‘I could not fight him off,’ woman tells Cosby jury on fifth day of trial
NORRISTOWN, Pa. — Bill Cosby was supposed to be her mentor, Andrea Constand told a jury here Friday. Instead he became her attacker, she said, so unrelenting in his sexual pursuit — even after she had rejected his advances — that he drugged and molested her during a visit to his home in January 2004.
“I was kind of jolted awake and felt Mr. Cosby on the couch beside me, behind me, and my vagina was being penetrated quite forcefully, and I felt my breast being touched,” Constand said on the fifth day of Cosby’s sexual assault retrial. “I was limp, and I could not fight him off.”
Constand was more composed and less emotional in giving her account this time than she had been last summer, when she first testified about what she said had happened at Cosby’s house near Philadelphia.
That case ended in a mistrial when the jury became deadlocked. This time, Cosby’s defense team has taken a more aggressive stance toward Constand, describing her as a “con artist” who engaged in a consensual encounter and then concocted a story of assault so as to score a big payday.
Prosecutors seemed cognizant of those efforts to depict Constand in an unflattering light when they asked her why she had agreed to cooperate when they brought charges, even after securing a large financial settlement from Cosby in a 2005 lawsuit. “For justice,” she replied.
Her court appearance followed several days of testimony from five other women who said they believe they, too, had been drugged and sexually assaulted by Cosby.
Cosby is not charged with assaulting the other five women who have testified, but prosecutors hoped to show a pattern of predatory behavior that eventually targeted Constand, 45. Cosby, 80, has denied any inappropriate behavior and said the sex was consensual.