THE CREEPIEST COSBY SHOW
His TV sitcom made him the most beloved star in America. Then scores of women accused Bill Cosby of drugging and sexually assaulting them. Yesterday the trial began that could see him die in prison . . .
Bill Cosby cut a shambling figure as he hobbled into court yesterday. The star of The Cosby show and one of America’s most revered cultural icons was about to come face to face with his potential nemesis.
Andrea Constand is the only woman out of scores who have claimed they were sexually assaulted by him to have succeeded in getting her day in court.
When she received an invitation to Cosby’s sprawling mansion in the suburbs of Philadelphia one evening in January 2004, she was wary. Twice before, the attractive former college basketball star had been forced to rebuff his embarrassing sexual advances. That night Cosby had told her he would be alone and to dress in ‘comfortable clothing’.
but she wanted to trust him. He was her mentor and some 36 years her senior — older than her father — and she needed his advice about furthering her career as a sports manager at the university where Cosby was on the board of trustees. When Constand, then 31, arrived, he poured her a glass of wine in the kitchen and disappeared upstairs.
He returned with three blue pills which he urged her to swallow, assuring her they were a herbal formulation that would ‘cheer her up’.
After no more than half an hour, she said her vision blurred and she could not speak. she was unable to resist or think as Cosby led her to a sofa. she felt his hands on her breasts and inside her jeans, and then she passed out.
she woke at 4am, her sweater bunched up around her neck, her bra on back-to-front and her nether regions feeling ‘raw’.
According to her evidence, Cosby was waiting in the hall. He offered her a blueberry muffin and walked her to the door, saying only ‘All right?’ as he ushered her out.
When Constand went to the police — some 12 months later — Cosby told a different story. yes, they had indeed had sex, but it had been consensual and the pills he’d given her had simply been the antihistamine benadryl.
He prided himself on being a ‘pretty decent reader of people and their emotions in these romantic sexual things’ and knew his advances had been willingly returned.
According to Constand’s lawyer, Cosby was such a good judge of ‘romantic sexual things’ that he hadn’t known Constand was a lesbian until police told him.
This week a jury in Norristown, Pennsylvania, is being asked to decide which of them — Cosby or Constand — is telling the truth in a trial that may bring to a conclusion one of the greatest sex scandals in Hollywood history.
Cosby, 79, denies a charge of aggravated indecent assault related to that single night. since 2000, more than 50 women have come forward to say Cosby raped or sexually assaulted them in cases dating back to 1965.
Many never went to the police or, when they did, they discovered that legally it was too late as the alleged offences were beyond the statute of limitations for sexual assault.
(The Cosby camp has always questioned why it took so long for women who claimed they had been assaulted to speak out, suggesting they are ‘opportunist liars’.)
so the whole case against Cosby now stands or falls on Constand’s allegations. Unlike other claims against him, it has not fallen foul of the statute of limitations — and there is potentially damning testimony from Cosby himself.
The defence has already indicated it will try to portray Constand as Cosby’s scheming ex-lover who is lying about their consensual relationship.
They will ask why she went to his house — knowing he was alone — after he had twice made sexual advances, and why she waited so long before going to the police.
Constand has said she delayed because she was concerned about her job at the university and was weighed down by an ‘element of fear’.
it seems as if every week brings allegations of a male celebrity preying sexually on his star-struck female fans.
The Cosby case, however, inhabits an all- together different universe of scandal. For bill Cosby was not just any other TV star but the man dubbed ‘America’s Dad’.
With his globally popular comedy series The Cosby show, which ran from 1984 to 1992 and in which he played the kind-hearted patriarch Dr Cliff Huxtable, Cosby was credited with not only reinventing U.s. family TV but also American culture. Here, at last, was a loving, middleclass black family that white Americans could embrace as proof their country had finally overcome its racial demons.
The idea that bill Cosby had feet of clay has been a very hard notion for many to swallow.
Most of his accusers, denied their day in court, have already spoken out, perhaps emboldened by their sheer number.
one of them is Victoria Valentino, a former Playboy pin-up and bunny girl, now 73. she has described Cosby as ‘like a hawk looking at a little mouse’ as he stared at one of her female friends after drugging her into a comatose state one night in 1970.
Cosby had taken Valentino, then 26, and her friend out for dinner in los Angeles. she says Cosby gave them pills with their wine to make them ‘ feel better’. When their speech suddenly became slurred and their movement sluggish, he offered to take them home.
but instead he drove them to a flat in the Hollywood Hills
where Valentino said he raped her as she tried to draw his attentions away from her unconscious friend. When she asked him how they could get home, he said: ‘Call a cab.’ Valentino said she kept what happened to herself, but was so shattered by the experience she started self-harming.
‘I felt stupid and dirty and used and embarrassed and shamed, with an impotent anger inside of me,’ she says. ‘I symbolically tried to slash my wrists with my grandmother’s sewing scissors.’
Among the Hollywood fraternity it was well-known that Cosby — married to Camille for 53 years — was a serial philanderer who received a stream of attractive young visitors on set. But nothing was ever said.
Lili Bernard was one of many pretty aspiring actresses ‘mentored’ by Cosby. Her reward was a brief walk- on part on one episode of The Cosby Show.
‘He praised me . . . he lifted me up. I believed him. After all, he was Bill Cosby,’ she said tearfully at a press conference. ‘After he had won my complete trust and adoration, he drugged me and raped me.’
He put a pillow over her face to stifle her screams, she recalled.
Ms Bernard, now an artist, says she last had contact with him in 1992 when he threatened her, saying: ‘ As far as I’m concerned, Bernard, you’re dead . . . I never wanna see your face again. Now get the hell out of here!’
A few of his victims had consensual sexual relationships with Cosby before he assaulted them, too.
Beth Ferrier, a former model who works as a flight attendant, had an affair with the star for several months in the mid-Eighties. A few weeks after they broke up, he asked her to a show in Denver where he gave her a ‘favourite’ cappuccino. She woke up hours later in the back of her car, her clothes in a mess.
‘I was definitely drugged. All I had to drink was coffee and the room was spinning,’ she recalled. ‘I wondered, I still wonder: “What did he do with me? Why was my bra unhooked? What happened?” ’
Astonishingly, she first made those claims publicly in 2006 when she was one of 13 women who agreed to testify in support of a civil lawsuit brought against Cosby by Andrea Constand.
Constand, now 43, had sued Cosby in a civil case after prosecutors decided there was insufficient evidence to bring criminal charges. (Before the civil case reached trial, Cosby and Constand reached a confidential settlement.)
In the wake of this case, the U.S. media and Hollywood returned to fawning over Cosby. In 2009, he was awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. It was another gong to add to the Presidential Medal of Freedom — America’s highest civilian honour — given to him by George W. Bush, and the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award he was handed at the 2003 Emmys.
For his accusers, however, the consequences of speaking out were nightmarish. ‘ I lost everything,’ said Ferrier. She repeatedly had to change her phone number because she says she was being threatened and her modelling work dried up.
Even her family stopped speaking to her, as did friends — appalled by her attempt to ‘ besmirch’ the saintly name of Bill Cosby.
It wasn’t until october 2014 when a black stand- up comedian, Hannibal Buress, let rip a tirade against Cosby from the stage including the rape allegations — and wasn’t sued — that American journalists began to pursue the case more rigorously.
According to more cynical observers who had monitored the story for years, Crosby had only escaped justice for so long because his critics were terrified of being accused of racism.
Now another black man had raised the issue and the predominantly white U.S. media at last felt able to sit up and take notice.
The trickle of female accusers coming forward to share their stories became a deluge. Child abuse was added to the charge list after Judy Huth claimed he sexually assaulted her at the Playboy Mansion when she was just 15.
Cosby refused to comment, but his lawyers rejected vehemently the claims, insisting he was the victim of a malicious stitch-up. However, TV companies began to cancel plans to work with him, and academic institutions cut their connections. But it all seemed too late to bring him to justice.
Then, in July 2015, came a crucial breakthrough. Following media pressure, the judge in the 2005 civil case brought by Andrea Constand agreed to release the confidential court papers to the public.
They revealed that Cosby had admitted in a deposition that he had given powerful tranquiliser drugs called Quaaludes to women with whom he had wanted to have sex. Insisting that it was always consensual, Cosby also conceded chasing young women for sex after promising to mentor their careers.
Incredibly, given the allegations against him, Cosby said he tended to refrain from full sexual intercourse as he didn’t want women falling in love with him before he ‘moved on’ to his next target.
HE ALSo admitted he had been immediately attracted to Constand when he saw her playing basketball in a match at his alma mater, Temple University, Philadelphia, where she was a team coach.
They became friends. At the time of the alleged assault she was the basketball team’s director of operations at the university.
The revelations prompted Pennsylvania prosecutors five months later to charge Cosby with aggravated indecent assault on Constand. In May last year, a judge ordered he stand trial which began yesterday. If found guilty, Cosby could face up to ten years in jail.
Constand’s evidence is likely to be backed up by another prosecution witness, known only as ‘Kacey’. She was Cosby’s former agent and says he drugged and assaulted her in 1996.
Prosecutors had asked to include evidence from a dozen women but the judge, for reasons which have yet to emerge, ruled that only ‘Kacey’ could do so.
For so many years, Cosby had the weight of public opinion on his side. Now, in a last-minute attempt to drum up public sympathy, he has given interviews to the American media portraying himself as the victim of racism and even revenge from those he might have crossed in his long career.
His wife Camille remains loyal, although she has rarely been seen in public since 2014. Some of their five grown-up children have also spoken up to defend their father against the ‘liars’, while his TV ‘wife’, Phylicia rashad, who played Claire Huxtable in The Cosby Show, has ‘never wavered’ in her support.
Cosby, who arrived at court armin-arm with Keshia Knight Pulliam, who played his television daughter rudy, has said he won’t give evidence. Friends say he is now ‘completely blind’ from a degenerative eye disease. Confined to his mansion, he has been living ‘in his own personal hell’.
As the case began yesterday, Assistant District Attorney Kristen Feden warned the jury not to fall into the trap of confusing Cosby with the beloved family man he played on TV.
‘We think we really know them [TV stars]. In reality, we only have a glimpse of who they really are,’ she said. He used his power and fame to violate Andrea Constand, she added.
In his opening statement, defence lawyer Brian McMonagle attacked what he said were inconsistencies in Constand’s story, disputed that she was incapacitated, and made the case that she and Cosby had a romantic relationship.
No doubt, over the next two weeks, the truth will emerge. It is safe to say that few of Cosby’s remaining friends in showbusiness hold much hope that he will emerge with his reputation restored.