Norristown: Time and again during Bill Cosby’s second trial, his lawyers launched blistering attacks on the six women who told a Pennsylvania jury that he had sexually abused them, questioning their motives and assailing their characters in stark terms.
Lead attorney Tom Mesereau called Andrea Constand, the victim, a “con artist” and “pathological liar” and grilled another woman on her past drug use. His colleague Kathleen Bliss described former supermodel Janice Dickinson, who was a witness for the prosecution and testified that Cosby had sexually assaulted her, as a “failed starlet” who sounded like she had “slept with every man on the planet”.
Confronted with an avalanche of damning evidence, defence lawyers may have felt they had no choice but to be hyper-aggressive.
But the tactic, not uncommon in cases involving sex crimes, appeared out of sync with the #MeToo movement and a national shift in sentiment toward victims since Cosby’s first trial ended with a hung jury last year.
The withering tone and inflammatory words of the defence may have backfired with the jury of seven men and five women, which voted unanimously on Thursday to convict Cosby, 80, of drugging and sexually assaulting Constand at his home in 2004.
“I understand people doing vigorous cross-examination, but calling people names and trying to characterise them in the most negative light struck me as a bridge too far. And I wonder if there was a boomerang effect in the minds of the jury,” said Valerie Hans, a law professor at Cornell University who studies the jury system.
Cosby, who built a family-friendly image playing the lovable father in the TV comedy The Cosby Show, has been accused by more than 50 women of sexual assault, though all the allegations but Constand’s are thought too old to support criminal charges.
He has denied any wrongdoing, saying any sexual encounters were consensual