NORRISTOWN, Pa. (AP) — Entertainer Bill Cosby was charged Wednesday with sexually assaulting a woman at his home 12 years ago — the first criminal charges brought against the comedian out of the torrent of allegations that destroyed his good-guy image as America’s Dad.
The case sets the stage for perhaps the biggest Hollywood celebrity trial of the mobile-all-the-time era and could send Mr. Cosby, 78, to prison in the twilight of his life and barrier-breaking career.
In bringing the case, Montgomery County District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman overruled her predecessor, who declined to charge Mr. Cosby in 2005 when Temple University employee Andrea Constand first told police that the comic drugged her and violated her by putting his hands down her pants at his mansion in suburban Philadelphia.
Mr. Cosby was charged with aggravated indecent assault and was to be arraigned in the afternoon.
The TV star acknowledged under oath a decade ago that he had sexual contact with Ms. Constand, but said it was consensual.
The charges were announced just days before the 12-year statute of limitations for bringing charges was set to run out.
Prosecutors reopened the case over the summer as damaging testimony was unsealed in Ms. Constand’s related civil lawsuit against Mr. Cosby, and as dozens of other women came forward with similar accusations that made a mockery of his image as the wise and understanding Dr. Cliff Huxtable from TV’s “The Cosby Show.”
Most of those alleged assaults date back decades, and the statute of limitations for bringing charges has expired in nearly every case.
Ms. Constand, who is now 42 and works as a massage therapist in her native Canada, is ready to face Mr. Cosby in court, her attorney, Dolores Troiani, said this fall.
“She’s a very strong lady,” Ms. Troiani said. “She’ll do whatever they request of her.”
Ms. Constand’s lawyer has also said Ms. Constand is gay, and was dating a woman around the time she met Mr. Cosby in the early 2000s.
The charges add to the towering list of legal problems facing the actor, including defamation and sex-abuse lawsuits filed in Boston, Los Angeles and Pennsylvania.
Mr. Cosby in 1965 became the first black actor to land a leading role in a network drama, “I Spy,” and he went on to earn three straight Emmys.
Over the next three decades, the Philadelphia-born comic created TV’s animated “Fat Albert” and the top-rated “Cosby Show,” the 1980s sitcom celebrated as groundbreaking television for its depiction of a warm and loving family headed by two black professionals — one a lawyer, the other a doctor.
He was a fatherly figure off camera as well, taking stands against cultural degradation and urging young men to pull up their saggy pants and act responsibly.
Ms. Constand, who worked for the women’s basketball team at Temple, where Mr. Cosby was a trustee and alumnus, said she was assaulted after going to his home in January 2004 for some career advice.
Then-District Attorney Bruce Castor declined to charge Mr. Cosby, saying at the time that both the TV star and his accuser could be portrayed in “a less than flattering light.”
This year, Mr. Castor said the allegations Ms. Constand is now making in her lawsuit are more serious than the account she gave police. Had she been making those more serious claims at that time, “we might have been able to make a case,” he said.
After the criminal case went nowhere, Ms. Constand settled her lawsuit against Mr. Cosby in 2006 on confidential terms.
Her allegations and similar ones from other women in the years that followed did not receive wide attention.
But it all exploded into view in late 2014, first online, then in the wider media, after comedian Hannibal Buress mocked Mr. Cosby as a hypocrite and called him a rapist during a stand-up routine. That opened the floodgates of allegations.
Women, mostly from the world of modeling, acting or other entertainment fields, came forward. Many described being offered a drink by Mr. Cosby. Some said they woke up to find they had apparently been sexually assaulted. Others had no memory of what, if anything, happened.
Mr. Cosby, through his representatives, accused several of the women of trying to extract money from the wealthy entertainer or use him to get ahead in show business. He also maintained that these encounters were consensual and many women sought him out.
Earlier this year, The Associated Press persuaded a judge to unseal documents from the Constand lawsuit, and they showed the long-married Cosby acknowledging a string of affairs and sexual encounters.
Mr. Cosby testified that he obtained quaaludes, a sedative that was widely used by people in the 1970s, to give to women he wanted to have sex with.
He denied giving women pills without their knowledge, and said he had used the now-banned sedative “the same as a person would say, ’Have a drink.’”
In the deposition, Mr. Cosby said he put his hands down Ms. Constand’s pants that night and fondled her, taking her silence as a green light.
Ms. Constand maintains she was semi-conscious after he gave her pills he said would relax her.
“I don’t hear her say anything. And I don’t feel her say anything. And so I continue and I go into the area that is somewhere between permission and rejection. I am not stopped,” Mr. Cosby testified.
He said Ms. Constand was not upset when she left that night.
She went to police a year later.
The AP generally does not identify people who say they have been sexually assaulted unless they agree to have their names published, as Ms. Constand has done.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.