Cosby lawyers paint accuser as con artist in final appeal to jury

NORRISTOWN, Pa. >> Lawyers for Bill Cosby fiercely attacked the credibility of his accuser, Andrea Constand, during two hours of closing arguments in his sexual assault retrial here today. They appealed to jurors to ignore the social changes occurring outside the courtroom so they could focus on the single case before them.

Kathleen Bliss, one of Cosby’s lawyers, said predatory sexual behavior was a real social problem, comparing it to other issues like income inequality. But she added that the Cosby trial — the first high-profile sexual assault trial of the #MeToo era — was not the forum for addressing it.

“Yes, we do have to deal with sexual assault,” she said. “It’s a worldwide problem. Just like we have to deal with pay disparity and just like we have to deal with income inequality. But questioning an accuser is not shaming a victim. Mob rule is not due process.”

Cosby’s lead attorney, Thomas Mesereau, described Cosby as a victim of an arch manipulator, a pathological liar who wanted his money.

“Mr. Cosby must walk out of here free,” he said. “He made some mistakes for sure, but he is not a criminal.”

Before the jury was expected to begin deliberation later today, the defense portrayed Constand as someone with financial problems who pursued Cosby relentlessly. She barraged him with gifts and phone calls and visited his home and hotel room, his lawyers said. She turned what they described as a romantic, consensual affair into a lucrative payday with a false accusation that now threatened Cosby, once a beloved entertainer, with “absolute ruin.”

Cosby paid Constand $3.38 million in 2006 to settle a civil suit she filed years ago after prosecutors initially declined to bring charges.

“The question is, ‘Who is pursuing who?’” Mesereau asked the jurors.

“This woman will say anything she wants to say,” he said “The truth means nothing.”

The defense team’s arguments had already been forcefully challenged by the prosecution, which was to present its starkly different version of events when it took the floor for closing arguments later Tuesday.

Prosecutors say Cosby, now 80, befriended Constand, won her trust and plied her with gifts before finally drugging and sexually abusing her at his home near Philadelphia in 2004, when she was an employee of Temple University, his alma mater.

Cosby’s wife of more than 50 years, Camille, who had not been in court for the first two weeks of the retrial, joined him in the court for the defense statements.

Before the jurors were seated for the closing arguments, she embraced her husband who stood up to greet her at the defense table and they kissed briefly.

Cosby’s first trial, also at the Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas, ended last summer with a hung jury.

The defense says Constand made multiple false and inconsistent claims. The lawyers pointed out, for example, that Constand had at one point told police she had never been alone with Cosby before the night she said was assaulted. But then, in another statement to police, she admitted she had.

“They are not inconsistencies,” Mesereau said, “they are lies.”

In one attack on Constand’s character, the defense contended that she had once been involved in a pyramid scheme designed to solicit money from others. Constand testified that she knew nothing about the scheme and had simply sent one email using language provided by her friends.

In another strike, the team said she had continued to call Cosby after the night when she says she was sexually assaulted. “Look at all these calls after she has been assaulted,” Mesereau said.

Constand said that many of the calls were Temple-related and that she had only been returning calls to Cosby, an alumnus of significant standing.

The defense team put the task before jurors this way: They had to decide whether to believe Constand or its star witness, Marguerite Jackson, a veteran academic adviser at Temple University. Jackson testified that Constand had once confided she could make money by falsely claiming that she had been molested by a prominent person.

“Who are you going to believe — a well-educated master’s degree woman who works at Temple, who counsels students?” Bliss said, referring to Jackson. “Or a woman who is briefly at Temple running a pyramid scheme?” Bliss added, alluding to Constand.

Constand’s testimony, though, was bolstered by accounts of five other women, who told the jury they too believed they had been drugged and sexually assaulted by Cosby. The defense lawyers attacked the accounts and characters of the five in separate incidents.

Bliss said the women’s claims were about “money, press conferences, TV shows, salacious coverage, ratings, sex sells.” But this had nothing to do with real sexual assault, she said.

The defense lawyers spent a good deal of time arguing that Cosby should never have been charged because the 12-year statute of limitations had already expired, they said, before he was charged in December 2015. To further this argument Mesereau went through Cosby’s calendar for January 2004 to convince jurors that his client could not have been at his home outside Philadelphia during that month, when Constand says the assault occurred.

Prosecutors say the records are inconclusive because they do not cover the entire month. Cosby has also acknowledged as part of the Constand civil case that the encounter happened in 2004.