Key witness says Cosby accuser told of plot
2004 CONVERSATION
NORRISTOWN, PA. • The chief accuser at Bill Cosby’s sexual assault retrial talked about framing a celebrity before going to police with her allegations in 2005, a key defence witness testified Wednesday as the TV star’s lawyers began putting on their case.
Marguerite Jackson, an academic adviser at Temple University, took the witness stand after a judge overruled prosecutors and said she could tell her story to the jury.
Jackson said Andrea Constand spoke of the plot while they were rooming together on a road trip to Rhode Island with the Temple University women’s basketball team, where Constand was working as operations director.
After watching a TV news report about a celebrity who had been accused of sexual assault, Jackson said Constand told her: “Oh wow, something similar happened to me.” Constand said she never reported the assault because her assailant was a “high-profile person” and she knew she couldn’t prove it, Jackson testified.
Jackson said she encouraged Constand to report it. She told jurors that Constand then switched gears, saying: “No it didn’t, but I could say it did. I could say it happened, get that money. I could quit my job. I could go back to school. I could open up a business.”
Jackson said the conversation happened Feb. 1, 2004, a few weeks after Constand says Cosby drugged and molested her at his Philadelphia home. The defence hoped Jackson’s testimony would bolster Cosby’s efforts to show Constand fabricated the allegations against him to extort a civil settlement. Cosby paid Constand nearly $3.4 million in 2006.
Constand testified Monday she didn’t “recall ever having a conversation with” Jackson.
Prosecutors wound down their case earlier Wednesday, introducing the comedian’s explosive testimony about giving quaaludes to women before sex — an old admission that’s taken on new significance after a half-dozen women testified that he drugged and violated them.
A police detective read a transcript of the 2005 testimony as prosecutors saved for the very end of their case Cosby’s own words about using the 1970s party drug “the same as a person would say, ‘Have a drink.’ ”
Cosby, now 80, is being retried on charges he drugged and molested Constand at his home. He says their encounter was consensual.
Jurors at Cosby’s first trial last year also heard excerpts from the deposition but deadlocked on sexual assault charges.
In a transcript read to the jury Wednesday, the Cosby Show star said he obtained seven prescriptions for quaaludes from his doctor in Los Angeles in the 1970s, ostensibly for a sore back.
Defence attorney Kathleen Bliss underscored that most of that testimony pertained to the 1970s, and a police detective acknowledged that authorities didn’t find quaaludes in a search of Cosby’s home.