Eight years after her testimony led to Bill Cosby’s conviction on sex assault charges, and five years after that verdict was overturned, Andrea Constand returned to the witness stand on Thursday to provide evidence in a civil case brought by another Cosby accuser.
Donna Motsinger, 84, a former waitress at a Sausalito restaurant, has accused Mr. Cosby in a lawsuit of drugging and raping her in 1972 when she was 31 after he escorted her to one of his comedy shows.
Ms. Constand, 52, is one of three women whom Ms. Motsinger’s lawyers have said they plan on calling as witnesses because their accounts of being abused by Mr. Cosby so closely resemble their client’s.
Ms. Constand went first, and during several hours of testimony in Los Angeles Superior Court, she described her history with the entertainer and how she had felt after her encounter with the celebrity who had become her friend and mentor.
“Really shocked,” she told the jury. “Humiliated at what had happened. And I think I was pretty fearful, and pretty scared.”
In 2004, Ms. Constand was working as a director of operations for the women’s basketball program at Temple University, where Mr. Cosby was an important and engaged alumnus. In testimony that mirrored what she had said during Mr. Cosby’s criminal trial in 2018, she described a night at Mr. Cosby’s home in a Philadelphia suburb when, she said, he gave her three pills, ostensibly to calm her nerves, that incapacitated her before she was sexually assaulted.
Mr. Cosby has denied assaulting any of the women who have come forward to accuse him of sexual misconduct, including Ms. Motsinger, who sat in the courtroom watching as Ms. Constand described feeling betrayed by the older man she had once trusted. Mr. Cosby was not present on Thursday.
Ms. Constand told a jury that, after taking the pills, her vision blurred, her words began to slur, and she lost control of her limbs. After Mr. Cosby escorted her to a couch, she said, she went in and out of consciousness, and at one point realized that Mr. Cosby was feeling her breasts, touching her vagina and masturbating himself with her hand. But she said she could not do anything to stop him and could not and did not consent. When she initially confronted Mr. Cosby about six weeks later, she said, he responded with a question: “You had an orgasm, didn’t you?”
Like Ms. Constand, Ms. Motsinger says in her court papers that Mr. Cosby gave her wine and a pill that left her incapacitated and that she woke up the next morning half dressed in her bed and recognized that she had been raped.
Mr. Cosby, 88, has acknowledged pursuing women for sex, but said it was always consensual and that any drugs he might have supplied were taken by the women with full knowledge of what they were ingesting. His lawyers have depicted him as someone who unfairly became a target of the emotions stirred by the #MeToo movement.
During cross-examination, Mr. Cosby’s lawyer, Jennifer Bonjean, appeared to be seeking to establish that Ms. Constand’s relationship with Mr. Cosby had in fact been a romantic one, meaningful and intimate. She emphasized the number of calls the pair had exchanged and the dinners they had together and pointed out that some had involved brandy or a lit fire. She repeatedly asked Ms. Constand to reaffirm that Mr. Cosby’s wife had never been there during those meetings.
The lawyer also sought to establish inconsistencies between some of Ms. Constand’s testimony and things she had told Canadian police investigators years ago, including a statement that she had known Mr. Cosby for only about six months and that they had never been alone together.
“I was traumatized — my brain wasn’t working right,” Ms. Constand said on Thursday, seeking to explain a discrepancy.
The proceedings in a modest courthouse in Santa Monica drew only about a dozen people, who filled the small courtroom, and did not at all resemble the media firestorm that had surrounded Mr. Cosby’s criminal trial. After his conviction in Ms. Constand’s case, he served three years of a three- to 10-year sentence at a maximum-security prison outside Philadelphia. But his conviction was overturned on appeal in 2021 by a judicial panel that ruled that a “non-prosecution agreement” with a previous prosecutor meant that he should not have been charged in the Constand case.
Lawyers did not ask Ms. Constand about her feelings on Mr. Cosby’s release.
Since he left prison, Mr. Cosby has largely stayed out of the public eye. During a deposition in the Motsinger case last fall, he described the financial downturn he had experienced because he had been unable to get the high-profile work he once enjoyed as a comedy star whose “Cosby Show” became a major television success.
“Due to allegations, whether they be newspaper, radio, television, magazines, or just plain internet, I have not worked in about 10 years, or more,” he said in the deposition. He added, “That means I have not earned a cent through my being an entertainer, a writer, a television performer, except in reruns, and my net worth has gone down like a submarine with no motor.”
He has faced foreclosure on two New York properties and sold one of them, a Manhattan townhouse, last year for $28 million. He still owns another house in New York and also has homes in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.
While dozens of women have come forward over the years with accusations of sexual misconduct by Mr. Cosby, the Constand case was the only one to result in criminal charges. Many other Cosby accusers feared they had been denied their day in court because they did not come forward with their accusations until after the time allowed for charges or lawsuits under the statute of limitations.
But California is among the states that have in recent years amended the statutes in sexual assault cases to allow cases like Ms. Motsinger’s to be pursued even after a lengthy passage of time. Several of Mr. Cosby’s accusers played a part in the movement that led to the reforms. More than a dozen other suits against Mr. Cosby are pending in states including New York and Nevada.
The judge in the Motsinger case, Judge Bradley S. Phillips, allowed her lawyers to call Ms. Constand and other women who have accused Mr. Cosby of sexual assault to testify on the stand in support of Ms. Motsinger. He said he had done so because their claims were “sufficiently similar to Plaintiff’s testimony and allegations to be admitted as evidence of a common plan or design used by Defendant.”
Opening statements in the trial began on Tuesday, and the trial is expected to last for two weeks.
Matt Stevens is a Times reporter who writes about arts and culture from Los Angeles.
The post Andrea Constand Testifies in Support of Another Bill Cosby Accuser appeared first on New York Times.
