many of the women lined up in the predawn hours to get a seat in the courtroom had been willing to testify; Judge O’Neill decided against allowing their testimony. Still, just being in the courtroom felt, for some, like therapy. They have come to call each other “sister survivors.”
“This is seriously closure,” Green, one of the first women to publicly accuse Cosby of sexually assault, said in an interview. “I feel like a cloud has been lifted.”
“Justice for one is justice for all,” said Therese Serignese, now a Florida nurse who says Cosby assaulted her after giving her a quaalude in the mid-1970s, and later was involved in an on-again-off-again relationship with the comedian.
Green and Serignese are among several plaintiffs in an ongoing defamation lawsuit against Cosby, which was filed by D.C.-based attorney Joe Cammarata, who once represented Paula Jones in a sex-fueled case involving then-President Bill Clinton. The lawsuit says Cosby defamed the women by saying they were lying about their sexual assault allegations.
“Today we celebrate the rule of law,” said Cammarata, who attended the sentencing. “The jury spoke through its verdict that abhorrent sexual behavior is not to be tolerated in a civilized society.”
Even before Tuesday’s decision, Cosby was living in a prison of his own making, a shadowy world of serial infidelity and deception. By his own admission, Cosby — who says he did not drink — acquired quaaludes, a powerful sedative, to give to women with whom he wanted to have sex. He also admitted to using his vast wealth to silence women who might have exposed his secret life. It was a real-life existence dramatically out of step with the wholesome image he projected on television as Dr. Cliff Huxtable on “The Cosby Show,” a megahit program that broke new cultural ground with its depiction of an upper-middle-class African American family.
The same year that Cosby assaulted Constand, the comedian gave his infamous “poundcake speech,” in which he chided young African Americans, saying that people were getting shot over a “piece of poundcake.” Cosby’s moralizing tone in the speech, and in other public appearances at which he criticized African Americans for their use of vernacular language and their fashion choices, led to much resentment among the very people ge was hoping to inspire.
Cosby staunchly refused to admit doing anything wrong to Constand, whom his legal team sometimes described as his lover. His attorney, Thomas Mesereau, portrayed Constand as a greedy schemer who wanted to trick Cosby to enrich herself. Cosby, who did not testify at his April trial or in a previous trial that ended with a hung jury, had testified in a civil deposition that he gave Constand 1½ Benadryl pills, an over-the-counter allergy medication.
By the time Cosby’s sentencing hearing arrived, Mesereau — a Los Angeles-based attorney famed for winning an acquittal on molestation charges for pop star Michael Jackson — had left the case. The departure was just the latest in a revolving door of attorneys for Cosby, who was represented by his 16th attorney, a suburban Philadelphia lawyer named Joseph P. Green at the sentencing hearing.
Constand’s case traces back to the 2005 when she made her allegation public, asking prosecutors in Montgomery County, Pa., where Cosby’s Elkins Park mansion is located, to investigate. She later sued Cosby after authorities refused to bring charges. She settled that lawsuit for more than $3.8 million. It wasn’t until nine years later that Cosby’s sexual conduct swelled into a full-blown national scandal after a comedian, Hannibal Buress, told an audience in Philadelphia to conduct an Internet search for the words “Cosby and rape.” His remarks, captured by chance by a Philadelphia Magazine reporter, went viral, and dozens of women came forward to tell their stories of alleged assaults.
The jurors who convicted Cosby in April heard testimony from six women who say Cosby drugged and assaulted them: Constand and five women, known as “prior bad act witnesses” who prosecutors brought to the witness stand to establish a pattern of behavior. Two of those women — Lise-Lotte Lublin and Chelan Lasha — appeared at a news conference on Sunday, the day before the sentencing hearing began, to urge the judge to sentence Cosby to prison time.
“I really think it’s important that he spend some time behind bars,” said Lublin, a music teacher who was a model when she met Cosby in the late 1980s, according to the Associated Press. “At some point, he should acknowledge what he’s done, and do the time for the crime.”
Cosby’s wife of more than 50 years, Camille, had a waged an eleventh-hour campaign to undercut Judge O’Neill in the days before the trial. The week before the sentencing, she announced that she had hired a former prosecutor to investigate her allegations that O’Neill held a grudge against the former district attorney, Bruce Castor, who had declined to charge Cosby. Castor defeated O’Neill in a long-ago race for district attorney. Cosby’s legal team has said O’Neill should have recused himself because of alleged lingering resentments from that race, and because O’Neill had allegedly had a romantic relationship with a women in Castor’s office. O’Neill declined to do so.
Camille Cosby was absent on Tuesday when her husband was sentenced. So were his three adult daughters. The court saved two full rows in the packed courtroom for Cosby’s personal use — enough to hold at least 16 people. In the first row sat an attorney, two publicists and one old friend. The second row was empty.
Manuel Roig-Franzia is a feature writer in The Washington Post’s Style section, where he profiles national figures in the worlds of politics, the law and the arts. He previously served as bureau chief in Miami for The Post's National staff and in Mexico City for the Post's Foreign staff. He is the author of a biography of Sen. Marco Rubio.
Democracy Dies in Darkness
