NORRISTOWN, Pennsylvania—“She is not the con, he is.”
That was the message, over and over again, that prosecutors made Tuesday in their closing arguments in the Bill Cosby trial. Cosby is charged with three counts of aggravated indecent assault for the night he allegedly drugged and sexually assaulted Andrea Constand. The arguments, made by prosecutors Kristen Feden and Stewart Ryan, were a mix of detailed examinations of the evidence and passionate defenses of all the women who came forward and the character assassinations they endured on the stand.
In her portion of the Commonwealth’s closing arguments, Feden gave a sweeping, emotional, and at times confrontational rebuttal for all the women who spoke out against Cosby. She repeatedly walked over toward Cosby and pointed at him with disgust in her face.
“This is his con, and he’s laughing like its funny but there is absolutely nothing funny about stripping a woman of her decency, incapacitating her to the point she could not consent,” Feden said loudly, pointing at the defendant. “There is nothing funny about that, Mr. Cosby.”
“They should not be responsible for his sexuality.”
Camille Cosby, who had arrived in the morning and sat through closing arguments for the defense, was long gone. She was not in the courtroom for the prosecution’s case. But Constand was in the courtroom, sitting behind the table for prosecutors.
“He is nothing like the image he plays on TV and, in fact, he utilized that image and cloaked it around himself,” Feden said, “so that he was able to gain the trust and the confidence of these young, aspiring, unsuspecting women, to sexually assault them and strip them of their very autonomy.”
Feden specifically defended each woman who spoke, saying their names and calling out the various ways the defense had shamed them: Shaming them for having more than one sexual partner, shaming them for any past drug use, shaming them for not being perfect rape victims, and shaming them for being alone with a married men. As Feden said, “they should not be responsible for his sexuality.”
Why were the women’s characters attacked? The defense had to do that, Feden said, because the women’s stories corroborated each other and lent credibility to what Constand told police happened to her.
“Every single one of these women were subjected to vicious character assassinations. But that’s because when you piece it all together their corroboration, their scrapbook, all of that substantiated their account that the defendant drugged and sexually assaulted them,” Feden said.
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