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A jury has found Bill Cosby guilty of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand in his suburban Pennsylvania home in 2004. The jury handed down the guilty verdict on all threecounts of indecent aggravated assault after more than 12 hours of deliberation, following a retrial that lasted more than two weeks.

Cosby’s conviction concludes an acrimonious case that played out in the courtroom and in the press. In 2014 and 2015, dozens of women came forward with allegations that the comedian had drugged and sexually abused them. The statute of limitations had long since expired in almost all of those cases.

Andrea Constand’s was the exception. In December 2015, Montgomery County prosecutors charged Cosby with three counts of aggravated indecent assault relating to accusations from Constand. Constand, who went to police in 2005, alleged that Cosby had given her pills in his suburban Pennsylvania home that left her incapacitated and molested her. The case went to trial in June 2017, and ended in a mistrial.

Then came the #MeToo movement. After the New York Times and the New Yorker reported on the widespread allegations of sexual abuse by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein,more and more stories came pouring out about high-profile men who abused their power. Ten months elapsed between the two trials, but Cosby returned to court in a very different climate. And this time, the jury believed the women who accused him.
Cosby was on trial for drugging and assaulting a woman in 2004

Andrea Constand, a former Temple University employee, met Cosby in 2002, when she worked as the director of operations for the women’s basketball team. (Cosby, a former Temple student, served on the university’s board of trustees.) Constand said she considered Cosby, then in his 60s, a mentor. In January 2004 at Cosby’s home, she said, he gave her three blue pills that he told her would help to relieve stress. She took them, and became unfocused and confused. She said she passed out on the couch.

“I felt Mr. Cosby on the couch behind me, and my vagina was being penetrated quite forcefully, and I felt my breasts being touched,” Constand testified. She said she was too weak to fight Cosby off: “I wanted it to stop,” she said. “I couldn’t say anything. I was trying to get my hands to move, my legs to move, and the message just wasn’t getting there.”


In the first trial, the jury heard Constand’s story, and the story of one other accuser. This time, the judge allowed the prosecution to call five witnesses, all of whom said Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted them. Their accusations dated back to the 1980s.

Cosby is not on trial for the incidents they described — something the judge had to remind the jury — but the five women were supposed to serve as “prior bad acts” witnesses who could establish Cosby had a pattern of assaulting women.

The five women, often defiant in the face of attacks on cross-examination, presented a powerful case. Their stories echoed Constand’s own story of confusion, paralysis, and shame as they realized they had been violated. “Here was America’s Dad on top of me,” Janice Dickinson, a former supermodel who said Cosby drugged and raped her in 1982 in Lake Tahoe, said in court, describing her shock during the assault.

Those five accusers and Constand herself withstood the torrent of questions and recriminations from the defense. Some women admitted to confusion about what happened to them decades ago, and that they spent years grappling with their encounters with Cosby. Yet all were adamant about their allegations: They were drugged, they were assaulted, and Cosby did it.

The defense tried to depict the sexual assault allegations against Cosby as a “witch hunt”— echoing some of the backlash to the #MeToo movement. Cosby and his new legal team also introduced new evidence, including a witness who testified that Constand had planned to accuse Cosby of sexual assault to get money. The sum of the settlement Constand reached with Cosby in 2006 — nearly $3.4 million — was also made public at trial, for the first time.

The defense tried to discredit Constand and the other women, attacking their credibility and drudging up their past misbehaviors. The comedian’s lawyers also tried to sow doubt by presenting his touring schedule and his private plane records to show he hadn’t scheduled trips to Philadelphia around the time of the alleged assault. Cosby did not take the stand in his own defense.


The prosecution closed the trial with a closing statement that lasted three hours. In it, prosecutors described Cosby as a serial predator. “That character assassination that Ms. Bliss put those women through was utterly shameful,” prosecutor Kristen Feden said of one of Cosby’s lawyers, Kathleen Bliss. “She’s the exact reason why women, victims of sexual assault and men don’t report these crimes.”


Cosby could face up to 10 years in prison for each of the charges against him.
Cosby is one of the first celebrities convicted in the #MeToo era


Sexual assault allegations against Cosby began to circulate in earnest toward the end of 2014, when Cosby reemerged on a standup tour and had plans for an NBC sitcom and Netflix show and after a standup clip of comedian Hannibal Buress joking about Cosby being a rapist went viral. Dozens and dozens of women started speaking out. It felt like the start of a reckoning.


By now, about 60 women have come forward with sexual assault allegations against Cosby. Some were young models or actresses who attended meetings with Cosby on the promise of reading a script or getting career advice. Many kept their silence for years, assuming their word against that of a famous comedian would not be believed.

“For 30 years I really didn’t think about it,” Janice Baker-Kinney, a Cosby accuser testified at the trial. She paused slightly before continuing: “I didn’t want to think about it. And I will tell you that when women started coming forward and my husband — my current husband — started seeing articles in the paper about it, he kept pointing them out to me. And what I said was, ‘I don’t want to read them. I don’t want to hear about those.’ I ... don’t know how to sum it up.”

Yet the women who once feared telling the truth about Cosby for years revealed themselves, and found the public was finally listening and starting to believe them.

It started, in many ways, the surge to come. Sexual harassment accusations eventually ousted Fox News chair Roger Ailes in the summer of 2016; Bill O’Reilly followed from Fox News in April 2017. The New York Times published its exposé on Weinstein in October 2017. Famous actresses and household names accused a powerful Hollywood director of sexual assault, and the silence was shattered. Survivors, women and men, spoke out with allegations — about Matt Lauer, about Kevin Spacey, about Roy Moore, about Al Franken.

Still, for all of the concerns that the movement denies men “due process,” most of the #MeToo claims of harassment have been litigated in the media — not in court.

But what unfolded during Cosby’s trial is hard to separate from the national debate happening outside it. During jury deliberations, the first question asked of the judge was the legal definition of consent.

The judge said he could not answer it, and that the jurors already had the legal definition of the crime.

That left the jury to decide its definition, and it felt like a microcosm of how the country has grappled with allegations that poured out during #MeToo.

Ultimately, the jury found Constand could not, or did not, give consent to Cosby. The guilty verdict is a hopeful sign for sexual assault survivors — and a warning for those that perpetrate it — that the broader social reckoning is translating to the criminal justice system

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Beyonce's electrifying performance steamed up the stage and screens sitting on a chair in a barely-there leotard to open the show with the highly anticipated new hit song "Drunk In Love".

But you could hear the room buzz - and social media race to judgment - when she got off the char and revealed only a thong was restraining  the legendary highly sexy and skin showing diva.

Some speculations were that she suffered a major wardrobe malfunction during the electric performance, but a spokesman took to the social networking site Twitter to clarify that the nipples were part of the design of the super sexy outfit.

When her husband Jay-Z joined her on the stage, the crowd swelled in approval as they indulged in a spot of dirty dancing.

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