Victim Gives Bill Cosby A ‘Present’ After He Allegedly Raped Her

Andrea Constand told a detective in 2005 that she gave Bill Cosby a sweater as a present during months after she claimed the comedian sexually assaulted her.

Katharine Hart, a former detective for the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office, testified at a preliminary hearing in the criminal case against Cosby in court on Tuesday. A judge ruled that the sexual assault case against Cosby will move forward. If convicted, the 78-year-old comedian could face as much as 10 years in prison.

Constand claims that Cosby sexually assaulted her inside his Philadelphia home in January 2004. A year later, she was interviewed by Hart where she laid out what she said happened between her and Cosby. (Hart read mostly from a transcript in court that Constand reviewed and edited following the interview.)

After testifying for the prosecution, Hart was cross-examined by Cosby’s attorney, Brian McMonagle. His strategy is simple: discredit Constand by questioning her behavior after the alleged rape.

“Is it the case that [Constand] told you she brought her family to his show, and brought him a present, a sweater?” McMonagle asked Hart as he directed her to that portion of Constand’s transcript.

“Yes,” Hart replied.

McMonagle then moved to undercut Constand by contrasting her account of what happened immediately prior to the alleged assault that she first gave to police in Canada before she spoke to American authorities.

Constand, who was living in Toronto when she first reported Cosby to police in January 2005, told them that Cosby had “taken her out to dinner and out in [Philadelphia’s] Chinatown,” according to a police report read in court. Constand later told Hart, according to the transcript, that she had driven herself to Cosby’s home.

The prosecution objected to McMonagle’s questions as being irrelevant to whether or not Constand was assaulted.

No matter how they got to his home, Constand recalled telling Cosby she did not feel well soon after they arrived. Constand said that’s when Cosby briefly left the room they were in and returned with blue pills, which he said were “herbal” and would “make you feel good, make you relax.”

“I said to him that I trust him,” Constand said, according to Hart, and she swallowed the pills. Cosby insisted she try the wine he’d poured for her, Constand said, though she’d declined because she said had not eaten.

“OK, you can drink it or you can nurse it,” Cosby told her, according to the interview transcript.

Constand told detectives that she began to feel dizzy and afraid soon after ingesting the pills.

“I said to him ‘I can’t even see, Mr. Cosby,” Hart recounted Constand as saying.

“I’m going to lay you down on the couch and let you relax,” Cosby said, according to the interview.

Constand told Hart she lay on the couch, unable to move or open her eyes.

“I wasn’t aware of any sounds. I don’t know where Mr. Cosby went,” Hart said Constand recalled.

Then Constand said she was very much aware of Cosby when he put his hands on her breasts and his fingers inside her vagina. Constand told Hart that Cosby lay behind her on the couch and reached into her pants from behind. Constand said Cosby took her right hand and placed on his penis, which was erect. 

Constand says she fell asleep and found her shirt pulled up and her bra backwards when she woke up at 4 a.m.

“The snap was in the front not the back — I couldn’t have done that myself if I wanted to,” Constand said, according to Hart. Cosby then gave Constand her a mixed-berry muffin and tea before she left, she recalled.

McMonagle said he objected to Hart’s testimony in its entirety, arguing it was hearsay and that the accuser herself, Constand, should be required to appear before the court and “answer questions like: ‘Why did you wait so long to report?’”

Judge Elizabeth A. McHugh agreed with the prosecution that she could not consider questions of credibility during the preliminary hearing and dismissed McMonagle’s attempt to compel Constand to take the stand on Tuesday morning.

Constand met Cosby at Temple University, where she was the director of the women’s basketball team and he was a prominent booster for the university. 

Following Constand’s report to authorities in 2005, Montgomery County D.A. Bruce Castor said he found insufficient evidence to corroborate her story and indict Cosby. Ten years later, however, D.A. Kevin Steele reopened the case and indicted Cosby thanks in part to his deposition in a civil trial brought by Constand. 

In the deposition, Cosby admitted giving other women quaaludes before sex. (Cosby said this sex was consensual; several dozen women have said it was not.) A judge unsealed the transcript said last year because Cosby had “voluntarily narrowed the zone of privacy” he was entitled by by donning “the mantle of public moralist,” the judge wrote. Constand and Cosby settled out of court for an undisclosed sum of money. 

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The Worst Thing Bill Cosby Ever Said

Nothing. Dozens of women went public and he didn’t even acknowledge their existence—unless it was to sue them for daring to oppose him.

I never believed Bill Cosby.

It was not the horrific stories of more than 50 alleged victims. It was not because his team of high-priced lawyers helped him settle numerous civil actions out-of-court over the years. It was not because the entertainment juggernaut built his entire public persona on respectability politics, the notions that black people are culpable for racist attitudes that we experience. It was not even the grand irony that he admitted in sworn depositions released this summer to drugging and engaging in sex acts with a Temple University employee.

It’s what he did not say.

Cosby has refused to publicly answer specific allegations. Instead, consumed in controversy, he has used his considerable resources to castigate, malign, and attempt to silence his accusers. Through his attorneys, he has issued a blanket denial that he ever engaged in sexual misconduct and he has even sued many of his accusers, including supermodel Beverly Johnson, for defamation of character.

Cosby could have admitted to knowing the women, he could have confessed to enjoying sex, engaging in infidelity and using his celebrity as a lure. “Would they have slept with me otherwise?” he could have said, “I don’t know. But what I do know, for sure, is that we were consenting adults.”

He hasn’t said anything close to that.

In fact, Cosby has avoided addressing the issue in public. He wanted us to believe that this was a private matter. He has paid attorneys and public relations experts to salvage his reputation, in hopes that his celebrity and charitable largesse would save him from the firestorm of scrutiny—and from prison. The man who once reveled in the spotlight met the controversy with flashes of anger and resentment. At one point, he even challenged black media to “stay neutral.”

Until today, he has never been forced to answer any of the accusations and defend himself in an open criminal court. Montgomery County, Pennsylvania’s district attorney announced that Cosby has been charged with a single count of aggravated indecent assault against Andrea Constand, who says she was drugged and assaulted inside his home. The indictment came 17 days before the statute of limitations was set to run out.

In other words, Cosby almost got away with it.

Based on that deposition taken in 2005, released earlier this year by a federal court judge, prosecutors re-opened an investigation and found sufficient evidence to indict.

There are other alleged victims, DA Kevin Steele said, and “we are examining evidence” to determine whether additional charges will be filed “down the line.”

Following a case like this—as a black woman, a rape survivor, and as someone who grew up on Jell-O Pudding Pops, Fat Albert, and The Cosby Show—has been heartbreaking. Until today, I have avoided reading the details of specific incidences. I needed to protect myself emotionally, I reasoned. Until now, I have mostly addressed this case from the perspective of a cultural analyst with a dose of advocacy.

Even when I wrote a cover story for Ebony about the Cosby legacy, I wasn’t even sure I could discuss my feelings with my own mother. For so many in the black community, the revelations remain too painful to talk about and, for others, difficult to believe.

A lot is riding on the outcome of this case because it is the last criminal one open to prosecution. The remaining accusers—like many who say they have endured the horrors of sexual assault—may never see justice.

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Reasons Diehard Supporters of Bill Cosby Will Keep Believing He Is Innocent

                                                                   Mario Anzuoni/Reuters

To some, the comedian is a god, plain and simple - never mind his legions of accusers, the latest of whom was just a kid. And any attempts to question his legacy will be met with anger.

My grandmother loved her Jesus, her husband, and her pastor—and not always in that order. Say a foul word about one or the other and you had better tell it walking.

Bill Cosby is not a pastor and, if your name is not Camille, he almost certainly is not your husband. But for some people, it seems, Cosby is a god—deified based on his career as a legendary comedian and actor, a Hollywood icon who generously invested countless millions in historically black institutions.

When I was invited to write a cover story for Ebony magazine and offer an analysis of that legacy, I accepted the assignment with both honor and trepidation. My focus was not on the allegations but on how Cosby’s widely acclaimed, record-breaking television show came to be the standard against which black families would be measured—by others and by us. What social model did it reinforce, and does its power endure in the face of Cosby’s crumbling public reputation?

Over the course of 72 breathtaking hours, I interviewed dozens of thought leaders, cultural experts, industry veterans, and academicians about that legacy and how deeply it was intertwined with his on-screen fictional persona, Heathcliff Huxtable. An excerpt of the cover story was released online Thursday afternoon.

As the cover art began to circulate on social media, both support and pushback began almost immediately. The cover, a framed photograph of the fictional Huxtable family behind shattered glass, evoked strong feelings, even before the 3,000-word story itself hit newsstands. Some voices were glad to see the story about how Cosby’s legacy and that of his alter ego, Cliff, have been challenged in recent months. Others cried foul, angered because they believe Cosby himself is “under attack.”

“It’s difficult for black people to accept the idea that Cosby could be guilty,” University of Connecticut professor Jelani Cobb told me recently. “Certainly the long history of prominent African Americans being torn down in public lends itself to the idea that Cosby is being targeted because of his wealth and influence.”

I have been reporting on and writing about the impact of the rape allegations since comedian Hannibal Buress unceremoniously outed Cosby last year. Truth be told, Cosby’s sexual proclivities were the biggest un-kept secret in Hollywood. When he came and left town, people talked. So Buress was only saying what many already believed.

My grandmother might have been proud to see my writing land on the cover of Ebony, long heralded as the bible of black celebrity, culture, and social progress. Inarguably, though, she would not have approved of me writing about a man she revered in her living days. Still, even in her disappointment, Grandma Alice would have been quick to say, “Tell the truth and shame the Devil.”

I stuffed away my own experiences, forgot for a moment that I had been the victim of child molestation and later drugged and raped by a high school football coach. I forgot who I was and focused on the women. I interviewed two dozen people who are experts on everything from rape culture to television programming, from the evolution of parenting to the impact of the Reagan-era “war on drugs.”

I had almost grown numb to the increasing number of women who claim Cosby drugged and raped them. The allegations stretch back nearly 50 years and, if the allegations are true, he did not discriminate.

The women are black, white, middle class, wealthy, and poor. Some are household names, while others could slip in and out of the local grocery store with little notice. They have long hair, short hair. They are graying brunettes and strawberry blondes. There is even one outsize Afro. They are former supermodels, actresses, talent agency secretaries, dancers, and cocktail servers.

Frankly, I thought I was over it. I thought I had successfully put it all behind me. Then came had plenty to say but who had not read the unreleased story, a colleague circulated a related news item. In the middle of our afternoon editorial meeting, I sat staring at my laptop.

“She was a gawt-damned kid,” I muttered to myself.

Thursday.

As I scrolled through my Twitter mentions, raising a brow (and a mute button) to objectors who

I kept saying it, over and over again, as I read and re-read the news. Another woman had come forward Wednesday to file a civil lawsuit. It appears Renita Chaney Hill was, at the time of her alleged assault, the youngest Cosby victim.

Hill says she was still in high school when she met him. In the lawsuit, she accuses him of plying her with alcohol that caused her to black out and says she woke up “oftentimes nude, disheveled, confused and disoriented.”

She was a teenager, just a couple of years older than me. “She was a gawt-damned kid,” I said again.

Now about 50 years old, Hill is suing because she believes Cosby, his attorney, and his wife made particularly defamatory public statements after she went public with her story. According to the court filing, Hill is alleging defamation and “intentional infliction of emotional distress.” She claims their actions were “egregious in nature.”

To say I was disappointed about the initial round of allegations is an understatement, even if I have always been bothered by Cosby’s brand of respectability politics. For the record, I do not question the veracity of the women’s stories based on the number of years it took them to come forward. After all, it took me nearly three decades to speak up about what happened to me.

“Mr. Cosby’s vast resources and high-priced team retaliating against his accusers—that deterred women coming forward for years, and still scares them even now,” Lisa Bloom, a lawyer for model and Cosby accuser Janice Dickinson, told me as I was researching the Ebony cover piece.

“When women speak their truth out loud, it is empowering,” Bloom continued. “Let the perpetrator hide his head in shame. Let him close the door and remain quiet.”

Dr. Cobb was right when he said, “It’s too early to tell what Cosby’s legacy will be ultimately.” It is a complicated question, but one that deserves to be asked.

However, if your defense of Cosby means blindly accepting his innocence, if it involves defaming, marginalizing, and lobbing salacious personal attacks at his accusers: Tell it walking.

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