27 September 2018 - Bill Cosby Sentenced to 3 to 10 Years in Prison
Bill Cosby sentenced to three to 10 years in prison for sexual assault
Erin Durkin (The Guardian, 25/09/2018)
Bill Cosby has been sentenced to between three and 10 years in prison for drugging and sexually assaulting a woman over a decade ago, becoming the first celebrity of the #MeToo era to be jailed for his crimes.
“It is time for justice,” said Judge Steven O’Neill, who handed down the sentence on Tuesday at the Montgomery county courthouse in Norristown, Pennsylvania.
Cosby was found guilty earlier this year of drugging and molesting Andrea Constand at his suburban Philadelphia estate in 2004. The sentence caps a precipitous downfall for an actor once known as “America’s Dad,” who starred in the popular Cosby Show in the 1980s and 90s.
These Cosby Accusers Were Barred From Sharing Statements. They Read Them Anyway.
Alanna Vagianos (The Huffington Post, 26/09/2018)
The judge who sentenced Bill Cosby to prison for sexual assault rejected a prosecution request to allow additional accusers to speak at this week’s sentencing hearing. But that didn’t stop some from telling their stories anyway.
“I’ve waited 32 years for this day hoping my nightmare would go away,” Chelan Lashan, who accused Cosby of sexually assaulting her in 1986, defiantly told a small group of reporters and advocates after the comedian was led away in handcuffs on Tuesday.
Cosby, 81, was sentenced by Montgomery County Common Pleas Judge Steven O’Neill to three to 10 years in state prison for the 2004 sexual assault of Andrea Constand.
The Feigned Victimhood of Bill Cosby, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas
Jelani Bob (The New Yorker, 26/09/2018)
Just after William Henry Cosby, the comedian, actor, philanthropist, and, as of this year, convicted felon and sex offender, was led away from a courthouse in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday, his spokesman, Andrew Wyatt, denounced the proceedings as “the most racist and sexist trial in the history of the country.” That’s a high bar for a country that has witnessed the Scottsboro trial; the 1955 trial that exonerated the men who killed Emmett Till, another martyr figure whom Cosby’s supporters have compared him to; and the trial of the Central Park Five. Fourteen years have elapsed since the night when Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted Andrea Constand. His conviction required the election of a new Pennsylvania prosecutor, the voiding of an agreement with the previous prosecutor, two trials—the first ended in a hung jury—and, contextually, similar allegations from nearly seventy other women. The scales of justice may be tipped, but at every step of these developments they were leaning in Cosby’s favor.
The spectacle of Cosby in handcuffs is wildly, irreconcilably dissonant to anyone who witnessed him at the height of his career and influence, in the eighties. But it is even more jarring in the context of late-stage Cosby, the moral scold, the comedian turned societal heckler who launched that career by literally defending the police shooting of presumably unarmed black men. In a 2004 screed that came to be known as the “pound cake” speech, he said,
People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake! Then we all run out and are outraged: “The cops shouldn’t have shot him.” What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand? I wanted a piece of pound cake just as bad as anybody else. And I looked at it and I had no money. And something called parenting said, “If you get caught with it, you’re going to embarrass your mother.” Not “You’re going to get your butt kicked.” No. “You’re going to embarrass your mother.”
Dem strategist: It shouldn’t take a flood of women coming forward for survivors to be 'believed and heard'
Tess Bonn (The Hill, 27/09/2018)
Democratic strategist Juanita Tolliver says it shouldn’t take a flood of women coming forward as sexual assault survivors for their allegations to be heard and be taken seriously.
“Every survivor who has the bravery and courage to step forward and heard should be believed and heard,” Tolliver, a campaigns director at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, told Hill.TV's Buck Sexton and Krystal Ball on “Rising.”
The strategist said she found this to be particularly disappointing in Bill Cosby’s case. The comedian was sentenced Tuesday to three to 10 years in prison after he was found guilty of drugging and assaulting athletics administrator Andrea Constand at his home in 2004.