Cosby Called Pills He Gave to Accuser Andrea Constand ‘your Friends,’ She Says in Graphic Retrial Testimony
By Bob Stewart
She said Bill Cosby gave her three "small round blue pills" that left her slurring her words and strangely immobilized on a couch. "These are your friends," Cosby had said as he reached out his hand with the medication. As she lay paralyzed and "very scared," Andrea Constand felt the man once revered as "America's Dad" grope her breasts, penetrate her "forcefully" with his fingers and masturbate himself with her hand, she told a jury Friday. When she woke up around 4 or 5 o'clock the next morning, her bra was up around her neck and her pants unzipped. She walked to the kitchen, feeling shocked and confused. "There's a muffin and a tea on the table," Cosby allegedly told her before she drove herself home. "I wanted it to stop," Constand, 45, said of the alleged 2004 attack in Cosby's suburban Philadelphia mansion. "I was weak. I was limp, and I could not fight him off," she testified. In her second courtroom showdown with the comedian after a trial that ended with a hung jury last year, Constand recounted going to Cosby's house that night to discuss her decision to quit her job with the women's basketball program at Temple University. She described feeling nervous about the big change and said she accepted the pills thinking they were an "herbal" remedy for stress. She trusted Cosby as a professional mentor, father figure and respected Temple trustee, she said. "I began to (have) double vision," she told the jury of five women and seven men now hearing the retrial on three felony counts of aggravated indecent assault stemming from her claims. "My mouth became very cottony," she said. "I started slurring my words. And Mr. Cosby said, 'I think you need to relax.' But I knew something was wrong." She said her legs "felt very rubbery" as Cosby walked her to a sofa and put a pillow under her head. "I was very scared. I didn't know what was going on with my body, and why I was feeling that way," she testified. "The next thing I recall is I was kinda jolted awake, and I felt Mr. Cosby on the couch behind me," she said. "My vagina was being penetrated very forcefully, and I felt my breasts were being touched, and he placed my hand on his penis and masturbated."
She recalled feeling Cosby's "fingers going in and out very forcefully." "Were you able to tell him, 'Stop,'" prosecutor Kristen Feden asked. "No," she replied. Constand's chilling account echoed the testimony she gave at Cosby's first trial, when she spoke publicly about the alleged assault for the first time. Jurors hearing the second trial in Norriston, Pa., listened intently and wrote notes as she again described the encounter and its aftermath. "I was really humiliated. I was in shock, and I was really confused," she said. Cosby, 80, has pleaded not guilty in the case. He claims the pill pieces were the cold medicine Benadryl and that the sexual contact was consensual. In his opening statement Tuesday, Cosby's lead defense lawyer Tom Mesereau called Constand a "con artist" who set out to frame the famous TV star for a "jackpot." He highlighted the fact Cosby paid Constand a $3.38 million settlement in 2006 to end the civil lawsuit she filed after prosecutors decided in 2005 not to bring criminal charges in the case. Prosecutors in Montgomery County decided to reconsider the case after a wave of more than 50 women stepped forward in 2014 and 2015 to accuse Cosby of sexual misconduct and assault. Cosby was arrested in December 2015 just as the 12-year statute of limitations in Constand's case was about to expire. The last-minute decision came after a judge unsealed civil court deposition testimony in which Cosby admitted he obtained seven prescriptions for Quaaludes in the 1970s so he could give the powerful drug to women he found sexually attractive. On the stand Friday, Constand told jurors she has nothing to gain financially by agreeing to testify at the criminal trial. "Ms. Constand, why are you here?" Feden asked. "For justice," Constand said.
She said prior to her alleged assault, Cosby often invited her to events as he cultivated a friendship with her. She said he made romantic passes on two occasions, but she rebuffed them with little trouble and tried not to judge him. During their first dinner at his home, for instance, he put his hand on her thigh, she told the jury. At another meeting, he reached over and tried to unbutton her pants but stopped when she leaned forward and gestured she "was not interested," she said. "He stopped respectfully," she said. "He got the picture." She told the jury she was physically fit at the time and felt confident she could handle him if he ever tried anything more. "I thought it was a little bit absurd, given that Mr. Cosby was just a little bit younger than my grandfather," she said of Cosby's awkward early overtures. "But I wasn't threatened." If convicted of any of the charges at his retrial, Cosby faces up to 10 years in prison. Before Constand took the witness stand, jurors heard from five other women who claimed Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted them in the 1980s. Former supermodel Janice Dickinson, 63, was one of the women, testifying Thursday that Cosby rendered her "immobilized" with a blue pill he said would ease her menstrual cramps. She said he then raped her inside a Lake Tahoe-area hotel room in 1982. Cosby's lawyers attacked Dickinson during cross examination, saying she was not credible because she didn't mention the rape in a memoir that talked about Cosby. Dickinson said she tried to include the rape, but her publisher told her she had to sanitize the meeting to get the book to print. To attack Constand's credibility, Cosby's lawyers are expected to call a woman to the stand who claims she roomed with Constand on a Temple basketball trip. The woman, Marguerite Jackson, said in an affidavit that during the work trip, Constand spoke to her in their shared hotel room about setting up a celebrity for a payday. On the witness stand Friday, Constand said she never shared a room with the woman.
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