Jury hears lurid decade-old testimony
Cosby’s 2005 statement read
NORRISTOWN, Pa. — The jury at Bill Cosby’s sexual assault trial heard from the comedian without him actually taking the stand Thursday as prosecutors read into the record his lurid, decade-old testimony about giving pills to Andrea Constand and then reaching into her pants.
Jurors sat riveted and took notes as they heard the TV star say that as he touched Ms. Constand’s body at his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004, “I don’t hear her say anything. And I don’t feel her say anything. And so I continue and I go into the area that is somewhere between permission and rejection.”
“I am not stopped,” he said.
Mr. Cosby testified in 2005 as part of a lawsuit brought against him by Ms. Constand. He eventually settled the case for an undisclosed sum, and his deposition was sealed for years, until a judge released parts in 2015 at the request of The Associated Press.
A portion of it was read aloud by a detective Thursday afternoon, with more expected on Friday, including Mr. Cosby talking about giving quaaludes and alcohol to women he wanted to have sex with.
Mr. Cosby, 79, could spend the rest of his life in prison if convicted of drugging and molesting Ms. Constand, a former employee of Temple University’s women’s basketball program. He has said the sexual encounter was consensual.
Ms. Constand, 44, testified this week that Mr. Cosby penetrated her with his fingers against her will after giving her pills that left her so limp that she was unable to push him away or tell him to stop.
Mr. Cosby, who said recently that he did not intend to testify at his trial, showed little reaction as the deposition was read.
In his testimony, he said he gave Ms. Constand three halftablets of the cold and allergy medicine Benadryl before the “petting” began. Prosecutors have suggested he drugged her with something stronger, perhaps the quaaludes he admitted obtaining decades ago.
It was the unsealing of the deposition that spurred Pennsylvania prosecutors to reopen their investigation and let loose a flood of similar allegations from dozens of women that all but destroyed his niceguy image from “The Cosby Show” as America’s Dad.
Prosecutors on Thursday also read into the record Mr. Cosby’s 2005 statement to police, in which he gave a similar account of the night in question, saying he gave Ms. Constand the Benadryl to help her relax.
Also Thursday, a detective testified that Bruce Castor, the district attorney who decided more than a decade ago not to bring charges against Mr. Cosby, shut the investigation down in 2005 while police were still working the case.