What happened
A California jury yesterday awarded Donna Motsinger $59.25 million in civil damages after finding comedian Bill Cosby liable for drugging and sexually assaulting her in 1972. Motsinger accused Cosby, now 88, of giving her pills that incapacitated her after escorting her to his stand-up comedy show, then raping her while she was unconscious. The jury awarded her $17.5 million in past damages, $1.75 million for future damages and $40 million in punitive damages. Cosby did not testify. 

Who said what
The jury’s decision “further tarnished” Cosby’s reputation, The New York Times said, after his “standing as one of America’s most beloved entertainers dissolved” in the face of dozens of similar sexual assault allegations. Cosby has “denied all allegations involving sex crimes,” USA Today said, but he was the “first Hollywood figure to be convicted following the #MeToo movement.” He served almost three years in prison for drugging and raping protégé Andrea Constand before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court threw out his conviction on a technicality in 2021.

Cosby has “settled some similar lawsuits and has been ordered to pay in others,” The Associated Press said, but yesterday’s award “is likely the most he has had to pay in a case.” The money is “icing on the cake,“ Motsinger told reporters after the verdict, but the accountability is more important. “It has been 54 years to get justice, and I know it’s not complete for the rest of the women, but I hope it helps them a little bit.”

What next?
Cosby’s lawyer, Jennifer Bonjean, said they were “disappointed in the outcome,” but “we believe we have a strong appeal and we’ll pursue that.” 

What happened
The Trump administration yesterday agreed to pay France’s TotalEnergies nearly $1 billion to forgo its leases to build two wind farms off the coasts of New York and North Carolina. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the federal government would reimburse TotalEnergies as the company invested in natural gas and oil projects in the U.S. Under the “innovative agreement,” the Interior Department said, TotalEnergies also “pledged not to develop any new offshore wind projects in the United States.”

Who said what
The deal to abandon the two wind projects, which would have powered more than 1.3 million homes and businesses, “is an extraordinary transfer of taxpayer dollars to a foreign company for the purposes of boosting the production of fossil fuels” and “throttling” clean energy, The New York Times said. President Donald Trump has “personally reviled” windmills for years, CNN said.

Burgum argued that offshore wind was “unreliable, unaffordable and unsecured” because the wind doesn’t always blow. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) said Trump’s “pay-not-to-play scheme” was “an outrageous abuse of taxpayer dollars.” North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein (D) said it was “ludicrous and wasteful” to “pay off a company to stop it from investing private dollars to create the clean energy we need.” TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné (pictured above left, with Burgum) said it was a “pragmatic” business decision now that developing “offshore wind projects is not in the country’s interest.” 

What next?
One of the five East Coast wind farms Trump tried and failed to stop last year, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, “started delivering power to the grid for Virginia” yesterday, The Associated Press said. And as Trump is “boosting oil, gas and coal” in the U.S., “globally the offshore wind market is growing, with China leading the world in new installations.”