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Bill Cosby’s Fate Now Rests in the Hands of the Jury Bill Cosby’s Fate Now Rests in the Hands of the Jury
(about 5 hours later)
• The defense rested its case on Monday after calling one witness, a police detective, who testified for six minutes.• The defense rested its case on Monday after calling one witness, a police detective, who testified for six minutes.
• Closing arguments in the sexual assault trial started immediately, with the defense casting Bill Cosby as a philanderer, but not a criminal, and the prosecution portraying him as someone who used his celebrity and power to take advantage of a young woman who had trusted him.• Closing arguments in the sexual assault trial started immediately, with the defense casting Bill Cosby as a philanderer, but not a criminal, and the prosecution portraying him as someone who used his celebrity and power to take advantage of a young woman who had trusted him.
• Despite speculation that Mr. Cosby might testify, he did not. His wife, Camille, who had not been in court last week, walked in with him on Monday, but left later in the afternoon.• Despite speculation that Mr. Cosby might testify, he did not. His wife, Camille, who had not been in court last week, walked in with him on Monday, but left later in the afternoon.
• Judge Steven T. O’Neill began charging the jury who will decide the case just after 4 p.m. and they began their deliberations in the early evening. • Judge Steven T. O’Neill began charging the jury who will decide the case just after 4 p.m. and they deliberated for four hours before retiring to their hotel.
His lawyers rested their case after calling just one witness, a local detective who in 2005 had interviewed both Mr. Cosby and Andrea Constand, the Temple University staff member who has accused Mr. Cosby of drugging and sexually assaulting her at his home outside Philadelphia in 2004. The deliberations followed closing arguments during which his lawyer acknowledged in court that Mr. Cosby is a deeply flawed man, an unfaithful husband who may have shattered his fans’ illusions, but insisted that what he characterized as a dalliance with a much younger woman was an affair, not a crime.
The detective, Sgt. Richard Schaffer, had testified last week as a prosecution witness. On Monday Brian J. McMonagle, a lawyer for Mr. Cosby, brought him back to the stand for roughly six minutes, specifically to have him talk about a document he had created in 2005. The document, which the detective labeled “Questions for Andrea,” included some matters about her account that he had sought clarification on, including the question as to why she had gone to meet Mr. Cosby at a casino in Connecticut. The lead defense attorney, Brian J. McMonagle, acknowledged that revelations of Mr. Cosby’s womanizing, depictions of him as a philander who plied women with charm and drugs, have overtaken his image as a genial comedian and beloved TV dad.
The defense has argued that that meeting and other evidence suggests that Ms. Constand had a romantic relationship with Mr. Cosby and that their sexual encounter in 2004 was consensual. Ms. Constand and her mother were in the courtroom Monday. But that is no crime, Mr. McMonagle said, arguing that the entertainer’s 2004 encounter with Andrea Constand, the woman Mr. Cosby, 79, is accused of sexually assaulting, was consensual.
The detective testified for only a few minutes and then the defense rested. “They’ve been intimate,” he said. “Why are we trying to make it something it’s not?”
The lawyer emphasized that prosecutors had decided not to bring charges in 2005. The new case, he argued, was based on deposition testimony from a subsequent 2005 lawsuit filed by Ms. Constand in which Mr. Cosby acknowledged securing drugs to increase his chances of having sex with women. As if to show that he, too, was disappointed in Mr. Cosby — and perhaps offer the jury the catharsis of a public shaming — Mr. McMonagle pointed at his client and declared angrily, “You danced outside your marriage.” Turning to Mr. Cosby’s wife of more than 50 years, making her first appearance at the trial and sitting in the front row, he added, “And you deserved better.”
But even that testimony, Mr. McMonagle suggested, portrayed a romantic, consensual relationship with Ms. Constand, one that he said Ms. Constand elected to remain in even after, by her own testimony, she had rebuffed two earlier advances. Kevin R. Steele, the Montgomery County district attorney, also addressed Mr. Cosby directly, in a closing argument that lasted more than two hours on just the sixth day of a fast-moving case, originally anticipated to have taken weeks, not days, to present. Mr. Steele said Mr. Cosby, a Temple University trustee and the university’s most famous alumnus, set his sights on Ms. Constand, an employee in the university’s athletic department who was 36 years younger than him.
He cited her acknowledgment that she had visited Mr. Cosby in his hotel room at the Connecticut casino. “You ingratiated yourself into this woman’s life,” he said. “You treated her well. You paid her attention. And then you drugged her and you did what you wanted.”
“Why on earth would you go to Foxwoods casino in Connecticut after he has already unbuttoned your pants and put his hands down your pants?” he asked. He is charged with three counts of aggravated indecent assault, each punishable by 10 years in prison.
He focused on the inconsistencies in Ms. Constand’s statements to police, some revisions she made to her police statements, and why she maintained contact with Mr. Cosby after she said was assaulted, including long phone calls of more than half an hour. The case will turn largely on how credible the panel finds Ms. Constand, who testified that in a visit to Mr. Cosby’s home near Philadelphia, he gave her pills that he said were herbal, but that left her immobile and drifting in and out of consciousness, and sexually assaulted her. He later said he had given her Benadryl.
“Ms. Constand was untruthful time and time and time again,” Mr. McMonagle said. She took the witness stand last week as a proxy for the dozens of women who have since stepped forward to say that Mr. Cosby had assaulted them, often with details remarkably similar to Ms. Constand’s story. Adding weight to the allegations was the revelation in 2015 that Mr. Cosby in a deposition for a 2005 civil suit filed by Ms. Constand had admitted to obtaining quaaludes to help him in his pursuit of sex with women.
For example, he said, she told the Pennsylvania investigators the attack had occurred in March 2004, after a dinner, and then corrected the date to January, when she said there was no dinner and she went directly to Mr. Cosby’s home. None of the other women’s accusations has resulted in prosecution — in many cases, too much time has passed — leaving Ms. Constand’s case as the only formal test of Mr. Cosby’s guilt. Prosecutors wanted to call a dozen of the accusers to testify in the trial, but Judge O’Neill allowed just one, Kelly Johnson, who testified that Mr. Cosby had drugged and assaulted her in 1996.
“She says one thing yesterday, another thing today,” Mr. McMonagle said. “What is she going to say tomorrow?” Even so, the specter of the other allegations hung over the trial. Jurors conceded during jury selection that they were aware of the claims. Mr. McMonagle on Monday cited the “drumbeat” of highly publicized charges, referring it seemed to the Johnson accusation and charging that the case was more media frenzy than legal tribunal.
As for Mr. Cosby, he added, “tomorrow could be too late.” The defense seized on inconsistencies in the version of events Ms. Constand gave when she went first went to the police, and statements she made later on: She said the assault took place in March 2004, after dinner at a restaurant, then said it occurred earlier, unconnected to the restaurant outing; she said it was first time she had been alone with Mr. Cosby in his home, then said it was the third time, and that she had rebuffed his sexual advances the first two times; she said she had minimal communication with him after the incident, then acknowledged many contacts.
While Mr. McMonagle spoke, Mr. Cosby leaned forward at a table at the front of the courtroom, with a slight frown on his face. The lawyer said he did not have to call Mr. Cosby to testify because Mr. Cosby had been truthful in his police statement. “They put his words in front of you; I didn’t have to,” Mr. McMonagle said, referring to the prosecution’s decision to enter the police statement into evidence. “Ms. Constand was untruthful time and time and time again,” Mr. McMonagle told the jury. “There is one contradictory story after another.”
“He gave her Benadryl,” he said of Mr. Cosby. “He didn’t have to say that.” He questioned why an assault victim would have continued to have contact with her assailant, and as evidence of an intimate relationship, he cited a trip Ms. Constand took to a resort to see Mr. Cosby perform, when she visited him in his hotel room. “Why on earth would you go to Foxwoods casino in Connecticut after he has already unbuttoned your pants and put his hands down your pants?” he demanded.
Mr. McMonagle also worked to soften the blow of hearing Mr. Cosby, once seen as America’s Dad, cast as being, at the very least, an unfaithful husband. He suggested it was similar to what happens when children grow and see their parents and their faults. During the trial, the prosecution called one expert who testified that victims’ accounts are often disjointed and inconsistent, and another who said that Benadryl, in a high dose, could be a powerful sedative. Under cross-examination, Ms. Constand explained her lapses as innocent mistakes, and said her contacts with Mr. Cosby after the incident were mostly cursory, the unavoidable result of her job duties.
“I told you when we started, when you looked over here you would see different things,” he said, standing beside Mr. Cosby. “You would see a brilliant comedian, an artist who not only taught us how to smile but taught us how to love each other.” He described her later contacts with him as irrelevant, and said jurors should ignore what Mr. Steele said were myths about how sexual assault victims are supposed to behave.
But, he added, “We are not perfect, are we?” When Ms. Constand’s mother called to confront Mr. Cosby about a year after the incident, he said, the defendant’s apology, and his offer to pay for her schooling, therapy and a trip to Florida, were evidence that he knew he had done something wrong.
Pointing at Mr. Cosby, the anger in his voice evident, Mr. McMonagle shouted, “You danced outside your marriage,” and then, pointing at Mrs. Cosby, sitting in the front row, he said, “And you deserved better.” “Andrea Constand’s own words, just what she told you, should sustain a conviction in this case,” Mr. Steele said. “But under the defendant’s own words, you must convict.”
But that was not a crime, he said. Mr. Cosby’s lawyers were, in essence, promoting the view that prosecutors had failed to prove anything.
Defense lawyers had asked to bring forward a second witness, Marguerite Jackson, an adviser at Temple, but Judge O’Neill denied the request to introduce her, suggesting it would be “hearsay” evidence. The only witness called, Sgt. Richard Schaffer of the Cheltenham Township Police, had interviewed Mr. Cosby and Ms. Constand after her initial complaint 12 years ago. Mr. McMonagle questioned him about a document he created in 2005, labeled “Questions for Andrea,” where the detective indicated he too was curious as to why she had gone to see Mr. Cosby at Foxwoods.
On a break later, Andrew Wyatt, a spokesman for Mr. Cosby, said that Ms. Jackson and Ms. Constand had traveled together as roommates with the Temple women’s basketball team years ago and that “this woman remembers Constand saying that she could set a rich guy up like Bill Cosby.” The defense chose not to summon Bruce L. Castor, Jr., the former district attorney who in 2005 declined to file criminal charges against Mr. Cosby.
Ms. Jackson, in a brief telephone interview Monday, said she believed, based on the conversation, that Ms. Constand had been motivated by money and that she wondered why the judge had disallowed her testimony. On Monday, Judge O’Neill questioned Mr. Cosby about his team’s bare-bones defense, including asking whether he agreed with the decisions not to testify, himself, and to call only a single witness. Mr. Cosby replied with a series of staccato answers, such as “yes” and “correct.”
Dolores Troiani, a lawyer who previously represented Ms Constand, said her former client was never a roommate of Ms. Jackson and that she had never heard the assertion, which Ms. Troiani disputed, that Ms. Constand had sought money when accusing Mr. Cosby of sexual misconduct.
The judge interacted a bit with Mr. Cosby as Monday’s court session began, speaking directly to him across the court and presenting several questions to Mr. Cosby to confirm that he agreed with his lawyers’ decision to bring the one witness and with the decision that he wasn’t going to testify. As his wife, Camille, watched from the front row, Mr. Cosby replied simply, “Yes” or “Correct.”
Prosecutors asked Ms. Constand to tell her story, while defense lawyers attacked her credibility. Her testimony was emotional and she stayed composed, even as Mr. Cosby’s defense team produced phone records showing she called Mr. Cosby at least 53 times after the night she said she was assaulted at his home. She said that she had to speak to him for Temple University business.
Another question for the defense had been whether to call Bruce L. Castor Jr., the former district attorney who carried out the initial investigation in 2005. His name has been referenced several times in court by the defense team. But even though he had concluded there was “insufficient credible and admissible evidence” to bring charges, he had also said that he believed Ms. Constand’s account and thought Mr. Cosby was guilty of some improper behavior.
“My gut told me that,” he told The New York Times in 2014.
Perhaps the defense worried that this sentiment would have come out on cross-examination.
He recounted Ms. Constand’s story of the night she went alone to Mr. Cosby’s home, portraying Mr. Cosby as an entertainer who used his celebrity and power as the young woman’s mentor to befriend, and eventually drug and assault her. “You ingratiated yourself into this woman’s life,” Mr. Steele said in a closing that lasted more than two hours. “You treated her well. You paid her attention. And then you drugged her and you did what you wanted.”
He said beyond Ms. Constand’s account, Mr. Cosby’s own words were incriminating, citing among other instances, an apology he made to Ms. Constand and her mother during a two-hour phone call in 2005. “Andrea Constand’s own words, just what she told you, should sustain a conviction in this case,” he said. “But under the defendant’s own words, you must convict.”
Mr. Steele also denounced the defense lawyers for raising questions about why Ms. Constand had kept in contact with Mr. Cosby after the night she said she was assaulted, asserting they were exploiting debunked myths about how sexual assault victims are supposed to behave.
He told them the groundrules he expected to guide them in their deliberations.
The jurors may be relieved by the speed of the proceedings. They were drawn from the Pittsburgh area, 300 miles west of Norristown, Pa., because of concerns over pretrial publicity. They are being sequestered for the duration of the trial.
“You have been amazing in how you have taken that hardship, being away from your family, away from your normal routine,” Judge O’Neill said on Friday as he wished them a restful weekend.
But he warned them not to talk about the case with anyone and to keep an open mind, as they now come into the spotlight.