After the Pennsylvania Supreme Court annulled his conviction and ordered his immediate freedom, Bill Cosby is being released from prison.
What happened was this: In 2015, Cosby, 83, was charged with drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand, a Canadian ex-professional basketball player, at his house in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania in 2004. Cosby’s first trial ended in a mistrial in 2017, but he was retried and sentenced to ten years in state prison in 2018.
The state’s high court found that two factors necessitated the voiding of his conviction and release from jail when it announced the decision to dismiss his conviction and release him from prison:
Cosby and the former prosecutor in his case had an arrangement that if he testified in a civil deposition, he wouldn’t face criminal charges.
Constand’s case was tainted by the evidence of five women who had similar tales to Constand’s.
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What It Means: When scores of women publicly accused Cosby of sexual assault, his reputation as a beloved comedian and successful consumer product spokesman was shattered. Following his conviction, Cosby’s Kennedy Center Honors were revoked, and episodes of his sitcom “The Cosby Show” were pulled from television syndication.
Cosby’s demise was widely regarded as a watershed moment in the #MeToo movement, which saw powerful men such as “Today” anchor Matt Lauer and Hollywood boss Harvey Weinstein lose their jobs.
More lately, the movement appears to have lost much of its clout, with Democratic governors Andrew Cuomo of New York and Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax of Virginia both continuing in office despite public claims of sexual assault. Joe Biden’s campaign remained unaffected during the 2020 presidential race after Tara Reade, a former aide in Biden’s U.S. Senate office, said that he sexually assaulted her in a Capitol Hill office in 1993. During the 2016 campaign, Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, was accused of sexual assault by a number of women.
In today’s press briefing, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was questioned about the Bill Cosby issue and answered, “I have yet to receive a reaction from the White House. The president has long been a proponent of ending domestic violence and boosting the voices of survivors.”
Bill Cosby, photographed by the World Affairs Council in 2011 / Flickr Creative Commons is a creative commons license.
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