Bill Cosby’s accuser has her dramatic, detailed day in court
NORRISTOWN, Pennsylvania (Los Angeles Times/TNS) – In the nearly three years since women began stepping forward to accuse Bill Cosby of sexual assault, none ever achieved what most abuse victims wish for: a day in court. No longer. Andrea Constand took the witness stand at the Cosby trial on Tuesday and faced off against her alleged attacker in a dramatic moment that has long been called for by survivors of sexual violence.
“There, wearing a dark-colored coat, brown tie and white shirt,” Constand said, gesturing, when asked to point out the entertainer who is accused of violating her at his Philadelphia-area mansion. He glanced down quickly at his clothing, then sat stoically.
With that, the 44-year-old massage therapist from Toronto embarked on an emotional and detailed account of a friendship that began when she met Cosby while running operations for the women’s basketball team at Philadelphia’s Temple University in 2002, and continued through half a dozen dinners and social engagements in which he mentored her for a sports broadcasting career, till the night in January 2004 when she says he gave her three pills and penetrated her with his fingers.
The testimony offered a full account, under oath, of a narrative similar to what other women had expressed only in scattered op-eds and TV appearances, often about encounters dating back many decades. It brought to the fore an accuser who had been shrouded in shadow, and seized back a cultural text that, with the accusations leveled at Bill O’Reilly and the boasts made by Donald Trump, many felt had too often focused on the aggressor instead of the aggrieved.
Cosby is charged with three counts of aggravated indecent assault against Constand and could face a decade in jail if he’s found guilty. But for a moment in a suburban courthouse Tuesday afternoon, legal outcomes took a back seat to the importance of testimony, as a woman offered a first-person lens onto the evolving dynamic between a mega-celebrity and his alleged sexual-assault victim.
“He was a Temple friend, somebody I trusted, a mentor, and somewhat of an older figure to me,” Constand said of the entertainer, who served as a trustee at the Pennsylvania school.
After meeting Constand via a mutual friend, Cosby started calling her on her university-issued cellphone about issues such as renovations to the team’s facilities.
Constand described the ways Cosby would soon come to inquire about her personal life and eventually act like a patron. He would introduce her to important people – machers in the Philadelphia restaurant business, figures of distinction in the city’s university community, even a television writer and agent in New York, on trips he partly subsidized. She showed her appreciation by calling on him often and even giving him gifts – bath salts, Temple apparel.
But Constand also recounted details that raised red flags, at least in retrospect. In an Ontario lilt, she told of the time he invited her to his show at Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut and asked her to his room to share “baked goods,” then lay back on the bed and brushed his knee against her leg. Or a series of awkward dinners, in which Cosby would invite her to his mansion and have the chef prepare a meal that she would then eat by herself, with Cosby popping in only occasionally to check on her.
Constand appeared upbeat and relaxed as she entered the courtroom, and increasingly serious and impassioned as her testimony wore on. By the time she got to the January 2004 night, the tension had become almost cinematic.
“What are they – are they natural? Are they herbal?” she recalled saying when Cosby handed her three blue pills after a dinner at his home.
“He said, ‘Put them down [your throat]. They’re your friends; they’ll take the edge off,’” she said.
Constand was dubious. So many, she asked? She says he nodded and she told Cosby she trusted him – in their conversations about basketball they had discussed herbal supplements – and swallowed them all.
Things soon went awry, she testified: “I began slurring my words. I told Mr. Cosby I had trouble seeing him – that I could see two of him. My mouth was very cottony.” She said she stood up and found that her legs could barely support her.
He led her to the couch, helped her lie down and provided a pillow for support, and she lost consciousness, she testified. An indeterminate amount of time later, she said, she was jolted awake by physical contact: “I felt Mr. Cosby’s hands groping my breasts under my shirt. I also felt his hand inside my vagina moving in and out. I felt him take my hand and place it on his penis and move it back and forth.”