Constand takes the stand in Cosby trial
Main accuser recalls encounter for the first time in public
Andrea Constand, star witness and main accuser in Bill Cosby’s sexual assault trial here, took the stand Tuesday and for the first time in public told a jury that her former Temple University mentor drugged her to the point of near paralysis and then assaulted her as she lay helpless on a couch at his home in suburban Philadelphia in 2004.
The Canadian- born Constand, 44, testified she went to Cosby’s home to talk about her career. He offered her three blue pills to help her “relax,” she said. She asked if they were herbal, and he assured her they were.
“He said ‘ put them down, they’re your friends. They’ll take the edge off.’ ... I said ‘ I trust you’ and I took the pills and swallowed them down. ... And I started to panic.”
Cosby brought her to his couch and laid her down, she said. “He said, ‘ It’s time for you to relax.’ ”
“I thought I was having a bad reaction. ... My legs were getting rubbery. ... I don’t really remember passing out.”
Some time later, she was jolted awake, she said, and felt Cosby’s hand “groping my breasts.” She said she felt his hand in her vagina and he placed her hand on his penis. She wanted to stop him, she said, but wasn’t able to do so.
“I was frozen. ... The next thing I recall is putting my two feet on the ground and feeling my ( bra) around my neck,” about 4 or 5 a. m.
In tears, Constand said she felt humiliated and confused as she drove away from Cosby’s house the morning after.
Under prosecution questioning, Constand, who worked in the Temple basketball program ( she’s now a massage therapist living in Toronto), said that after she met Cosby in 2002, she developed a friendship with the Temple alum, and met him several times at his home and at restaurants and in New York.
Once before the night in question, she testified, Cosby touched her inappropriately.
So why did she continue to go back to visit Cosby, she was asked. “I wasn’t scared of someone making a pass at me or an advance at me,” she said.
Cosby’s defense team noted in their opening statement that, despite telling police she had no contact with Cosby after that night, there were 72 phone calls between them, 53 initiated by her.
Constand told jurors the calls mostly involved the women’s basketball team, especially around tournament time.
Under cross- examination, defense lawyer Angela Agrusa pointed out omissions and misstatements Constand made during her contacts with police. She told Toronto police she had known Cosby for sixmonths, when it really was 18 months. She also told them she had never been alone with him prior to the encounter in question, which also wasn’t true.
Her testimony provided a dramatic punctuation to Day 2 of Cosby’s trial. In the morning, prosecutors sought to bolster the trial’s secondary star witness, whose testimony on Monday that she was drugged and molested by Cosby was blunted on cross- examination by some discrepancies in her account. Puente reported fromMcLean, Va.