Accusers lash out at Cosby
NORRISTOWN, Pa. — Two accusers lashed out at Bill Cosby from the witness stand on Wednesday morning, as his sexual assault retrial took a dramatic turn in its third day of testimony.
“You remember, don’t you, Mr. Cosby?” Chelan Lasha tearfully challenged the defendant, interrupting Judge Steven T. O’Neill as he attempted to dismiss the jury for lunch. The once-aspiring model had just finished recounting for jurors how she said the comedy icon knocked her out with pills and assaulted her in 1986 in a Las Vegas hotel room, when she was 17.
Cosby smiled slightly as she spoke; his lawyers stood in anger, asking the judge to declare a mistrial. O’Neill denied the request.
Lasha’s remark came just minutes after another accuser, Heidi Thomas, who says Cosby drugged and abused her in 1984, had finished testifying, but not before declaring under cross-examination, “I want to see a serial rapist convicted.”
The women are the first of five accusers being called to publicly testify for the first time about Cosby’s alleged sexual misconduct, in a bid by prosecutors to prove that the entertainer used an established pattern of behavior to drug and assault Andrea Constand in 2004. Only one of the more than 60 women who have accused him was permitted to testify at the first trial, which ended with a hung jury.
Lasha, of Palmdale, was tearful from the moment she took the witness stand and stated her name. Letting out loud sobs between words, she said she had just graduated high school and was an aspiring model when she met Cosby nearly 32 years ago. He visited her grandparents’ home in Las Vegas, called her and her grandmother on the phone, and eventually invited her to the Elvis Presley Suite at the Las Vegas Hilton to pose for modeling photos.
Lasha had a cold that day, she said, and after a photographer took pictures of her Cosby offered her what he said was an antihistamine with a shot of amaretto. She said she became woozy and Cosby helped her to a bed, where he lay next to her, grabbed her breasts, humped her and grunted.
“Dr. Huxtable wouldn’t do this,” Lasha said she was thinking at the time. “You said you were going to help me. What are you doing to me?”