“I am the wife of Kermit Gosnell. I’m not happy about that now, and I haven’t been for a long time,” Gosnell, 51, said at her sentencing Wednesday.
Gosnell lashed out at her husband, saying he refused to take a plea deal that would have spared her prison and saved the family home, and called him cowardly for refusing to speak at his sentencing.
“By choosing to take the cowardly course that he did, my husband has left me to make the apologies,” Gosnell told a judge. “My husband is in jail forever, which is where he should be.”
Gosnell reaped the financial rewards of her husband’s busy abortion and pain clinic, and lied about the $250,000 in cash found stashed in their teen daughter’s bedroom, a prosecutor said. She told the FBI it came from rental properties.
“You chose to be his partner in life. And you chose to be his partner in this operation masquerading as a medical facility,” Common Pleas Judge Benjamin Lerner said.
Earlier in the day, Lerner freed a former employee who had pleaded guilty to third-degree murder and testified against Gosnell, though she admits killing a baby born alive in a toilet. Adrienne Moton had spent 28 months in prison, but Lerner credited her with both remorse and redemption.
Lerner called Kermit Gosnell a manipulator and “charismatic sociopath,” while defense lawyer Stephen Patrizio, who represents former worker Lynda Williams, called him “a depraved, parasitic hustler.”
Prosecutors asked for at least 10 years for Williams, who pleaded guilty to third-degree murder in the deaths of both a patient and a baby that moved after being born. But her sentencing was postponed until federal drug charges can be resolved. They stem from Williams’ role at Kermit Gosnell’s front desk, where she allegedly sold painkiller prescriptions for him to addicts and drug dealers.
The scheduled sentencings of two other co-workers — 53-year-old Sherry West and 47-year-old Tina Baldwin — are likewise on hold amid the federal charges. Several other co-defendants, including an unlicensed doctor who admits cutting 100 babies for Gosnell, also await sentencing.
Before his capital murder trial got underway in March, Kermit Gosnell rejected an offer to serve a life term on both the drug and murder charges. In exchange, his wife would have been spared prison time and avoided the likely forfeiture of their home, where she lives with their 15-year-old daughter and 21-year-old son, who is in college. Gosnell also has four older children from two previous marriages.
“Being the selfish, inconsiderate person that he is … he decided to go to trial,” said defense lawyer Michael Medway, representing Pearl Gosnell. “He left his family essentially hanging out to dry.”
What’s worse, he said, his client and her children have to live with a name that “will go down in infamy.”
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