sneakypersimmon

The conservationist shares her ongoing struggle with 'indescribable, inescapable pain' caused by the chronic disease

A woman who claims Bill Cosby drugged and raped her in 1972 won a $19.25 million jury award on Monday, decades after first stepping forward as Jane Doe Number 8 in the 2005 lawsuit filed by former Temple University athletics director Andrea Constand against the disgraced comedian.

Jurors found Cosby liable for the sexual assault of an intoxicated woman as well as sexual battery. They awarded plaintiff Donna Motsinger $17.5 million for past mental suffering and $1.75 million for future suffering. In another major finding, they determined Cosby acted with “malice, oppression, or fraud,” opening the door to punitive damages to be decided in a second phase of the trial.

In her testimony and court filings, Motsinger, 84, claimed Cosby befriended her while she was working as a waitress at a popular restaurant in Sausalito, California, called The Trident. She said Cosby later invited her to the recording of his standup act Inside the Mind of Bill Cosby at the Circle Star Theater in nearby San Carlos. She alleged Cosby gave her wine that made her feel sick and then gave her two round white pills she thought were aspirin.

“Next thing she knew, she was going in and out of consciousness,” Motsinger’s lawsuit said. “The last thing Ms. Motsinger recalls were flashes of light. She woke up in her house. with all her clothes off, except her underwear on – no top, no bra, and no pants. She knew she had been drugged and raped by Bill Cosby.”

The Heritage Foundation’s latest document, “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years,” was published in January, and its purported goal is to reverse the country’s declining birthrate.

See, if you can’t physically force women to have more babies, which is what abortion restrictions aim to do, you design government policies that pressure women into having more babies.

You cut off opportunities outside the home, you make the public sphere hostile to women’s independence and you create a system where the only viable path left for a woman is dependence on a man for survival. In other words, you drag the country back to a time when women had fewer choices.

A 31-year-old Georgia woman has been charged with murder by police who say she took pills to induce an illegal abortion.

If state prosecutors decide to move forward with the murder charge brought by local police against Alexia Moore, her case would be one of the first instances of a woman being charged for terminating a pregnancy in Georgia since it passed a 2019 law banning most abortions.

The arrest warrant charging Moore with murder uses language that echoes the law, saying police determined that Moore had been pregnant beyond six weeks “based on the medical staff’s knowledge that the baby had a beating heart and was struggling to breathe”.

“No one should be criminalized for having an abortion,” Dana Sussman, senior vice-president of the advocacy group Pregnancy Justice said in a statement, calling Moore’s case “an unprecedented murder charge for an alleged abortion”.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/49632137

“The Bachelorette” is on pause amid Taylor Frankie Paul and Dakota Mortensen’s toxic fallout. The ABC reality show, which was set to premiere on Sunday, March 22, has been pulled from the schedule. The network has not yet shared whether it will air at a later date.

“In light of the newly released video just surfaced today, we have made the decision to not move forward with the new season of ‘The Bachelorette’ at this time, and our focus is on supporting the family,” the statement from a Disney Entertainment Television spokesperson reads.

“The Bachelorette” is on pause amid Taylor Frankie Paul and Dakota Mortensen’s toxic fallout. The ABC reality show, which was set to premiere on Sunday, March 22, has been pulled from the schedule. The network has not yet shared whether it will air at a later date.

“In light of the newly released video just surfaced today, we have made the decision to not move forward with the new season of ‘The Bachelorette’ at this time, and our focus is on supporting the family,” the statement from a Disney Entertainment Television spokesperson reads.