Montgomery County prosecutors lash out at comedy icon Bill Cosby calling him a 'serial predator'
On Tuesday, prosecutors from Montgomery County lashed out at Bill Cosby while making their final pitch to jurors. They branded Cosby as a serial sexual predator who used his reputation as "America's Dad" to lure young women into uncomfortable situations.
“He is nothing like the image he plays on TV,” Assistant District Attorney Kristen Feden said while addressing the panel of seven men and five women hearing the case. “He utilized that image and cloaked it around himself, so he could gain the trust of young, unsuspecting women to sexually assault them and strip their ability to say no.”
Cosby and his lawyers had earlier attempted to discredit the case's central accuser, Andrea Constand, as a grifter and a "con artist", to which Feden and her co-counsel M Stewart Ryan responded rather explosively, reported Los Angeles Times.
They described efforts by Cosby's lawyers as "utterly shameful" and "filthy" while accusing them of attempting to denigrate the five other women who testified against the veteran entertainer in court.
Pointing at defense lawyer Kathleen Bliss, Feden said, "She’s the exact reason that women and victims of sexual assault don’t report this crime." Bliss had dismissed each of the plaintiffs one-by-one in her closing argument hours as gold diggers, "failed starlets, or promiscuous liars. “How dare she call these women moral-less?" Feden remarked.
When Feden found the iconic comedian smiling just a few feet from where she was standing, she was outraged.
“There’s nothing funny about that, Mr. Cosby,” she said. “And there’s nothing funny about five different women plus Ms. Constand being incapacitated, stripped of their autonomy, and being unable to say, ‘I don’t want to engage in sexual contact.’ There’s nothing funny about ‘No.’ ”
Bliss and her co-counsel Tom Mesereau had compared Cosby's legal problems to a "lynching" earlier in the day and wholly dismissed the #MeToo movement which has hovered over the proceedings throughout, reported Philly.com.
“Questioning an accuser is not shaming a victim. Gut feelings are not rational decisions. Mob rule is not due process,” Bliss said. “When you join a movement based primarily on emotion and anger, you don’t change a damn thing.”
Cosby's defense argued that Constand had made up her story for the $3.4 million settlement she would receive in a suit she later filed against him, rejecting the alleged victim's account of being drugged and assaulted at the entertainer's Cheltenham home back in 2004. Calling her a "pathological liar", they brought forth several inconsistencies in her testimonies to the police over the last 13 years.
“I call it one of the biggest highway robberies of all times,” Mesereau said. “Bill Cosby got conned, big time.”
Standing before the panel, Bliss asserted that there was a huge difference between "victim shaming" and the type of scrutiny her team applied to the accusers throughout the trial. After that, she went on to tear apart their characters, called them names, and concluded that each had compiled false accusations in a conspiracy to bring down a legend.
Bliss took the case of Heidi Thomas, one of Cosby's accusers who is a former aspiring actress and claims that he drugged and attacked her in Reno, Nevada, back in 1984. She said: “She wanted to be a star. She’s living the dream now.”
Bliss's next target was Janice Baker-Kinney, who had testified that she made a "stupid mistake of taking party drugs from Cosby", who was married back then, before she was allegedly attacked.
"Where is her morality? Where are her values? Where is a little personal responsibility?” Bliss asked.
And then it was Janice Dickinson's turn. Bliss did not hold back when it came to the former supermodel who accused Cosby of raping her in a Lake Tahoe hotel room in 1982.
“It sounds as if she slept with almost every single man on the planet,” the lawyer said. “Is Ms. Dickinson really the moral beacon the women’s movement wants?”
Ryan, the prosecutor, feebly responded to Bliss' remarks in his speech.“I can only hope … that what we are seeing are the last vestiges of a tactic designed not to get to the truth but to damage character and reputation.”
After the lawyers were done with their speeches, O'Neill said that he would instruct jurors on the law come Wednesday morning allowing them to commence their discussions pertaining to the case.
Back in June when Cosby's first trial took place, the jurors took over a week to discuss the case and were unable to reach a consensus, forcing the presiding judge to declare a mistrial.
Bill Cosby has been charged with three counts of aggravated indecent assault and could face up to 30 years in prison.