Cosby trial: ‘This is a dirty old man with a young girl’
NORRISTOWN, Pennsylvania: Bill Cosby thought he could talk his way out of his problems with the woman who accused him of drugging and sexually assaulting her.
Jurors in the comedian’s sexual assault trial have heard a taped recording of one of Cosby’s phone conversations in 2005 with Gianna Constand, the mother of his alleged victim, Andrea Constand. But it wasn’t until Friday — on the fifth day of Cosby’s trial — that jurors learned what was going through the comic legend’s mind during those conversations.
“I’m thinking this is a dirty old man with a young girl,” Cosby said, according to a decade-old deposition read to jurors on Friday by a police officer. “The mother is coming at me for being a dirty old man.”
The deposition, which Cosby submitted to as part of a civil lawsuit filed against him by Andrea Constand, is a key piece of evidence for prosecutors seeking to convict the 79-yearold comedian of three counts of aggravated indecent assault. Cosby was deposed over four days in late 2005 and early 2006.
Constand, then an administrator with Temple University’s women’s basketball team, was 30 at the time of the alleged crime in 2004. Cosby, then in his 60s, sat on the Philadelphia school’s board of trustees.
One of the deposition’s most explosive revelations is Cosby’s admission that he acquired Quaaludes to give to women with whom he wanted to have sex. But those passages were not read to jurors on Friday, and it’s unclear when or if they will ever hear about his use of the powerful sedative. When the deposition first became public in 2015 after media reports, Cosby’s representatives dismissed the Quaalude admissions as artifacts of the wild 1970s, with no relevance to the Constand allegations.
On Friday, during crossexamination of a Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, police officer, James Reape, Cosby’s attorney, Brian McMonagle pounded away with questions about the timeline of the case. McMonagle emphasised that Cosby was deposed only after local prosecutors opted against criminally charging him, and that the criminal investigation was tabled for a decade.
The lengthy deposition transcript, which prosecutors displayed on large courtroom screens, offers a granular look at how Cosby deals with crises. He describes how he tried to negotiate with Constand’s anguished mother, who had just learned of the alleged incident the year before at Cosby’s suburban Philadelphia estate.
Cosby pressed Gianna Constand to agree to an in-person meeting to discuss their problems and the possibility of the wealthy entertainer paying for Andrea Constand to attend graduate school.
“I want to find out what the problem is face-to-face,” Cosby said in the transcript read to jurors.
Cosby had a foundation that gave out education grants, which were approved by an appointed board. But he said in the deposition that he did not intend to get the foundation involved in the proposed payments to Andrea Constand.
Instead, he said his “family” would write a personal cheque to cover the costs of Constand’s education. However, he didn’t plan to be entirely forthcoming with his family.
“My wife would not know it was because Andrea and I had had sex and that Andrea was now very, very upset,” Cosby said, according to the transcript.
The meeting never took place. Earlier in the trial, Constand’s mother testified that she wasn’t looking for money from the entertainer. But there was something wanted from himsomething he was willing to give.
“I apologised to this woman,” Cosby said, according to the deposition. “But my apology was, ‘My God, I’m in trouble with these people because this is an old man and their young daughter.’” — WP-Bloomberg