Cosby witness says accuser spoke of plot to frame
NORRISTOWN, PA. >> The chief accuser at Bill Cosby’s sexual assault retrial talked about framing a celebrity before going to police with her allegations in 2005, a key defense witness testified Wednesday as the TV star’s lawyers began putting on their case.
Marguerite Jackson, an academic adviser at Temple University, said Andrea Constand told her she could fabricate sexual assault allegations and “get that money” from a civil suit, bolstering Cosby’s efforts to show Constand made up the allegations against him to extort a big civil settlement.
Jackson’s account was immediately challenged by prosecutors, who suggested she wasn’t on the trip where she said her conversation with Constand took place.
Her appearance on the witness stand was one of the most highly anticipated moments of a retrial that has Cosby, 80, defending himself against criminal charges that he knocked Constand out with pills and then sexually assaulted her in 2004. Cosby’s lawyers call Constand a “con artist” who set him up.
Prosecutors wound down their case earlier Wednesday, introducing the comedian’s explosive testimony about giving quaaludes to women before sex, an old admission that’s taken on new significance after a half-dozen women testified earlier in the retrial that he drugged and violated them, too.
A police detective read a transcript of the 2005 testimony
Cosby was deposed in 2005 and 2006 after Constand filed suit against him. The deposition was hidden from public view until 2015, when The Associated Press petitioned to have it unsealed, leading prosecutors to reopen the criminal case and file charges.
Jurors at Cosby’s first trial also heard excerpts from the deposition.
In a transcript read to the jury Wednesday, the “Cosby Show” star said he obtained seven prescriptions for quaaludes from his doctor in Los Angeles in the 1970s, ostensibly for a sore back, but added he didn’t use them himself because they made him tired. The sedative was banned in the U.S. in 1982, the same year one of the women who testified, Janice Baker-Kinney, alleges Cosby knocked her out with pills she suspected to be quaaludes and then raped her.