‘I was frozen.’ Accuser Andrea Constand for the first time publicly recounts her interactions with Bill Cosby.
NORRISTOWN, Pa. — 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, 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 put 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 a.m. or 5 a.m.
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.
At least once before the night in question, she testified, Cosby touched her inappropriately.
« Mr. Cosby again came and sat down beside me…..he sat very close to me and commented on my pants and touched the side of my waist and took his hand and attempted to unbutton my button, ” she told the jury. “When I felt that, I leaned forward and he took his hand away…’I said I’ m not here for that, I don’ t want that.’ ”
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.”
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.
« It had more to do with business than it did with me personally, » she said.
Her testimony provided a dramatic punctuation to Day 2 of Cosby’s trial, which opened in the morning with prosecutors seeking to bolster the trial’s secondary star witness whose testimony that she was drugged and molested by Cosby was undermined on cross-examination by some discrepancies in her account.
Judge Steven O’Neill allowed prosecutors to call the mother and ex-lawyer of Kelly Johnson, a former employee of Cosby’s agent, who testified Monday that she was drugged and assaulted by Cosby, 79, in a bungalow at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles in 1996 — even though she said under oath in the past that their encounter happened in 1991.
Johnson’s mother, Patrice Sewell, told the jury on Tuesday that her daughter called her distraught in 1996, fearing Cosby was trying to get her fired from her job. She said her daughter later told her she woke up next to Cosby in bed with her clothes undone — an account that tallied with what Johnson testified about on Monday.
“She said Mr. Cosby asked her to meet her at the Bel-Air Hotel to talk about her career.… And when she went to the hotel she was directed to (a bungalow) , ” Sewell testified. When she arrived, Cosby appeared in slippers and a robe, she said.
“He said you don’ t have anything to be nervous about. Then he offered her a drink. And said she should take a pill… She tried to refuse, and she put it under her tongue. He asked her to raise her tongue.”
Johnson didn’ t tell police about the encounter at the time because she wanted to avoid the shame and humiliation directed toward victims of sexual assault who go public, Sewell said.
Joseph Miller, a worker’s compensation lawyer who represented Johnson, says he was surprised by « things of a sexual nature » Johnson recounted during her 1996 deposition for her claim that she’d developed debilitating stress from her secretarial job at Cosby’s agency.
“He had exposed himself to her, taken some of her clothing off, ” Miller said on the stand. Cosby “wanted her to fondle him and she didn’ t want to do that… She cried several times during the deposition, I remember she was tearful during the session.”
During cross-examination, defense attorneys attempted to poke holes in Sewell’s account regarding why Johnson left her job at the agency, using lawyers’ notes taken during Johnson’s deposition because the document itself could not be found. Miller testified that he and his business partner decided not to create a transcript of the deposition due to the sensitive nature of the testimony.
Defense lawyers tried to establish that Johnson did not leave her job because of an incident with Cosby.
“We ended up settling the case for a lump sum of money (about $10,000) , that was to be paid to Ms. Johnson by the William Morris agency, » Miller said.
A Toronto police detective also testified Tuesday, telling the jury that Constand (she is from Toronto and moved back there after the Cosby encounter) told him she had been drugged by Cosby at his home after they had been out to dinner with friends in 2004.
“They were alone and she said Mr. Cosby gave her a couple of pills to help her relax, ” said Det. Dave Mason of Durham Regional Police, who is trained in sexual assault investigations.“She said her legs felt like jelly… I remember her being a little embarrassed as she told the story.”
On cross-examination, lead defense attorney Brian McMonagle asked Mason if Constand told him she had never been alone with Cosby prior to that night. That is correct, Mason said.
In fact, the defense contended, Cosby and Constand had been alone at least twice before in homes in the Philadelphia area and in Connecticut.
Cosby is being tried on three counts of aggravated indecent sexual assault stemming from an encounter with Constand in 2004 at his nearby estate in suburban Philadelphia.
Constand is the star witness, testifying in public for the first time about what she says happened more than 13 years ago. He says their encounter was consensual. She says he drugged her — leaving her nearly paralyzed — and then molested her.
Constand’s testimony is crucial because there is no contemporaneous forensic evidence. She waited a year before reporting the encounter to authorities, and prosecutors at the time declined to press charges then due to lack of evidence.
