Bill Cosby Charged for 2004 Sexual Assault

Bill Cosby (Photo: Getty Images)

A bad year for Bill Cosby is only getting worse: Wednesday morning, a Pennsylvania district attorney announced that Bill Cosby will face charges of aggravated indecent assault for the alleged January 2004 sexual assault of former Temple University employee Andrea Constand. The charge is a first-degree felony.

Constand is just one of several dozen women who’ve accused Cosby, 78, of drugging and then sexually assaulting them throughout the decades. Most of the alleged attacks, however, are outside the statute of limitations and criminal charges cannot be filed. The one comes in just under the wire. With a 12-year statute of limitations, the opportunity to file charges for Constand’s alleged assault, which happened in January 2004, ends next month.

This is the first criminal charge against the former America’s Dad in the recent swarm of allegations.

In a news conference Wednesday morning, Montgomery County, Penn., District Attorney-elect Kevin Steele announced plans to file charges against Cosby for the 2004 assault. People reports that an arrest warrant has already been issued for the once beloved comedian; he’ll be arraigned this afternoon. Aggravated indecent assault carries a possible sentence of five to 10 years behind bars and a fine of up to $25,000.

“Reopening this case was not a question,” Steele said.

While Steele did not mention Cosby’s victim by name, he did say that the two were acquainted through her job with Temple University’s women’s basketball program. Constand was, in 2004, the team’s director of operations.

Andrea Constand (Photo: AP Photo)

Cosby has long been affiliated with Temple. Earlier this year, he resigned from the university’s Board of Trustees after more than 50 women came out to accuse him of sexual assaults with similar M.O.s.

Constand first contacted police about her assault in 2005 but the DA declined to file charges at the time. She then filed a civil suit, which was settled in 2006.

In her civil suit, Constand, now 42, alleged Cosby gave her “herbal pills” at his home in Cheltenham, Penn., and then “touched her breasts and vaginal area, rubbed his penis against her hand, and digitally penetrated her.”

Steele echoed those claims Wednesday, saying Constand was “frozen, paralyzed, unable to move” after she was given pills and wine by Cosby.

In July, the New York Times obtained a copy of the deposition that Cosby gave as a part of Constand’s civil suit: “I think I’m a pretty decent reader of people and their emotions in these romantic sexual things, whatever you want to call them,” he said. Constand has combated that claim saying that she is a lesbian, and if he were a good “reader of people” he’d have known she wasn’t sexually interested in him.

The issue of Cosby’s prosecution actually came up in the recent election in which Steele defeated Bruce L. Castor, Jr., who was DA in 2005 when Constand reported the alleged crime. The two both released TV ads sniping at each other’s treatment of the case: “I go after sexual predators,” Steele said at the time.