Bill Cosby to Face Trial on June 5

Bill Cosby, once one of the most beloved figures in American entertainment and a towering symbol of Black success and respectability, was scheduled to stand trial on sexual assault charges — the culmination of a legal process that had stripped away his public legacy and resulted in more than 60 women coming forward with allegations of sexual misconduct spanning decades.

The criminal case in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, centered on an incident involving Andrea Constand, a former Temple University employee who alleged that Cosby had drugged and sexually assaulted her at his home in 2004. The charge was aggravated indecent assault.

Cosby's path to trial had been long and legally complex. A prior civil settlement with Constand had been kept largely confidential, and a previous district attorney had decided not to prosecute based on a reported promise of non-prosecution. A new district attorney's office revisited the case after Cosby's deposition in the civil suit — in which he admitted obtaining quaaludes with the intent of giving them to women he wanted to have sex with — became public as part of legal proceedings.

The case stood against a backdrop of the broader #MeToo reckoning that had swept through Hollywood, media, and other industries, bringing long-standing patterns of sexual misconduct to public account. Cosby's case was in many ways a forerunner of that reckoning — the scale of allegations against him, and the gap between his public image and private conduct, made him one of the defining figures of the cultural moment.

His first trial ended in a hung jury. The second resulted in conviction on three counts of aggravated indecent assault. He was sentenced to three to ten years in state prison, though that conviction was later overturned on procedural grounds related to the non-prosecution agreement.