The Cosby Appeal Battle Begins Uphill

The appeal process for Bill Cosby has begun with strong resistance from the panel of Pennsylvania Superior Court judges. Because people are completely entranced by the “believe women” narrative, including high court judges, the Pandora’s box of being pronounced guilty by mere volume of fingers pointed is now here in full effect. Perhaps because the defense’s strategy was primarily to overturn the conviction on technicalities, noticeably missing from the appeal hearing was any challenge to the judge’s referring to the testimonies of all the accusers as fact when none of the testimonies were strong, consistent or proven. This is an extremely bad precedent that went uncontested.

Cosby’s defense team presented the arguments that Cosby’s agreement with former DA Bruce Castor to never be criminally prosecuted should have been honored, and also that the lower court’s decision to allow 5 additional women to testify against Cosby along with Andrea Constand was prejudicial and should not have been allowed. However, the Pennsylvania Superior Court’s stance of considering the “prior bad acts” as legitimate and admissible is a big problem—because they weren’t. The prosecution used the testimony of these additional women to manifest a pattern of Cosby drugging and sexually assaulting women, but this should not have been allowed because the testimonies were inconsistent, bereft of any evidence and never proven in any court.

The judges, prosecution and not even Cosby’s defense team brought up the fact that none of the prior bad act witnesses were proved in court with convictions. Bill Cosby was not given due process on any of those allegations. Instead, a lucrative backdoor had been opened and an opportunity for women from all over to come forward with the claim Bill Cosby sexually assaulted them was created with pre-packaged benefit of the doubt. The testimonies could be deemed hearsay from women provably working together, many of them recruited and coached by Gloria Allred. Some of these same women still working in concert are currently being awarded money from Cosby’s insurer AIG.

Why the “Prior Bad Acts” are Bad

The desire to believe women in today’s #metoo environment is understandable. However, the law and presumption of innocence should not be abandoned to the extent that we now equate decades old inconsistent allegations as facts we use to convict people, or sustain convictions.

In truth, the testimonies of these prior bad act witnesses were rife with holes, inconsistencies and contradictions that were never addressed by either side. Any reasonable review of the testimonies would show that they were negative. No proof was produced by any of the women. Dates and times were wrong, not remembered or proved impossible. There were no toxicology reports submitted or any known drugs that matched the description of what some of the women alleged. For example, Andrea Constand claimed to be awake but just out of it and unable to resist, and that the pills she took voluntarily were blue. What drug was that? Without even having to discuss what drugs were given, the prosecution is just insisting he drugged women. Janice Dickinson was exposed for giving multiple completely different accounts as to what happened. She simply gave a new explanation to cover for her previous assertions. Under cross-examination from Tom Mesereau it was revealed on the stand in the 2^nd trial that accuser Janice Baker-Kinney was never given drugs by Bill Cosby which was her initial claim. She eventually admitted that Cosby did not give her drugs like she previously claimed and that she had taken Quaaludes on her own with a friend the night she seemingly voluntarily slept with Cosby. However, Cosby allegedly giving her drugs, or “drugging” her, was the very reason she was one of the women selected to prove a pattern of Cosby doing the same thing to other women. Again, the drug part wasn’t true according to her own testimony. So basically, Judge Steven O’Neill allowed for Cosby to be dogpiled by the testimonies of accusers who would never win their cases individually because they would have all fallen apart. There was enough evidence, or lack of it, for the defense to prove at least some of the women picked to testify were not telling the truth or sharing accounts that would ever be criminally charged as sexual assault.

During Cosby’s appeal proceeding, the three-judge panel of the Pennsylvania Superior Court were all speaking as though these prior bad act testimonies were gospel. One of Cosby’s defense lawyers, Kristen Weisenberger, avoided attacking the credibility of the testimonies, but instead argued that the additional women should not have been allowed because their allegations were all very different and therefore showed no pattern. Repeatedly interrupting her, Judge John T. Bender powerfully snapped, “He gives them drugs, then he has sex with them, that’s the pattern, is it not?” It appears that even the high court judges are just “believing women”, and not evidence.

Weisenberger did attempt to argue that one of the accusers didn’t even report that a sexual assault took place. However, Assistant District Attorney Adrienne Jappe and each of the judges powerfully shot that down insisting that this was because Cosby drugged her and that was why she didn’t remember being assaulted. That was not true. Her story was another allegation that kept morphing and evolving, and the early versions were that no assault took place. The court is literally assuming and asserting she must have been assaulted.

In today’s climate it is very easy for well-intentioned people and entities to believe they are helping women, while not realizing they are instead annihilating constitutional protections and making fair trials virtually impossible.

It seems everyone from the media to the judges is very careful to handle the accusers with kid gloves and never scrutinize the allegations too deeply, even when they are painfully inconsistent. So what is the point of even having a trial then? In the guise of some sort of progression, in truth we have regressed decades from “innocent until proven guilty” to “guilty until somehow miraculously proven innocent”.

There is a lot of anti-Cosby “believe the women” energy that is currently obliterating logic, reason and Constitutional rights. Judging from the statements made from the judges and even the questions from some journalists, it’s safe to assume that most of the people in the court room are resigned to the belief in Cosby’s guilt, but very few seemed well versed in or respectful of the actual facts of the case, or the specific details to the allegations against him.

There is almost no defense against this sort of dangerous made-up-mind group-think.  From the first trial to present day, Cosby’s presumed guilt was never taken off the table as a given, and that’s not what courts are supposed to do. Primarily because of the number of accusers paraded through the media, the allegations were always just assumed true, even ones that conspicuously didn’t add up. Consequently, Cosby was very clearly not given a fair trial. And as the Appellate court judges hammered away at Cosby’s floundering defense, it now seems as though the matter is very much mired deep into the politics, red-tape, cronyism and corruption of the American justice system.