PENNSYLVANIA
The Guardian (UK)
Ed Pilkington in Norristown, Pennsylvania @edpilkington
Bill Cosby paid $3.4m to buy the silence of a young woman he had previously drugged and then sexually assaulted, a prosecutor alleged on Monday as the comedian’s retrial got underway in Pennsylvania in the first major courtroom drama of the #MeToo era.
Kevin Steele, the district attorney for Cosby’s home county of Montgomery, revealed a secret that has remained hidden for the past 12 years – the amount of money that the TV star formerly known as “America’s Dad” was prepared to pay to keep his detractor quiet. The $3.4m was allegedly paid in 2006 to Andrea Constand, a Canadian massage therapist, to bring to a close a civil suit she had brought against him claiming he had persuaded her to take relaxant drugs before molesting her while she was unconscious.
The disclosure of the settlement amount came in Steele’s opening statement to the jury in Montgomery county court of common please in Norristown, a small, run-down Pennsylvania community struggling from industrial decline. For the second time in 10 months the town has become inundated with media and protesters drawn to the trial of one of America’s most famous – and once beloved – comedians.
Before the trial proper began, the courthouse was momentarily engulfed in drama of another sort: a black woman protester who ran towards the entrance of the building topless, with “Women’s Lives Matter” scrawled in red paint across her chest. Nicolle Rochelle, 39, had appeared on The Cosby Show in several episodes when she was a teenager, but now was streaking in solidarity, she said, with the star’s victims.
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