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Bill Cosby faces aggravated indecent assault charges
(AP Photo/Matt Slocum)
Jurors weighing the fate of Bill Cosby were allowed to hear graphic testimony from a 2005 deposition in which the comedian described a sexual encounter with accuser Andrea Constand in detail.
Prosecutors won the right to introduce the deposition, which Cosby gave in connection with a civil suit filed by Constand, at the sexual assault retrial on charges he drugged and molested her at his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004.
The ruling by Judge Steven T. O’Neill gave the prosecution a key victory in its effort to portray Cosby as a serial sexual predator.
In the deposition, Cosby described his attempt to obtain consent from Constand during a previous encounter.
“I’m giving Andrea time to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ about an area that is right there in the question zone,” Cosby testified.
He said he rubbed the skin above her trousers and “without talking I’m asking can I go farther.”
“I don’t hear her say anything. And I don’t feel her say anything,” Cosby said. “And so I continue and I go into the area that is somewhere between permission and rejection. I am not stopped.”
Constand has testified that she rejected Cosby’s previous advances.
The deposition was also included at Cosby’s first trial, which ended with a hung jury last year.
Prosecutors used another of Cosby’s statements — given to police in 2005 — to show how he described the encounter for which he is facing aggravated indecent assault charges. These could send him to prison for years.
Cosby said he gave Constand one and a half tablets of the cold and allergy medicine Benadryl to help her relax, then fondled her breasts and genitals, according to the transcript, which was read to the jury on Tuesday morning.
Cosby said Constand never told him to stop.
“We are petting. I enjoyed it,” the TV star said, according to the transcript. “And then I stopped and I went up to bed. We stopped and then we talked.”
Constand says Cosby knocked her out with the pills and then sexually assaulted her, penetrating her with his fingers and guiding her hand to his penis. Cosby told police he didn’t remember whether Constand touched his genitals.
The jury was expected to hear later about Cosby’s acknowledged use of Quaaludes, a popular party drug in the 1970s that was banned in the U.S. in 1982, to help get women to have sex with him.
Cosby said in his deposition that he had obtained several prescriptions for quaaludes from his doctor in Los Angeles in the 1970s, ostensibly for a sore back. The long-married comedian said he never took the drug, instead giving it to women he wanted to have sex with “the same as a person would say, ‘Have a drink.'”
“Quaaludes happen to be the drug that kids, young people, were using to party with, and there were times when I wanted to have them just in case,” Cosby testified.
The comic ultimately settled Constand’s lawsuit for nearly $3.4 million.
Cosby’s lawyers argued the testimony is irrelevant to his retrial because there is no evidence he gave Constand the drug. Prosecutors have suggested otherwise.
The unsealing of the deposition, at the request of The Associated Press, led prosecutors to reopen Cosby’s criminal case in 2015.
A police sergeant who investigated Constand’s allegation a decade earlier testified Tuesday that the probe was abruptly shut down before police had finished their work.
Cheltenham Township Police Sgt. Richard Schaffer told jurors that then-District Attorney Bruce Castor announced he was closing the probe hours after investigators met to discuss leads that needed to be followed up — and just four weeks after Constand went to police. Castor has said the evidence showed both parties “could be held in less than a flattering light.”
On Monday, Constand rejected defense allegations that she concocted her story to score a big payday, and her mother testified that Cosby apologized in a phone call and called himself a “sick man.”
Andrea and Gianna Constand’s testimony followed that of five additional accusers who told jurors that Cosby drugged and assaulted them two decades earlier.
As Cosby arrived at the courthouse Tuesday, his spokeswoman, Ebonee Benson, told reporters that Constand’s testimony “seemed to be more colorful and more embellished” than at the first trial.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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