3 women build ‘serial’ case against Cosby
NORRISTOWN (Pennsylvania): Three women who say Bill Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted them in the 1980s gave dramatic and tearful testimony in court on Wednesday, as prosecutors sharpened attempts to portray him as a serial predator.
The now frail and isolated 80year-old could spend the rest of his life behind bars if convicted of drugging and molesting Andrea Constand, 45, at his Philadelphia home in 2004.
The case has besmirched the legacy of the actor adored by millions as “America’s Dad” for his role as lovable father and obstetrician Cliff Huxtable on the hit television series The Cosby Show.
“I want to see a serial rapist convicted,” Heidi Thomas, a Colorado music teacher and mother of four, said on the stand. She claimed that Cosby assaulted her in Nevada 34 years ago.
Cosby’s first trial here, a Philadelphia suburb, ended in a hung jury in June last year.
Judge Steven O’Neill’s admission of testimony from five other accusers presented the biggest challenge for the defence, who twice called for a mistrial. Both were denied. The first came after Thomas stepped down.
Chelan Lasha then tearfully told the court that the actor drugged her with a blue pill and amaretto when she was 17, months after graduating high school. She woke up wearing a hotel robe, she said.
“You remember, don’t you, Cosby?” Lasha said tearfully, looking at the impassive entertainer, cutting through the judge’s remarks to the jury.
The defence called again for a mistrial, a request again rejected. The judge told jurors that Lasha’s statement was “stricken from the record”.
Janice Baker-Kinney, the third accuser told jurors that she was raped by Cosby when she was 24years-old, after he pressed her to take two pills that she believed were “Quaaludes” — a sedative that Cosby had admitted obtaining with a view to having sex.
Baker-Kinney, a bartender in Reno at the time, said she passed out, before waking up the next morning naked in bed with him.
“There was a sticky wetness between my legs and it felt like I had had sex,” she said, testifying that for decades she blamed herself.
Fending off aggressive crossexamination from Cosby’s celebrity defence attorney, Baker-Kinney stuck to her guns.
She insisted her prior drug use and subsequent alcohol addiction was not an issue at the time of the alleged rape, and refused to accept that she was either on a money-grabbing quest or had been swayed to consider the incident as rape only after other accusers started coming forward.