Names and faces
Jurors at Bill Cosby’s sex-assault trial can hear his deposition testimony about quaaludes but not his references to the supposed aphrodisiac Spanish fly, a judge ruled Friday. The 79-yearold Cosby is accused of drugging and molesting Temple University employee Andrea Constand at his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004. He calls the encounter consensual. In the decade-old deposition from an earlier lawsuit, Cosby said he got seven prescriptions for quaaludes in the 1970s, intending not to take them himself but to give them to women he was pursuing for sex. The powerful sedatives were banned in 1983, and Cosby said he no longer had them when he met Constand 20 years later. Defense lawyers therefore pushed to exclude his testimony about quaaludes from the trial. Prosecutors sought to include Cosby’s comedic riffs about Spanish fly to show a familiarity with date-rape drugs. The defense called the references, in his 1991 book Childhood and a Larry King interview that same year, nothing more than fanciful stories about adolescence. Cosby, once known as America’s Dad for his beloved portrayal of Dr. Cliff Huxtable on his top-ranked The Cosby Show in the 1980s and ’90s, is charged with felony sexual assault. Montgomery County Judge Steven O’Neill also ruled Friday to exclude from Cosby’s trial references to Constand’s lawsuit or the settlement. Jury selection is set to start May 22, and opening arguments are set for June 5. Cosby settled Constand’s lawsuit for an undisclosed sum after giving four days of deposition testimony. He has pleaded innocent in the criminal case, which prosecutors reopened in 2015 after key parts of the deposition were unsealed.
Conservative pundit Ann Coulter did not turn up in Berkeley, Calif., where hundreds held a raucous but largely peaceful demonstration Thursday in her absence and lamented what they called the latest blow to free speech in the home of America’s free speech movement. Coulter’s canceled appearance at the University of California, Berkeley, drew hundreds of her supporters to a downtown park about a mile from campus. While six people were arrested, there were no major confrontations between Coulter’s supporters and opponents. In canceling, the school cited fears of violence. University police erected barricades and refused to let any protesters enter the campus.