The case sets the stage for perhaps the biggest Hollywood celebrity trial of the mobile-all-the-time era and could send the 78-year-old Cosby to prison in the twilight of his life and barrier-breaking career.
Cosby was charged with aggravated indecent assault and was to be arraigned in the afternoon.
Prosecutors accused him of rendering former Temple University employee Andrea Constand unable to resist by plying her with pills and wine, then penetrating her digitally without her consent, when she was unconscious or unaware of what was happening.
She was “frozen, paralyzed, unable to move,” Montgomery County District Attorney-elect Kevin Steele said in announcing the charges.
Cosby acknowledged under oath a decade ago that he had sexual contact with Constand but said it was consensual.
The charges came down just days before the 12-year statute of limitations for bringing charges was set to run out.
The case represents an about-face by the district attorney’s office, which declined to charge Cosby in 2005 when Constand first told police that the comic violated her by putting his hands down her pants at his mansion in suburban Philadelphia.
Prosecutors reopened the case over the summer as damaging testimony was unsealed in Constand’s related civil lawsuit against 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.”
At that point, “reopening this case was not a question. Rather, reopening this case was our duty as law enforcement officers,” Steel said. He urged any other alleged victims to come forward as well.
Constand, who is now 42 and works as a massage therapist in her native Canada, is ready to face Cosby in court, her attorney, Dolores Troiani, said this fall.
“She’s a very strong lady,” Troiani said. “She’ll do whatever they request of her.”
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. But as for criminal chargers, many of the alleged assaults date back decades, and the statute of limitations has expired in nearly every case.
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, serving as a public moralist and public scold, urging young people to pull up their saggy pants and start acting responsibly.