‘Sex assault’ left me confused and humiliated, Cosby trial is told
BILL COSBY’S chief accuser took the stand at his sexual assault trial yesterday, describing how she felt “humiliated and confused” after the US comedian drugged and molested her at his home in 2004.
Andrea Constand told the court that Mr Cosby groped her and made her touch him after giving her pills that left her paralysed and helpless.
Her voice quivered as she described the alleged attack at Mr Cosby’s home near Philadelphia, while the 79-yearold comedian once known as “America’s Dad” shook his head.
Ms Constand said Mr Cosby had given her three blue pills that he claimed were herbal to help her relieve stress. “They’re your friends, they’ll take the edge off,” she recalled him as saying. “I said ‘I trust you’,” the then30-year-old recalled saying at the time.
She told the court that she began to feel woozy after about 20 minutes, with blurred vision, slurred words and legs that felt like rubber. She said Cosby then sexually assaulted her and that she was unable to push him away or tell him to stop.
“In my head, I was trying to get my hands to move, my legs to move, but I was frozen,” she said. “I wanted it to stop.”
Mr Cosby, once America’s highest paid actor, has been accused by dozens of women of sexual assaulting them after plying them with drugs, dating back to the 1960s. However, all the claims against him are too old to be the subject of criminal prosecution – apart from Ms Constand’s.
Mr Cosby, who has denied all the allegations, could get 10 years in prison if convicted.
Ms Constand said she first met the comedian in late 2002, when she was the newly hired director of basketball operations for Temple University’s women’s basketball programme and he was the university’s most famous alumnus.
The pair spoke several times on the phone, she said, and Mr Cosby began inviting her for dinner and other events, such as a jazz concert in New York. Yesterday was the first time Ms Constand had spoken about Cosby in public, having been barred from doing so under the terms of a confidential settlement they reached in 2006.
Ms Constand will now face cross-examination from Mr Cosby’s lawyers, who have argued that the two had a romantic relationship, that she was not incapacitated and that the sexual encounter was consensual.
Mr Cosby, who is almost blind, has said he will not testify in the trial in Philadelphia, which is expected to last about two weeks.