#TIMESUP FOR TOM?: Retired NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw allegedly made unwanted sexual advances against multiple women in the 1990s, a set of reports revealed Thursday, months after separate accusations took down longtime “Today” anchor Matt Lauer ... According to the Washington Post, Brokaw, now 78, made unwanted moves on Linda Vester, a former NBC correspondent and former Fox News anchor, twice during the 1990s, including a move to forcibly kiss Vester, who was in her 20s at the time. The report also detailed the claims of an anonymous woman who told the outlet Brokaw acted inappropriately toward her during her time as a production assistant in the 1990s. Brokaw was the anchor of “NBC Nightly News” at the time. He has denied all the accusations against him.

• Matt Lauer is ‘embarrassed and ashamed‘ as wife moves forward with divorce, report says

MAINE MANHUNT INTENSIFIES: The FBI and authorities in Maine said they’re offering a $20,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the man accused of killing a sheriff’s deputy Wednesday morning … The agency’s Boston office tweeted the poster about the wanted individual, John D. Williams, and shared new photos of him, including some that show off a variety of tattoos on his arms and chest. Williams is “considered armed dangerous,” the poster says. The search continued Thursday for Williams, 29, who has been accused of fatally shooting Cpl. Eugene Cole early Wednesday morning on U.S. Route 2 in Norridgewock, about 30 miles north of Augusta, authorities said.

AS SEEN ON FOX NEWS

KANYE EXPOSES THE LEFT:  “[Kanye] West has cracked open the door on the glaring hypocrisy of the left.”  – Laura Ingraham, on “The Ingraham Angle,” sounding off on the commotion Kanye West has stirred with his open support of conservative activist Candace Owens and President Trump. WATCH

‘AMERICA’S DAD’ NO MORE: ”My heart is broken knowing what he did and knowing what so many [people] invested in that visual of what we thought was a really good man.”  – Fox News political analyst Gianno Caldwell, on “Your World with Neil Cavuto,” reflecting on Bill Cosby’s sex assault conviction. WATCH

NFL DRAFT

Cleveland Browns pick Baker Mayfield No. 1 as NFL Draft sees run on quarterbacks.

NFL Draft: Why Pizza Hut is giving one rookie a year of free pizza.

NFL Draft rookie contract scale: Here’s how much each player will earn.

TRENDING

Ex-Clinton adviser censured after roadside rant to NJ police.

Family suing American Airlines over death of 25-year-old woman.

Pro-gun student sues school over dress code, claims it violates First Amendment rights.

Beer in space? Cutting-edge project touts unique zero gravity brew.                                                                                

THE SWAMP

Dem Sen. Menendez ‘severely admonished’ by Senate ethics committee, told to repay gifts.

Pruitt admits knowing about controversial raise, despite past denial.

Paul Ryan forces out House priest because he ‘aligned with Democrats’: report.

ACROSS THE NATION

Migrant ‘caravan’ gathers on US-Mexico border for final push.

Deputies have ‘no confidence’ in Broward County Sheriff Israel following Parkland, Fla., massacre.

Severed heads found in Texas, Louisiana may be part of the same case, police say.

MINDING YOUR BUSINESS

Economy started year slowly, but will likely pick up pace, market watchers say.

Trump, Merkel to tackle steel tariffs as critical deadline looms.

Amazon hikes Prime annual price to $119.

Wells Fargo under fire for retirement plan practices: report.

FOX NEWS OPINION

Sen. Chuck Grassley: Sentencing reform bill will fight crime.

Cutting federal prison terms would endanger communities and reward criminals.

Marc Thiessen: Macron and Trump don’t agree on much — Yet Dems have a lot to learn from the French president.

HOLLYWOOD SQUARED

Kanye West rips John Legend for using ‘tactic based on fear’ to criticize rapper’s Trump support.

‘Avengers: Infinity War’ on pace to be the highest-grossing movie of all time.

Brad Pitt working on film about Harvey Weinstein despite history with him.

DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THIS?

Pic of teens’ pre-prom prayer sparks anger.

Could an ‘insane’ Russian nuclear torpedo cause 300-foot tidal waves?

Sharks, crocodile spotted feasting on whale in ‘rare’ drone video.

Museum shocked to discover giant egg in collection is real.

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Mornings with Maria, 6 a.m. ET: Corey Lewandowski; U.S. Rep. Chris Collins, R-N.Y.; Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, former Federal Minister of Defence under Merkel; Stephen Schwarzman, Blackstone chairman and CEO. 

Varney Co., 9 a.m. ET: U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La.; Marcus Lattimore, former NFL star; Stephen Sweeney, New Jersey state Senate president.

Cavuto: Coast to Coast, Noon ET: John Lonski, Moody’s chief economist; U.S. Rep. Chris Stewart, R-Utah.

Risk Reward, 5 p.m. ET: Karl Rove; Gordon Chang, author of “The Coming Collapse of China.”

On Fox News Radio:

The Fox News Rundown podcast: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean leader Moon Jae-in net for a historic summit at their shared border. Historian Gordon Chang weighs in on the talks and what the impact might be for a possible U.S. – North Korean summit. “Fox Friends” co-host Ainsley Earhardt joins us to talk about her new memoir, “The Light Within Me.” She explains how she found God and how her faith has played a major role in her life. Plus, commentary from “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace.

Want the Fox News Rundown sent straight to your mobile device? Subscribe through Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Stitcher.

The Brian Kilmeade Show, 9 a.m. ET: Geraldo Rivera and Michael Loftus on the Kanye-Trump alliance; Shannon Bream on Cosby’s sex assault conviction, the latest from the U.S. Supreme Court and Comey’s potential legal trouble; Bret Baier on his takeaway from his interview with James Comey.

On Fox News Weekend: 

Legends Lies: The Civil War, Sunday, 8 p.m. ET: “Gettysburg: The High Water Mark” - The North turns back the South’s invasion after a heroic bayonet charge led by Maine’s Joshua Chamberlain — and the doomed Confederate charge led by General George Pickett.  

Life, Liberty Levin, Sunday, 10 p.m. ET: Host Mark Levin sits down with author and academic, David Berlinski, a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. They will explore the limits of science; discuss evolution and Berlinski’s defense of religious thought.

#OnThisDay

1982: The trial of John W. Hinckley Jr., who shot four people, including President Ronald Reagan, begins in Washington, D.C. (The trial would end with Hinckley’s acquittal by reason of insanity.)

1978: Convicted Watergate defendant John D. Ehrlichman is released from an Arizona prison after serving 18 months.  

1968: Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey declares his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president, less than a month after President Lyndon B. Johnson said he would not run for re-election.

 Fox News First is compiled by Fox News’ Bryan Robinson. Thank you for joining us! Enjoy your day and weekend! We’ll see you in your inbox first thing Monday morning.

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Bill Cosby Found Guilty of Sexual Assault in Retrial

The National Organization for Women called the verdict a “notice to sexual predators everywhere.” Rose McGowan, one of the women who has accused Harvey Weinstein of assault, tweeted a thank you to the judge and jury and to “society for waking up.” Gloria Allred, the lawyer who represented many of Mr. Cosby’s accusers, hailed the decision as an important breakthrough.

“After all is said and done, women were finally believed,” she said outside the courtroom.

The impression of change was evident within the trial itself when the defense attacked the credibility of five women who had testified that they, too, believed Mr. Cosby had drugged and sexually assaulted them. Kathleen Bliss, one of Mr. Cosby’s lawyers, called one of the women a failed starlet who slept around. She branded another a publicity seeker.

The remarks inflamed Kristen Gibbons Feden, a prosecutor on the case. She called the attacks filthy and shameful and the sort of criticism that had long kept sexual assault victims from coming forward. Ms. Feden’s colleague, M. Stewart Ryan, described Ms. Bliss’s approach as “the last vestiges of a tactic not to get to the truth, but to damage character and reputation.”

Their boss, Kevin R. Steele, the Montgomery County district attorney, referenced the broader significance of the case when he thanked Ms. Constand for taking part in not one, but two trials. “She has been a major factor in a movement that has gone in the right direction, finally,” he said.

The first trial ended with a hung jury after six days of deliberations last summer. When the jury announced its decision Thursday, Mr. Cosby sat back in his chair and quietly stared down. Several women who have accused him of abuse, and attended the trial each day, briefly cheered. Ms. Constand, who had been quiet throughout, stood up and was hugged by supporters, including her lawyer.

[Did the #MeToo movement have an effect on the Bill Cosby jury?]

Mr. Cosby did not comment as he left the courthouse, but his lead lawyer, Thomas A. Mesereau Jr., said his client would appeal. “We are very disappointed by the verdict,” he said. “We don’t believe Mr. Cosby is guilty of anything.”

In recent years, Mr. Cosby, 80, had admitted to decades of philandering, and to giving quaaludes to women as part of an effort to have sex, smashing the image he had built as a moralizing public figure and the upstanding paterfamilias in the wildly popular 1980s and ’90s sitcom “The Cosby Show.” He did not testify in his own defense, avoiding a grilling about those admissions, but he and his lawyers have insisted that his encounter with Ms. Constand was part of a consensual affair, not an assault.

The verdict now marks the bottom of a fall as precipitous as any in show business history and leaves in limbo a large slice of American popular culture from Mr. Cosby’s six-decade career as a comedian and actor. For the last few years, his TV shows, films and recorded stand-up performances, once broadcast staples, have largely been shunned, and with his conviction, they are likely to remain so.

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At Mr. Cosby’s retrial, in the same courthouse and before the same judge, a new defense team argued unsuccessfully that Ms. Constand, now 45, was a desperate “con artist” with financial problems who steadily worked her famous but lonely mark for a lucrative payday.

The prosecution countered that it was Mr. Cosby who had been a deceiver, hiding behind his amiable image as America’s Dad to prey on women that he first incapacitated with intoxicants. During closing arguments Tuesday, Ms. Feden told the jury: “She is not the con. He is.”

The defense’s star witness was a veteran academic adviser at Temple who said Ms. Constand had confided to her in 2004 that she could make money by falsely claiming she had been molested by a prominent person. Mr. Cosby paid Ms. Constand $3.38 million in 2006 as part of the confidential financial settlement of a lawsuit she had brought against him after prosecutors originally declined to bring charges.

[The Bill Cosby case: A timeline from accusation to conviction.]

But Ms. Constand said she had never spoken with the adviser, and prosecutors rebutted her characterization as a schemer. Perhaps most damaging to Mr. Cosby, was the testimony from five other women who told jurors they, too, were Cosby victims. The powerful drumbeat of accounts allowed prosecutors to argue that Ms. Constand’s assault was part of a signature pattern of predatory behavior.

Mr. Cosby’s lawyers had tried to block the additional women from testifying, arguing their accounts would be prejudicial. They noted that the scrutiny of sexual assault had heightened, and recently had ensnared a group of high-profile men, but they said it was only Mr. Cosby who was on trial in this instance. “Mob rule is not due process,” Ms. Bliss told the jury.

When Ms. Constand testified, she took the stand as something of a proxy for the other women, more than 50, who have accused Mr. Cosby of abuses.

None of those accusations had resulted in prosecution. In many of the cases, too much time had passed for criminal charges to be considered, so Ms. Constand’s case emerged as the only criminal test of Mr. Cosby’s guilt.

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But Mr. Cosby has been sued by several accusers, some of whom said he or his staff defamed them by dismissing their allegations as fabrications.

The suits are likely to draw momentum from the guilty verdict.

Many of the accusers celebrated the verdict with laughter and tears. Patricia Steuer, 61, who accused Mr. Cosby of drugging and assaulting her in 1978 and 1980, said she and her husband were in a pharmacy at Lake Tahoe when the news arrived by text.

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“We just collapsed in each other’s arms,” she said. “We were just crying.”

Mr. Cosby returned to the suburban mansion where, in the evening, his spokesman, Andrew Wyatt, said Mr. Cosby planned to appeal on grounds of prosecutorial misconduct and to also assert that the statute of limitations had expired before charges were filed in December 2015.

“God puts certain situations in your life, not to destroy you but to build you,” Mr. Wyatt said. “We build from here.”

The case largely turned on the credibility of Ms. Constand, who testified that during a visit in early 2004 to Mr. Cosby’s home near Philadelphia, when she was 30 and he was 66, Mr. Cosby gave her pills that left her immobile and drifting in and out of consciousness. He said he had only given her Benadryl.

[Andrea Constand was the “linchpin” of the Bill Cosby case.]

“I was kind of jolted awake and felt Mr. Cosby on the couch beside me, behind me, and my vagina was being penetrated quite forcefully, and I felt my breast being touched,” Ms. Constand said. “I was limp, and I could not fight him off.”

In Mr. Cosby’s first trial, only one other accuser had been allowed to testify. At the retrial, the five additional witnesses included the former model Janice Dickinson, who told jurors Mr. Cosby had assaulted her in a Lake Tahoe hotel room in 1982, after giving her a pill to help with menstrual cramps. “Here was America’s Dad on top of me,” she told the courtroom, “a happily married man with five children, on top of me.”

The defense suggested that Ms. Dickinson had made up the account, pointing to her memoir, which recounted the meeting without mentioning any assault. But Ms. Dickinson’s publisher testified that she had shared her account of rape and that it was kept out of the book for legal reasons.

Another accuser, Chelan Lasha, said Mr. Cosby invited her to his suite at the Las Vegas Hilton in 1986, when she was 17, to help her with her modeling career. Mr. Cosby, she said, gave her a pill and liquor, and then assaulted her.

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In court, Ms. Lasha, who was often in tears, called across the courtroom to the entertainer.

“You remember,” she asked, “don’t you, Mr. Cosby?”

The defense team tried to convince the jurors that Mr. Cosby’s main accuser, Ms. Constand, saw him as her escape from financial straits. “You are going to be asking yourself during this trial, ‘What does she want from Bill Cosby?’ And you already know the answer: ‘Money, money and lots more money,’” Mr. Mesereau told the jurors as he opened his defense of Mr. Cosby.

The defense emphasized inconsistencies in the version of events Ms. Constand had given the police, saying, for example, at one point that the assault had taken place in March 2004, then later changing that to January 2004.

Mr. Cosby’s lawyers cited her phone records to show she had stayed in touch with him after the encounter and they produced detailed travel itineraries and flight schedules in an effort to show that Mr. Cosby had not stayed at his Philadelphia home during the period in which she said the assault occurred.

“He was lonely and troubled and he made a terrible mistake confiding in her what was going on in his life,” Mr. Mesereau said.

Under cross-examination, Ms. Constand explained the lapses in her accounts as innocent mistakes, and said her contacts with Mr. Cosby after the incident were mostly cursory, the unavoidable result of her job duties.

Mr. Steele told the jury that Mr. Cosby took away Ms. Constand’s ability to consent with the pills he gave her, and that their later contacts were irrelevant.

When Ms. Constand’s mother called to confront Mr. Cosby about a year after the incident, the prosecution argued, his apology and his offer to pay for her schooling, therapy and a trip to Florida were evidence he knew he had done something wrong.

Mr. Steele, the district attorney, also worked to rebut the defense claims. He said that Mr. Cosby, a member of Temple University’s board of directors at the time and the university’s most famous alumnus, set his sights on Ms. Constand, an employee in the athletic department who considered him a mentor.

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“This case is about trust,” Mr. Steele had told the jurors. “This case is about betrayal, and that betrayal leading to a sexual assault of a woman named Andrea Constand.”

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