#MeToo: Bill Cosby Has being Convicted On Three Counts of Aggravated Indecent Assault

A jury outside Philadelphia just convicted Bill Cosby of three counts of aggravated indecent assault on after deliberating for 14 hours. This is the first big celebrity trial in the #MeToo era. 

The Associated Press

For many of the women who came forward to allege sexual assault against Cosby in past few years, the statute

of limitations had passed, and they weren't able to bring any charges. Andrea Constand, however, met Cosby in 2002 while she worked at Temple University, and she said he assaulted her in 2004 in his Philadelphia-area home, so her case still fell within time limit. In her testimony, she described the experience. She said he gave her three blue pills that he said would help relieve her stress, and they made her pass out. 

“I felt Mr. Cosby on the couch behind me, and my vagina was being penetrated quite forcefully, and I felt my breasts being touched,” Constand testified. “I wanted it to stop. I couldn’t say anything. I was trying to get my hands to move, my legs to move, and the message just wasn’t getting there.”

Cosby's lawyer called Constand a "con artist" who leveled false accusations against Cosby so she could sue him, and they tried to sell the trial as a "witch hunt." For their part, prosecutors used Cosby's past admissions about drugs and sex as well as the testimony of five other women to help bolster accuser Andrea Constand's allegations.

Cosby could get up to 10 years in prison on each of the counts, and this verdict comes less than a year after Cosby was originally tried. The jury deadlocked at the time, and it was declared a mistrial.

Dozens of women have come forward in recent years to say Cosby drugged and assaulted them. In the first trial, only two women were allowed to testify, but this time, the judge allowed five women to come forward to share their experiences. Even though Cosby was only on trial for his actions against Constand, the women were supposed to serve as examples of past poor behavior. 

“For 30 years I really didn’t think about it,” one Cosby accuser, Janice Baker-Kinney, testified at the trial. “I didn’t want to think about it. And I will tell you that when women started coming forward and my husband — my current husband — started seeing articles in the paper about it, he kept pointing them out to me. And what I said was, ‘I don’t want to read them. I don’t want to hear about those.’ I ... don’t know how to sum it up.”

This is the only criminal case to arise from allegations from more than 60 women.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.