Andrea Constand’s case hits another crossroads.
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. On Thursday, the jury told Judge Steve 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 decided 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. Cosby, now 79, faced three charges of aggravated indecent assault, all related to one incident that took place in 2004 in his Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, home. While the case was to go to trial due to its tumultuous history, relentless media attention, and the looming statute of limitations, it did. Constand is one of dozens of women who have accused the comedian of sexually assaulting or harassing them, but because of statutes of limitations, most of their cases (some women allege Cosby assaulted them more than 40 years ago) couldn’ t go to trial. The women’s stories have forced Americans to confront the idea that Cosby may not be the silly but responsible dad that his and standup persona suggested — resulting in a public reckoning that intersects complicated themes of race, celebrity, and our society’s shifting attitudes about sexual consent. Here’s how Cosby, Constand, and the dozens of women who accused the comedian got to this point. Nearly 60 women have now come forward to say Cosby either sexually assaulted them or attempted as much, in incidents. Many of the allegations against Cosby follow similar patterns: The women say Cosby offered them a beverage — sometimes a cup of coffee, or sometimes a glass of wine or liquor, sometimes to chase down a pill. Then, they say, Cosby sexually assaulted them while they were impaired or even unconscious (though some women have said they were not drugged when Cosby attacked or groped them) . The women span social classes and occupations — from servers, aspiring actresses, and lawyers to celebrity models Beverly Johnson and Janice Dickinson. In Constand’s case, she was the director of operations of the women’s basketball team at Temple University. Cosby, a Temple alum and former student-athlete, kept close contact with the school and its athletics program. By 2002, he was acting as a mentor to Constand. In January 2004, Constand was visiting Cosby at his home, seeking career advice, when she was feeling stressed. That’s when, she says, he gave her three pills, telling her they’d take the edge off. When she asked if they were herbal, he reportedly said, “Yes. Down them.” After taking the pills and drinking wine at Cosby’s urging, Constand testified, her vision became blurry and her speech slurred. Cosby then went on to grope and digitally penetrate her, and also guided her hand to touch his genitals, she said. Hours later, Constand said, she awoke in his house with her clothing askew. Cosby greeted her in a robe, gave her a muffin, and walked her out of his house. Constand reported the ordeal to local authorities in 2005, a year after it was alleged to have taken place. Cosby was questioned, and claimed the sexual acts were consensual. (Even before this incident, Constand said she refused Cosby’s advances from him two other times but wrote it off as flirting.) When the news of Constand’s allegations first went public in early 2005,California attorney Tamara Green appeared on the shortly after with a similar story about how Cosby gave her pills to help with a fever, and then sexually assaulted her in her apartment. Cosby denied both allegations, and then–Montgomery County District Attorney Bruce Castor said Constand’s case lacked enough evidence to move forward. Constand, who had moved back to Toronto at that point, filed a civil complaint against Cosby. Thirteen women had come forward to Constand and were mentioned in her case as Jane Doe witnesses. Some of the women who had provided testimony for Constand’s case even came forward publicly, telling reporters their stories of what Cosby had done to them. These stories got some coverage, but it never quite broke through to the national consciousness. Cosby and Constand the case on undisclosed terms in 2006. But nearly a decade after that case was settled, a joke went viral. with a not-so-subtle reminder that the elder comedian had been accused of raping or sexually assaulting several women. “I guess I want to just at least make it weird for you to watch reruns, ” Buress joked to a Philadelphia audience after a bit about Cosby and respectability politics. “Dude’s image is, for the most part, a public Teflon image. I’ve done this bit onstage and people don’t believe me; people think I’m making it up. I’m like, ‘Bill Cosby has a lot of rape allegations,’ and they go, ‘No, you do!’ No!… That shit is upsetting. If you didn’t know about it, trust me, if you leave here and Google ‘Bill Cosby rape,’ that shit has more results than ‘Hannibal Buress.’ ” The allegations had laid mostly dormant until that moment at a Philadelphia comedy show in 2014. In the eight years since Constand settled with Cosby, America’s general understanding of sexual assault, rape, consent, and power had evolved, and the public appeared less willing to ignore the idea that “America’s dad” could be capable of sexual assault. As Kathy McGee, a former radio host and one of Cosby’s accusers, “For 40 years, I didn’t say anything because I thought it was just me. Imagine a girl in the early 1970s trying to make it in Hollywood and have a career. He was in his heyday when it happened. My common sense told me nobody would believe me.” Initially few did, as those who brought complaints against Cosby found. But after the seal was broken three years ago, more women came forward to add their names to the list of those who said Cosby had abused them in one way or another, creating a striking avalanche of individual stories. In July 2015, Constand filed a motion just weeks before Pennsylvania’s for this case. Prosecutors didn’ t pursue the case a decade prior. But a devastating deposition Cosby gave during Constand’s civil suit against him was made public by the that summer. There, he admitted to drugging her with Quaaludes and then having sexual contact with her, though he still maintained that contact was consensual. The deposition provided an avenue for prosecutors to pick up the case. At the trial this month, Constand’s attorneys called 12 witnesses over five days last week. Though 60 women have made allegations against Cosby, spanning decades, only one other woman was allowed to testify at the trial aside from Constand. The woman, known as Kacey, was an assistant to Cosby’s former agent Tom Illius in the 1990s. She testified that Cosby invited her to his hotel room to discuss her acting career, according to. There, Kacey said, Cosby urged her to swallow “a big white pill, ” and then sexually assaulted her. “I was very afraid because I had a secret about the biggest celebrity in the world at that time, ” Kacey said on the stand. “And it was just me and my word against his. I was afraid.” Constand herself took the stand, explaining that she had trusted Cosby as a university trustee, donor, and alum. That was until Cosby gave her three pills that debilitated her. She recounted the story as she had previously, though this time, on the witness stand, through tears. “I was frozen and I was very limp, ” she said through a cracked voice, reports the Guardian, “and so I wasn’ t able to fight in anyway. I wanted it to stop.” After she awoke from being drugged, she said, she “felt humiliated and I was really confused because of what I remembered, and I just wanted to go home.” Through attorneys and spokespeople, Cosby has vigorously denied the accusations, but since the allegations hit their peak, he has hardly spoken publicly. In a rare interview earlier this year, he that he wanted avoid getting in the way of his legal team, which is why he would not testify. “I just don’ t want to sit there and have to figure out what I believe is a truthful answer to whether or not I’ m opening a can of something that my lawyers are scrambling, ” he said. In line with his defenses in the years since the civil case against Constand, Cosby added that the women making allegations against him were trying to take advantage of him, in order to gain money and fame. The closest the jury got to hearing his side of the story was his unsealed testimony from the 2005 civil case, where he disclosed that he did give women with the intention of then having sex with them.
