Former actor and comedian Bill Cosby has lost an appeal of his conviction for sexual assault, according to multiple news reports.
The news was first reported Tuesday morning on Twitter by news anchor Melissa Schroeder, with the ABC affiliate in Lynchburg, Va.
Cosby, 82, was sentenced in 2018 to three to 10 years behind bars for drugging and sexually assaulting a woman at his gated estate.
A panel of three appellate judges in Pennsylvania voted unanimously Tuesday against Cosby’s claim that the trial judge in the case improperly allowed five other accusers to testify. The Superior Court ruled the testimony helped establish Cosby’s pattern of taking advantage of women.
Cosby’s April 2018 conviction made him the first celebrity of the #MeToo era to be sent to prison and all but completed the fall from grace for the one-time star who became America’s TV dad on The Cosby Show in the 1980s.
A jury determined Cosby sexually assaulted former Temple University women's basketball administrator Andrea Constand at his suburban Philadelphia mansion in 2004. His first trial had ended in a hung jury.
He was sentenced the following September.
Since Constand first went to authorities in 2005, more than 60 other women have come forward and accused Cosby of sexual misconduct.
Cosby is serving his sentence at SCI Phoenix, a maximum-security facility outside Philadelphia. He could appeal Tuesday’s decision to the state Supreme Court.
The Georgia angle
Bill Cosby and his wife, Camille, donated $20 million in the late 1980s to Atlanta's Spelman College. In 2015, as sexual abuse allegations mounted against the entertainer, Spelman canceled a professorship that Cosby had funded and returned the money. Two of Cosby's daughters attended Spelman College.
— This is a developing story. Please return to AJC.com for updates.
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