Cosby paid $3.38M to settle previous sex claim
Norristown, Pa. — For years, Bill Cosby and the lanky former professional women’s basketball player who had accused him of sexual assault shared a secret.
They’d made a deal — a deal that required them both to keep their mouths shut. According to their arrangement, they would have to keep quiet about the substance of the allegations, but also about the price of that pact — the settlement that Cosby’s accuser, Andrea Constand, received to end her lawsuit against the legendary comedian.
On Monday, during opening statements in Cosby’s retrial on charges of sexually assaulting Constand, a state prosecutor formally wiped away that vow of secrecy, revealing for the first time that the entertainer paid his accuser $3,380,000 to end their dispute in 2006.
The settlement, which was not revealed in Cosby’s first trial before it ended last June with a hung jury, plays a pivotal role for both sides as the 80-year-old comedian returns to the courtroom. The defense hopes to use the settlement to cement a version of events in which Constand is a greedy schemer who lied to extract money from a wealthy celebrity. The prosecution, if it hopes to prevail, will have to persuade jurors to look past the seven-figure deal and focus instead on Constand’s accusation that Cosby abused his role as her mentor and tricked her into taking a sedative that so thoroughly immobilized her that she was unable to fend off his sexual advances.
“This case is about trust,” Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele told the jury. “This trust is about betrayal.”
The timeline of the case has always been a challenge for the prosecution, and some jurors stared with quizzical looks on their faces as Steele sought to make sense of a complicated chain of events. The case stretches back to a night in January 2004 when Constand, who’d met Cosby while working as an operations director for the Temple University women’s basketball team, says the comic legend drugged and sexually assaulted her at his suburban Philadelphia home.
Constand, who is more than three decades younger than Cosby, didn’t report the alleged assault until a year later. She filed a lawsuit after another district attorney declined to prosecute Cosby.
Before that case was settled, Cosby gave extraordinary deposition testimony, saying he gave Constand pills and describing their sexual encounter. That testimony remained secret until 2015 when parts of Cosby’s deposition was released publicly by a federal judge overseeing lingering legal disputes that stemmed from Constand’s accusations.