Accuser to Cosby at His Sex Assault Trial: ‘you Remember, Don’t You?’
By Graham Bowley And Jon Hurdle
Chelan Lasha was 17 in 1986 when she went to Bill Cosby’s suite at the Las Vegas Hilton, after, she said, he told her he could help with her modeling career. She wet her hair to pose for modeling shots at Mr. Cosby’s request. Then he offered her what he said was an antihistamine to help her cold, and some almond liqueur. She took both, Ms. Lasha told a courtroom on Wednesday, because “I trusted him.” Then, she said: “He laid me on the bed; I could not move any more after that. He kept pinching my breast and humping my leg. Waking up, I was naked.” She said she heard him grunting, and with that, she imitated from the stand the sounds she said Mr. Cosby had made. And when it was over, Ms. Lasha said, Mr. Cosby told her, “Daddy said wake up,” before pushing her out the door. The courtroom at Bill Cosby’s sexual assault retrial was silent as Ms. Lasha provided her account, sometimes struggling to keep her composure. Then she looked across at the 80-year-old entertainer sitting at the defense table and called out: “You remember, don’t you, Mr. Cosby?” The confrontation inside the Montgomery County Courthouse drew an immediate objection from lawyers for Mr. Cosby, who requested a mistrial. But Judge Steven T. O’Neill denied their request. Ms. Lasha was the second of five accusers prosecutors are calling to testify at Mr. Cosby’s trial on charges that he drugged and sexually assaulted Andrea Constand, a former Temple University employee, at his home near here in 2004. The first, Heidi Thomas, testified Tuesday that Mr. Cosby drugged and assaulted her in Reno, Nev., in 1984 after inviting her to the city, where he often performed, to help her with her acting career. A third woman, Janice Baker-Kinney, testified Wednesday that Mr. Cosby assaulted her in 1982 after giving her two pills that knocked her out.
Defense lawyers tried to undermine the credibility of each of the witnesses, suggesting during cross-examination that they had actually come forward out of a desire for attention and possibly money. But Ms. Thomas responded with a blunter rationale. “I want to see a serial rapist convicted,” she said. Those kinds of fiery statements made for some awkward #Me Too moments in the courtroom as the women — just three of the dozens who have come forward in recent years with accounts of having been sexually abused at his hands — confronted Mr. Cosby. For the most part, he stared down, impassively, while they spoke. Most defendants never face testimony from multiple people accusing them of prior crimes. Such evidence is typically viewed as too unrelated to the actual charges being considered, too prejudicial for a jury to hear. But Judge O’Neill ruled that multiple women could testify, based on the prosecution’s argument that the similarity of their accounts depicts a signature pattern of predatory behavior by Mr. Cosby that also ensnared Ms. Constand. The judge acknowledged, though, that such a drumbeat of accusations can be powerful, so powerful he has said he might limit the number of accusers to less than five if he felt the impact was preventing Mr. Cosby from receiving a fair trial, an argument his lawyers had put forth. Certainly Ms. Lasha’s testimony was compelling as she described leaving the hotel and retreating to her car in the parking lot where she prayed. She later told her guidance counselor and her sister what had happened, she said. But defense counsel asked why she had returned two days later, with her grandmother, to see Mr. Cosby in a show. She said she did it to accommodate her grandmother. “I didn’t want to be there,” she said. Under cross-examination, Kathleen Bliss, one of Mr. Cosby’s lawyers pushed her to answer why she had not told police investigating her Cosby account about her 2007 conviction for making a false statement to the police in an unrelated case. “You knew you had a conviction for filing a false police report in 2007, but you didn’t tell them, did you?,” Ms. Bliss asked. Ms. Lasha responded, “I said I had a criminal history,” but conceded that the police report did not make mention of that. Mr. Cosby has denied assaulting all of the women and has said that the sexual encounter with Ms. Constand was consensual. The first accuser, Ms. Thomas, testified Tuesday that, strangely incapacitated by a single sip of wine from Mr. Cosby, she found herself waxing in and out of consciousness during a 1984 trip to Reno for acting lessons. But one moment she remembered, she said, was being on a bed where Mr. Cosby was inserting his penis into her mouth.
Ms. Bliss asked whether she had received payments for media appearances related to the accusations. Ms. Thomas, now a private music teacher, said she had not. She said she first spoke out in January 2015 because other women had started to go public with accusations against Mr. Cosby. “There were women coming forward and they were not being believed,” Ms. Thomas said. “I wanted to support them.” Until then, she had blamed herself for the encounter, and had told few people about it, except her husband, a psychologist and her three daughters. “As a mother of daughters,” she said, “and as one who is now a statistic, it was important to me that they know if anything happened to them, they could come to me.” Ms. Bliss pressed her about what she depicted as discrepancies in the account she gave the police and in particular noted that the date on Ms. Thomas’s plane ticket to Reno — April 2, 1984 — was different than the date in her testimony, April 1. “The change of those dates affects your testimony of your four-day odyssey,” Ms. Bliss said. Judge O’Neill explained to the jury that Mr. Cosby is not being charged for the accusations leveled by Ms. Thomas. “The defendant is not on trial for this conduct,” he said. Ms. Baker-Kinney, now a 60-year-old sports broadcasting stage manager, testified that she too met Mr. Cosby in Reno, in her case at a house party. He gave her two pills, possibly quaaludes, she said, and she next remembers waking up on a couch in the living room with her shirt and pants undone and Mr. Cosby fondling her. When she woke again she was naked in bed with him, she said. “There was evidence between my legs that something had occurred there,” she said. Asked why she had taken the pills, she said that she had taken quaaludes before and Mr. Cosby had an image as a “happy, nice comedian.” “Even though I didn’t know him, I trusted him,” she said. In his cross-examination, Thomas A. Mesereau Jr., a lawyer for Mr. Cosby, pressed Ms. Baker-Kinney about why she had come forward only recently. She described her response as being part of a communal action, a movement in which women found support from other women. “People feeling empowered enough to come forward with what has happened to them,” she said, “and feeling their strength, allowing me to be brave enough to say that I, too, was in the same position — that I, too, denied it for many years.”
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