Sexual Abuse & Domestic Violence

Bill Cosby’s wife says the 80-year-old comedian was the victim of “lynch mobs,” and that her husband’s conviction on sexual assault charges was the result of a “frenzy” advanced by the media and the untrustworthy account of main accuser Andrea Constand.

In the first public statements made by Camille Cosby since a jury found her husband guilty on three counts of aggravated indecent assault last month, she said the case that could send the comedy legend to prison for the rest of his life was “mob justice, not real justice.”

The inflammatory, three-page written statement calls for the district attorney who prosecuted Cosby to be criminally investigated.

Cosby’s wife of more than five decades also equated Cosby’s fate to the death of Emmett Till, the black teen who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after witnesses said they saw him suggestively whistling at a white woman. The killers, meanwhile, were acquitted.

“Once again, an innocent person has been found guilty based on an unthinking, unquestioning, unconstitutional frenzy propagated by the media and allowed to play out in a supposed court of law,” Camille Cosby wrote. “This is mob justice, not real justice. This tragedy must be undone not just for Bill Cosby, but for the country.”

During Cosby’s two trials, Camille has been largely absent. Yet she has fiercely stood by her husband’s side in the face of more than 60 women accusing Cosby of sexual misconduct.

She appeared just once during Cosby’s criminal retrial last month, for the defense team’s closing arguments. She hugged and kissed her husband then sat in the front row of the courtroom, wearing large sunglasses the entire time. She left quietly, just before it was the prosecution’s turn to deliver final remarks to the jury.

Yet on Thursday, Camille Cosby’s blistering statement had a lot to say, unleashing venom in particular at Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele, whose office twice prosecuted Cosby for sexually assaulting Andrea Constand in 2004 at the entertainer’s mansion in Cheltenham, Pa.

“I am publicly asking for a criminal investigation of that district attorney and his cohorts,” she wrote. “This is a homogeneous group of exploitive and corrupt people, whose primary purpose is to advance themselves professionally and economically at the expense of Mr. Cosby’s life. If they can do this to Mr. Cosby, they can do so to anyone.”

A spokeswoman for the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office said prosecutors do not have a response to Camille Cosby’s statement.

But Constand’s attorney, Dolores Troiani, dismissed the statement when contacted for her response.

“Twelve honorable people — a jury of Cosbys peers — have spoken,” Troiani said. “There’s nothing else to say.”

Part of Cosby’s defense in both of his criminal trials was that the encounter between him and his primary accuser Constand was consensual.

Cosby’s lawyers told the jury during his retrial that he was not a criminal, but rather a “lonely and troubled” philanderer.

The statement from Camille Cosby did not respond to her husband’s admitted infidelity nor his insistence that the encounter between he and Constand was just an affair, not a sexual attack after being drugged, as accuser Andrea Constand has long maintained.

Jurors in the case, in their own statement, said earlier this week that they unanimously arrived at a far different conclusion after hearing Constand confront Cosby in court over two days.

“We were asked to assess the credibility of Ms. Constand’s account of what happened to her,” the seven men and five women wrote in a group statement. “And each one of us found her account credible and compelling.”

The judge who oversaw the trial has ordered Bill Cosby to remain on house arrest until his sentencing date. Then, the man once known as “America’s Dad” can face 10 years in prison for each of the three sexual assault charges a jury convicted him of in April.

Copyright 2018 WHYY. To see more, visit WHYY.

Editor’s note: This story contains a graphic description of assault.

A Pennsylvania jury has found Bill Cosby guilty on three counts of aggravated indecent assault, setting the comic legend up for the possibility of years of imprisonment for drugging and sexually violating a woman 14 years ago on a couch in his Cheltenham, Pa. home.

Cosby initially faced sexual assault charges in court last June but jurors could not reach a unanimous decision after 52 hours of deliberation. The judge declared it a mistrial.

This time around, the seven men and five women on the panel sat in the jury box of the Montgomery County Courthouse and listened to more than two weeks of testimony from 25 witnesses. Some cried on the stand recounting how Cosby attacked them while they were in drug-induced stupors, and others attempted to discredit main accuser Andrea Constand by detailing instances of supposed deceit and inconsistencies.

“This case is about trust,” Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele told jurors in his opening remarks. “This case is about betrayal, and that betrayal leading to the sexual assault of a woman named Andrea Constand.”

Constand, the only Cosby accuser whose case has triggered criminal charges, took the stand for the prosecution over two days, as she did during the first trial.

In addition to Constand, five women who have never before confronted Cosby in a criminal courtroom took the witness stand. They told the jury that the entertainer drugged and molested them in the 1980s, stories that first came to light after prosecutors reopened Cosby’s criminal case in 2015. That led more than 60 women to lodge sexual misconduct allegations against the television icon once known as “America’s Dad.”

“You remember, don’t you, Mr. Cosby?” said accuser Chelan Lasha from the stand, locking eyes with Cosby, who has remained largely impassive throughout the trial.

“I want to see a serial rapist convicted,” another accuser, Heidi Thomas, told the court, as spectators gasped at the statement.

Through it all, jurors had a front-row seat to the lawyerly slugfest that pitted three prosecutors from suburban Philadelphia against a throng defense attorneys led by Los Angeles-based Tom Mesereau, who aggressively depicted Constand as a “con artist.”

“You’re going to be saying to yourself in this trial, ‘What does she want from Bill Cosby,'” Mesereau said to jurors during opening statements. “You already know the answer: money, money and lots more money.”

To bolster this argument, the defense called star witness Margo Jackson, who used to work with Constand at Temple University. Jackson was banned from testifying during the first trial, but the judge allowed her in this time. Jackson told jurors that Constand once confided in her that she had a plan to frame a wealthy celebrity with a made-up sexual assault claim “to get that money.”

Prosecutor Kristen Feden seized on the characterization of Constand as a scheming con artist during closing arguments, saying it was Cosby who deployed his wholesome TV image to gain the trust of women he planned to incapacitate and assault.

She strode across the courtroom pointing inches away from Cosby as he sat wide-eyed at the defense table.

“The perpetrator of that con is this man!” she yelled. “Sitting right here. This is the man.”

When Constand took the witness stand, she told the jury that, one night in January 2004, Cosby gave her three blue pills he called “friends” to relax her. Instead, they rendered her defenseless, lapsing in and out of consciousness. Constand told jurors she was “jolted awake” by the feeling of his fingers in her vagina as she lay on a couch in Cosby’s home.

A couple of months later, she told the court, she attempted to confront Cosby about it.

“I wanted to know what pills he gave to me, and why he did that to me,” Constand said. “He stumbled on his words. He said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He said, ‘I thought you had an orgasm,’ and I had not. He would not answer my questions.”

Constand told the court that enduring two publicity-heavy criminal trials “tore my family apart,” yet when asked by prosecutor Kristen Feden why she agreed to take the stand again, Constand replied, “for justice.”

Constand faced withering questions from Mesereau on cross examination, as a part of a multi-pronged defense focused on shaking her credibility and that of the other witnesses. He probed Constand as to why she stayed in touch with Cosby after the incident, portrayed her as a desperate, cash-strapped pyramid scheme participant. Constand was also pressed about the nearly $3.4 million Cosby paid her in a 2006 civil settlement, which was previously confidential.

Cosby’s lawyers also suggested to jurors that the incident could not have happened the way she said it did, even hinting that there is a chance Cosby was not in the Philadelphia area around the time Constand said she was assaulted. The defense did not issue an outright denial of the episode at the heart of the alleged crime. Cosby has admitted that he and Constand had sexual contact in his house around 2004, but which he has long maintained it was consensual.

Legal observers have called the Cosby retrial a major test of the effects of the #MeToo movement, the wave of allegations of sexual assault lodged against prominent media figures that erupted between Cosby’s first and second trials.

During jury selection, the judge asked hundreds of potential jurors whether their feelings about #MeToo would get in the way of being a fair fact-finder in the Cosby case. Almost none said they were unaware of the cultural movement. Prosecutors never mentioned #MeToo to jurors during trial. But the defense team made an unsubtle attack on it when lawyer Kathleen Bliss told the panel that “when you join a movement based mostly on emotion and anger, you don’t change a damn thing,” adding that “mob rule is not due process.” She compared the dozens of accusations against Cosby to a “witch hunt,” and a “lynching.”

Copyright 2018 WHYY. To see more, visit WHYY.

The state’s Legislative Council adopted an updated sexual and other workplace harassment policy. The committee unanimously adopted the policy on Monday.

The new, six-page sexual harassment policy includes a more thorough definition of harassment than the 18-year-old, one-page policy. It also provides more details on how to report harassment. It sets out a timeline for investigations of harassment. And it allows for independent investigations of alleged harassment by legislators.

The council adopted a separate professional workplace conduct policy. It prohibits a variety of behavior. The policy bars legislators or supervisors from having consensual sex with their employees. It bars conduct that creates an “offensive workplace.” It also prohibits disruptive behavior, including “waving hands, arms or fists.”

Wasilla Republican Rep. David Eastman said he’s concerned the workplace conduct policy could prevent lawmakers from asking hard questions.

“There are a lot of things that are subjective that this policy touches on,” he said.

Eagle River Republican Sen. Anna MacKinnon said the policy is an improvement. Until now, the Legislature hasn’t had a policy on conduct separate from the harassment policy.

“There were opportunities for clarity for both staff and legislators in understand what is a safe and professional workplace environment,” she said.

The Legislature decided to revisit the harassment policy last year. Legislators cited concerns about harassment both inside the Capitol and nationally in seeking the review. Democratic Rep. Dean Westlake of Kiana resigned in December due to sexual harassment allegations. And Democratic Rep. Zach Fansler of Bethel resigned in February after a woman alleged he attacked her.

The Juneau community shared stories during an event Monday night promoting awareness of domestic violence and sexual abuse.

About 50 people attended “An Evening of Stories” at Elizabeth Peratrovich Hall. Alaska Network on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault sponsored the event.

Juneau police estimate that they had about 28 reports of sexual assault in 2017, but because the crime is so personal, cases are likely under-reported.

Actress Irene Bedard and playwright Vera Starbard shared their personal experiences. Starbard talked about her semi-autobiographical play, “Our Voices Will Be Heard.”

“It was intense, about a year and a half of really intense exploring my own abuse through a really public format,” Starbard said. “I don’t think I knew what I was signing up for until I did it. And it felt pretty good though, because … after every single performance I would hear a version of ‘this is my story,’ ‘that’s my story,’ ‘that happened to me.’”

Starbard said that a month after the play closed, the troupe found out one of the actors was an abuser.

“It destroyed everything. And it took me a while to come out of that. It’s hard, but it was months of hiding,” Starbard said. “Because I couldn’t believe that’s what I presented to people. I presented an abuser. To represent this idyllic world with no abuse.”

The play opened again in Fairbanks, and Starbard heard people tell their stories again.

Bedard, who voiced Disney’s “Pocahontas” and is also Starbard’s sister-in-law, also talked about her various roles in film and television.

“I feel like in so many ways the history of my film-makings since the beginning has been going through the history of these Native women from all over the country,” said the actress who also starred in “Smoke Signals” and “Into the West.” “I’ve had the chance to tell the variations on a theme of what the experience for Native women has been over the centuries. So here we are now, I feel like we have experiences where we can tell those stories.”

Bedard also performed a personal piece by the actress titled “Seven Dreams,” a portion of “Our Voices Will Be Heard,” and a new piece by Starbard titled “Fog Woman.”

This week, allegations of sexual abuse in the Haines School’s past were made public.

On Monday, KHNS reported on a new allegation of sexual abuse by former teacher and Superintendent Karl Ward.

Since then, several other former students have shared memories of Ward’s behavior, including inappropriate touching, with the Chilkat Valley News.

The Haines Borough School Board addressed the claims briefly at a regular meeting Tuesday.

“I want to make sure that we have the right protections in place to make sure that nothing like this could ever, ever happen again,” said Sara Chapel, who joined the meeting by phone.

She said this is an opportunity to take a closer look at the district’s practices.

“To just ensure that our school is as safe an environment as possible and that we’re doing everything we can to protect and support our students. I believe that is true,” Chapel said. “But I want to make sure that we’re addressing this as openly and honestly as we can.”

Interim Superintendent Rich Carlson said the district is focusing on providing support for students.

“From the school district’s standpoint, we’re really – our focus is entirely on attempting to give our students all the support they need and provide all the assistance they need,” Carlson said.

That includes former students, Board President Anne Marie Palmieri said.

“I think it’s super important that we provide a safe place for former students or current students who have been victims of sexual abuse in any form,” Palmieri said. “To be able to come to someone, whether it’s a staff member or the counselor or the principal. The parent of another student. To be able to talk about it and not stuff it down and feel shame.”

Anyone who has been impacted by this or other stories is encouraged to contact Lynn Canal Counseling at 766-6383. Anonymous help is available anytime at 1-877-294-0074.

A Haines School administrator is breaking the silence on long closeted allegations of sexual abuse by a former superintendent and teacher.

A new revelation from her late husband is igniting the conversation.

“I love my town,” Haines School Principal Rene Martin said. “I love the people who live here. We will not keep secrets. We will not live in the dark.”

Martin’s husband, Rick, grew up in Haines. He graduated from high school in 1975.

Martin was from the Siletz Tribe in Oregon.

In March, Rick died by suicide.

He left several videos for his family. In one, he claims former Haines School Superintendent Karl Ward raped him while he was a student at Haines School.

Ward came to Haines as part of the Presbyterian Mission in the 1940s.

At Haines House, an orphanage and boarding school, he worked with orphans and children, many from Alaska Native villages.

Then, Ward worked at the Haines School — first as a teacher, then as a principal and, eventually, he became superintendent — for more than 20 years, from 1954 until his retirement in 1976.

He also was a licensed foster parent. He died in 1997.

The high school gym is named after Ward. For decades, a yellow cedar sign bearing his likeness hung in the hallway.

Decades after the alleged abuse, Rick Martin got a job as a janitor at the school.

“He told me that it really bothered him to go by the Karl Ward sign, because he knew that Karl Ward was just a real creepy guy,” Rene Martin said. “I said ‘What do you mean by that?’ And at that time he told me that Karl Ward had tried to grab his penis. And he ran away and went and told his dad, who was Native. And his dad was like ‘OK you’re not really hurt.’ We’re Native and he’s the white superintendent. We just have to move on.”

In the week after Rick’s death, the sign outside the gym disappeared.

“The sign is down,” Rene Martin said. “We had to take it down for me to be able to go back to school, quite honestly.”

It’s unclear who took the sign or where it went.

It wasn’t an official action by the administration or the school board. It appeared back in the school gym, in a new location Monday.

The school superintendent said it’s being moved to a secure location for now.

On the school’s website, Ward’s name is no longer associated with the gym. But whether the name will be officially changed has not yet been decided.

For many years, allegations of sexual abuse by Ward have circulated, quietly, among some longtime Haines residents and Native families associated with Haines House.

Borough Manager Debra Schnabel is a lifelong Haines resident.

“I think that there are many people in the community that have had suspicions,” Schnabel said. “Certainly, I grew up with an indirect understanding that there were stories to be told. But I was never aware of anything specific. I think that as time went on though, as more people that I knew corroborated the sensibility about Karl Ward, that it became sort of an understanding that it must be true. Because there was so much of it.”

Schnabel said it’s time to face these allegations head on.

“That’s one of the things that’s so right about Rene Martin being willing to come forward,” Schnabel said. “It’s not to make a sensational story. But it’s to tell people, this is one person’s story. And if it’s happened to you, then it’s our story. I know that as the manager of the borough, it’s our story as a community and that’s one of the reasons that I’m willing to reach out and speak about it. Because it should be brought out so that nobody else suffers as much.”

Now that these allegations are out in the open, local mental health providers are preparing for others to come forward.

As soon as Rene began speaking out, community leaders including local clinicians, the police chief, the mayor and borough manager met.

“The main thing we want to let everyone know is that there are people here that are ready to help,” said Kelly Williamson, the director of Lynn Canal Counseling, part of the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium. “That want to be a part of the healing process.”

If you or anyone you know has been impacted by this story and would like to talk anonymously with someone trained to help, call 1-877-294-0074 anytime, day or night.

In-person support services are available through Lynn Canal Counseling at 766-6383.  You are welcome to walk in. Williamson says staff at her office are available, with or without an appointment.

Anonymous help is also available at 1-877-294-0074 at any time. People in crisis can always call 911.

KHNS would also like to hear from any other alleged victims of Karl Ward.

KHNS reached out to Ward’s surviving wife, Doris Ward, who said she isn’t ready to talk. Ward says she is shocked and mourning.

Through all of it, Haines School Principal Rene Martin is reaffirming her commitment to the well-being of Haines students.

“I promise you, I will do my very best, to protect the children of Haines while I am principal,” Martin said .