Cosby trial opens with tearful account
Former assistant to star’s agent recounts alleged 1996 sex assault in hotel room
NORRISTOWN, PA.— A witness sobbed, burning through tissues while she testified that the famous man gave her a pill and touched her as her vision blurred. Attorneys stalked across the well of the courtroom, voices booming in scorn and disgust.
The drama unspooling in a creaky old courtroom here in this Philadelphia suburb is a trial that once would have seemed unimaginable, a reckoning for a comic legend who not so long ago embodied an ideal of wholesome fatherhood. Bill Cosby’s days as America’s biggest television star are long behind him. But as he nears his 80th birthday, legally blind and leaning on a cane, he is the focal point in one of the highest-profile criminal trials in recent memory.
The aging entertainer listened intently Monday, occasionally clenching his fist or wincing, as attorneys offered competing visions of him on the opening day of the jury trial in his sexual assault case. A capacity crowd jammed into the courtroom, filling every seat in eight long rows of wooden benches. News helicopters hovered outside.
Cosby is accused of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand, an operations manager for the Temple University women’s basketball team, at his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004. But the first day of testimony was dominated by an emotionally charged appearance by another woman whom prosecutors called in hopes of establishing a pattern of illicit behaviour by the actor.
Kelly Johnson, an assistant to Cosby’s personal-appearances agent at the William Morris agency in the 1990s, wept while recounting an afternoon in 1996 when she said the comedian summoned her to his bungalow at the swanky Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles. Johnson said that Cosby had invited her there “in a Dr. Huxtable kind of way” to offer career advice.
When she arrived, Johnson testi- fied, Cosby was wearing a bathrobe. He urged her to take a white pill to relax, she said, opening her right hand on the witness stand to mimic the offer.
“Would I do anything to hurt you?” she said Cosby told her. “Trust me.”
Johnson, who was 34 at the time, didn’t want to take the pill, even hiding it under her tongue. But, she said, Cosby ordered her to open her mouth, then swallow. She felt “intimidated,” she said, because Cosby was the biggest client of the agency where she worked. She did what he said.
Confused, she went to the bathroom, where she found a huge array of prescription pills, she said. But her vision had gone fuzzy, and she couldn’t read the labels. Moments later, she said, she awoke in bed with Cosby, her dress pulled down from its top and up from its hem, exposing her breasts and her genitals. Cosby, she said, poured lotion into her hand and forced her to stroke his penis.
“I remember wanting to cover myself and not being able to,” she said through a torrent of tears.
Johnson, now a project manager for a corporation in Atlanta, is the only former accuser whom Montgomery County, Pa., Judge Steven O’Neill, who is presiding over the case, is allowing to testify. In an aggressive cross-examination, Cosby’s attorney, Brian McMonagle, tried without success to get Johnson to admit that her public comments about the allegations before the trial were coached by Gloria Allred, a feminist attorney who represents about half of the 60 women who have accused Cosby of sexual misdeeds over five decades.
After the alleged assault, Johnson testified, Cosby called her boss, the prominent agent Tom Ilius, and demanded that she be fired. When she lost her job, she filed a workers’ compensation lawsuit and gave deposition testimony with a different date for the alleged assault. But she stood firm when McMonagle loudly confronted her about the discrepancy.
(The Post has previously reported on Johnson, who appeared on camera at a January 2015 news conference using the pseudonym “Kacey.” We are now using her name because she has testified in open court.)
Johnson’s testimony was the opening salvo in a prosecution case that came into focus Monday morning during a searing opening statement by prosecutor Kristen Feden.
“This case is about trust, betrayal and the inability to consent,” Feden said, with a look of contempt on her face.
The prosecutor repeatedly stalked across the floor, pointing an accusatory finger within inches of Cosby as he sat leaning forward at the defence table. When Feden said that Cosby drugged Constand because he wanted to “gratify himself” without any chance of rejection, the entertainer balled his left hand into a fist and held it to his mouth.
Three of Cosby’s accusers who will not be testifying — Victoria Valentino, Therese Serignese and Lili Bernard — arrived at the courthouse hours early. They had hoped to sit in the same room as Cosby, but there was no room for them, and they were ushered to a separate room with a video feed instead.