The U.S. Supreme Court announced Monday that it will not review Bill Cosby’s sexual assault case, letting the former comedian go free and ending a two-decade legal drama that changed the cultural landscape, destroyed the groundbreaking black actor’s reputation and sent to prison when he was close to his 80th birthday.
The high court, whose nine members include two men accused of sexual misconduct, refused to review a stunning Pennsylvania decision that released Cosby from prison in June on the word of a former prosecutor who said he had made a secret promise to Cosby’s lawyers that he could never be charged.
A Cosby spokesman expressed “sincere gratitude to the judges” for the ruling on behalf of Cosby and his family, saying he was the victim of “reprehensible deception” by the prosecutor and trial judge in the case.
“This is truly a victory for Mr. Cosby, but it shows that cheating will never get you far in life, and the corruption within the Montgomery County District Attorney’s office has been brought center stage on the world stage,” he said. spokesman Andrew Wyatt.
Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele’s office in suburban Philadelphia had no immediate comment. The accuser Andrea Constand was to issue a statement later in the day.
Steele has said there is no evidence that Cosby had a legally binding agreement that he could never be prosecuted.
His predecessor, Bruce L. Castor Jr., never put it in writing or told anyone in his office. He never mentioned it publicly until new evidence emerged and the case was reopened a decade later.
“A secret deal that allows a wealthy defendant to buy his way out of a criminal case is not right,” Steele argued in court in 2016 as he pushed to send the case to trial.
Montgomery County Judge Steven O’Neill found Castor’s testimony on that point not credible and sent the case to trial. However, the state Supreme Court later ruled that, whether or not the purported agreement was legally binding, Cosby relied on it when he gave attention-grabbing and potentially incriminating testimony in a lawsuit later filed by Constand.
“The fundamental principle of fairness that underpins due process of law in our criminal justice system demands that the promise be kept,” Judge David N. Wecht wrote last year.
During deposition, a seemingly unconcerned Cosby gave lengthy and thoughtful answers to questions from Constand’s attorneys. He detailed his sexual relationship with a series of young women, some of them teenagers, over the years. And he recalled giving several of them, including Constand, alcohol or pills while he was sober.
“I don’t hear her say anything. And I don’t feel like saying anything. And so I continue and enter the area that is between permission and rejection. Nobody stops me,” Cosby said in the 2006 deposition describing a sexual encounter that occurred after he gave her three stress pills, which Constand said rendered her unconscious.
He was arrested on December 30, 2015, just days before the 12-year case expired. Steele had reopened it after The Associated Press went to federal court to seek publication of Cosby’s testimony in the Constand lawsuit that had been sealed for years.
Cosby, after testifying for four days, paid the plaintiff $3.4 million to settle the case.
He went to trial in the criminal case outside Philadelphia in June 2017. The jury was unable to reach a verdict. Less than a year later, after media reports about the sexual abuse of women by movie mogul Harvey Weinstein sparked the #MeToo movement, a second jury convicted Cosby of drugging and sexually abusing Constand.
The AP does not usually identify people who say they are victims of sexual abuse unless they authorize it, as has been the case with Constand.