Sex assault trial caps Cosby's life and legacy

PHILADELPHIA • Bill Cosby doesn’t plan to testify when he goes on trial Monday on sexual assault charges, but the rambling, remarkable testimony he gave in the accuser’s lawsuit could still prove pivotal.

The deposition from a decade-old sexual battery lawsuit, unsealed by a judge in 2015, showed the once-beloved comedian’s dark side.

Cosby, a champion of family life after a 50-year marriage and five children, detailed his practice of inviting actresses, models, flight attendants and waitresses to meetings that often featured pills and alcohol and turned sexual. He called some of them mere “liaisons.”

But Andrea Constand, he said, was different. Cosby was a mentor and friend to the former Temple University basketball team staffer. She will take the stand this week and tell her story.

Constand lodged a formal police complaint, then sued Cosby in 2005 over the night a year earlier when, she says, he drugged and molested her at his estate near Philadelphia.

Cosby and his agents, as they had with other women, offered Constand money for school when her mother, Gianna, called to confront him in January 2006.

Gianna Constand will also testify, to describe changes she saw in her daughter that year and the phone call with Cosby they taped after going to police near Toronto, where they live.

The complaint was referred to Montgomery County, Pa., where the district attorney found the case too weak to prosecute.

Constand sued Cosby for sexual battery. Thirteen women signed on to support her lawsuit, saying Cosby also molested them. But Cosby avoided a trial by negotiating a confidential settlement with Constand in 2006.

The issue died down until 2014, when comedian Hannibal Buress called Cosby out as a rapist, leading dozens of new accusers to come forward. Months later, a federal judge granted an Associated Press motion to unseal parts of his deposition.

In one revelation, Cosby said he had gotten Quaaludes in the 1970s to give women before sex.

His lawyers have spent the past 18 months trying to have the criminal case thrown out. They say Cosby testified only after being promised he could never be charged. And they argue the delayed prosecution makes the case impossible to defend, given witnesses have died, memories have faded and the 79-yearold Cosby, they say, is blind.

District Attorney Kevin Steele will be allowed to call one other accuser to suggest Cosby’s conduct with Constand was part of a “signature crime” pattern. She worked for Cosby’s agent and says Cosby drugged and assaulted her in 1996.