Cosby team tries to discredit accuser with phone records
Defense lawyers for Bill Cosby hammered away at his main accuser’s account Monday, focusing on her cellphone records they suggested contradicted her story.
The accuser, Andrea Constand, said she had called him as she drove up to his home on the night in January 2004 when she says he sexually assaulted her.
“Can you find one single call for the whole month of January to his Elkins Park number?” Thomas Mesereau, a lawyer for Cosby, asked Constand, as she reviewed the records.
“I might have been mistaken,” Constand said.
Constand remained outwardly calm during two hours of cross-examination in the sexual assault retrial, fending off queries on a variety of topics the defense brought forward to indicate she had converted a consensual sexual encounter with Cosby into a criminal assault in order to score a big payday.
She later said, in redirect testimony, that there were other numbers she was able to call to reach Cosby, whom she has accused of drugging and molesting her at his home near here.
The defense, though, continued to point to the phone records as evidence Constand had kept in touch with Cosby in the following weeks at a level at odds with her account of having been assaulted. They said Constand had called Cosby more than 70 times in the weeks after the encounter, including two calls she made to Cosby on Valentine’s Day that year.
Constand, who was director of operations for the Temple University women’s basketball team at the time, said she was calling Cosby only on matters of business at the university, where he was a powerful trustee and its best-known alumnus. In many cases, she said that she was only returning his calls, perhaps to alert him to a basketball game, and that her contacts were not evidence of any romance.
“I called many people on Valentine’s Day, sir,” she said at one point.
Constand, 45, sued Cosby in 2005 after prosecutors initially declined to take on her case. She later received a settlement of $3.38 million. She has said that Cosby, now 80, took advantage of his position as her mentor to bring her to his home, where he gave her three pills that incapacitated her.
Five other women testified last week that they, too, believe Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted them. Prosecutors presented their testimony in an effort to demonstrate a signature pattern of behavior by Cosby that, they say, later ensnared Constand.
To support the argument Constand’s account is a fabrication, Cosby’s lawyers have said they plan to bring forward an academic adviser at Temple who said she had roomed with her during university basketball trips. The adviser, Marguerite Jackson, has said in court records Constand once told her before the incident with Cosby that she could fabricate a claim of sexual assault about a celebrity to get money.