NORRISTOWN, Pa.— A mistrial has been declared in the criminal trial of Bill Cosby, an entertainer so beloved he was dubbed America’s Dad, so powerful his value was estimated at $400 million, and who in recent years has watched his entire empire crumble as dozens of women came forward saying he drugged, then raped them. It was in the case of one of those women that Montgomery County prosecutors brought charges of three counts of aggravated indecent assault. He faced up to 30 years in prison on the charges.
The decision came after more than 50 hours of deliberations by jurors, who started their process late Monday afternoon.
Despite so many women speaking out with similar stories, only one allegation has resulted in criminal charges—the case of Andrea Constand, a basketball player who, at the time, also worked for the women’s basketball team at Temple, where Cosby was a prominent trustee. Constand said he was a mentor to her and gained her trust, which he then used against her the night she came to his house to talk about her future. That night in early 2004, she said, he gave her three pills, calling them “your three friends to help you relax,” and told her they were herbal. She took them. All Constand remembers next, she told jurors last week, was being jolted awake, Cosby grabbing her breasts, and his hand inside her vagina. Then he took his hand and put it on his penis.
Constand left Temple and returned to Canada, where she started studying to become a massage therapist, like her father. But her family noticed something was wrong, and her mother, Gianna, testified to noticing her daughter having nightmares. Andrea Constand said nothing, even helping her family get tickets to see Cosby perform in Canada, until about a year later when she broke down and told her mother. They reported it to Canadian police, who passed them on to police in the Philadelphia area.
Gianna Constand called Cosby and confronted him. She testified about that phone call at the trial, saying Cosby told her that he was a sick man and talked openly about giving her daughter an orgasm. On the advice of her son-in-law, a police officer, Gianna Constand bought a recording device, and taped her next call with Cosby, which was played for jurors. In it, Cosby offered to help set up an educational trust for Constand, although even Cosby later admitted that the family never asked him for money or threatened to extort him.
Cosby, in a sitdown flanked by lawyers at a New York City office, said during the 2005 investigation that the sex had been consensual. His lawyers said the pills were Benadryl. This evidence was given to police and prosecutors but then-district attorney Bruce Castor closed the case without charges. Constand sued Cosby in civil court but, just as the case appeared ready to break open the nasty Hollywood machinery that keeps stars protected and projecting squeaky clean images, the lawsuit was settled. It sat, silently, for nearly a decade.
And then the entire facade unraveled. As more women came forward, the Associated Press asked to unseal multiple key documents from the Constand case. A judge agreed, unsealed them, and the documents provided pieces of a damning depositions of Cosby. The New York Times and several other publications got copies of the full depositions and wrote features based on the lurid details: How Cosby used celebrity, power, drugs, and and the promise of mentorship to coerce them into sex.
Using that same deposition, Montgomery County prosecutors reopened the investigation and, weeks before the statute of limitations ran out, charged Cosby. The entire time, since Constand first talked to police until this month’s trial, Cosby’s legal team has insisted there was no case. The sex, Cosby insisted in his deposition and police interview, was consensual.
The trial, once predicted to last at least two weeks, wrapped up in much less. The prosecution spent a full week bringing witness after witness, building a case that, they said, showed Cosby had a pattern of gaining women’s trust, then drugging them and forcing them to perform sex acts. The most powerful testimony came from two mothers—Partrice Sewell and Gianna Constand—who both testified following their daughters about the changes they noticed in their children and how it affected their families. Gianna Constand’s testimony was so powerful—she spared no punch in describing the lurid details of what Cosby told her about making her daughter orgasm, while avoiding giving the defense lawyer an inch—that Maclean’s headlined her testimony “At the Bill Cosby trial, ‘Canada’s Mom’ slays ‘America’s Dad.’”
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