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At Bill Cosby Trial, Andrea Constand Battles His Lawyers At Bill Cosby Trial, Andrea Constand Battles His Lawyers
(35 minutes later)
• Andrea Constand completed her second and final day of testimony after nearly five more hours of questioning by an attorney for Bill Cosby, who challenged her account that Mr. Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted her at his home outside Philadelphia in 2004.• Andrea Constand completed her second and final day of testimony after nearly five more hours of questioning by an attorney for Bill Cosby, who challenged her account that Mr. Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted her at his home outside Philadelphia in 2004.
• Prosecutors still plan to introduce expert witnesses and deposition testimony by Mr. Cosby in which he spoke of obtaining quaaludes to give to women.• Prosecutors still plan to introduce expert witnesses and deposition testimony by Mr. Cosby in which he spoke of obtaining quaaludes to give to women.
•The courtroom in Norristown, Pa., heard Mr. Cosby’s voice in a phone call recorded by Gianna Constand, Ms. Constand’s mother, offering to pay for her daughter’s schooling. • The courtroom in Norristown, Pa., heard Mr. Cosby’s voice in a phone call recorded by Gianna Constand, Ms. Constand’s mother, offering to pay for her daughter’s schooling.
• New documents showed that the defense in recent days had asked the judge to allow Mr. Cosby’s lawyers to introduce Ms. Constand’s prior relationships as evidence in the case, but were denied. Suddenly the center of attention after years of shunning the spotlight, the woman Bill Cosby is charged with sexually assaulting kept her composure on Wednesday under a second grueling day of cross-examination, as her credibility emerged as the crucial factor in whether the world-famous entertainer will go to prison.
In many respects Mr. Cosby’s lawyer, Angela C. Agrusa, revisited inconsistencies the defense had pointed out the day before, looking for an opportunity to shake Ms. Constand on her second day on the stand. Before testifying this week, Ms. Constand had never before spoken publicly about the night in early 2004 when she says Mr. Cosby drugged and abused her, but every detail of their relationship has been scoured since Tuesday by Mr. Cosby’s lawyers, who seized on any hint of inconsistency. She admitted some mistakes in dates and details, and acknowledged maintaining considerable contact with Mr. Cosby after the night she says she was assaulted, but she calmly and confidently tried to explain away some discrepancies, while dismissing others as innocent errors.
Why, the lawyer asked, had Ms. Constand told police that Mr. Cosby assaulted her in March 2004, only to later say it had been in January? “Ma’am, I was mistaken,” Ms. Constand replied to questioning by a defense lawyer, Angela C. Agrusa, who asked why, when she first went to the police, a year after the incident, she had told them she had first met Mr. Cosby in 2003. It was actually 2002.
Why, she asked, had Ms. Constand not told the Canadian police, to whom she first reported the incident, that she had earlier meetings alone with Mr. Cosby, or recounted all of her prior contacts with Mr. Cosby to the police in Pennsylvania? She also acknowledged giving police the wrong date for the alleged assault at his home in a suburb of Philadelphia, instead giving the date of another encounter with Mr. Cosby several weeks later. Ms. Agrusa asked, incredulously, “It went from the day, the night that you were drugged and assaulted to something else?”
“You changed your story,” Ms. Agrusa said. “Yes, ma’am,” Ms. Constand said. “I said I was mistaken.”
Ms. Constand appeared calm and confident in her responses, often attributing any errors to simple mistakes. She suggested that the police report did not contain any mention of her earlier meetings alone with Mr. Cosby because “I was never asked.” But it is clear that for dozens of women who say Mr. Cosby attacked them too, Ms. Constand’s testimony has been an empowering moment, and a possible pathway to his conviction and what they consider justice.
The defense has attempted to portray Ms. Constand, a Temple University staff member at the time, as a willing participant in a relationship with Mr. Cosby even though she knew he harbored romantic interests and kept seeing him. Ms. Agrusa spoke of how, she said, Ms. Constand had called a friend at home after her first meeting alone with Mr. Cosby and reported that he had made a pass at her. “They are trying to poke holes in her timeline and discredit her,” said Victoria Valentino, who says Mr. Cosby assaulted her in 1970, and is attending the trial, “and she is being very prudent and authentic in her responses. It comes across very clearly that she is telling the truth.”
Ms. Agrusa also asked about the visit Ms. Constand made to see Mr. Cosby at Foxwoods casino in Connecticut in November 2003, when she spent time alone with him in his hotel room, sitting on his bed. She accepted a $225 hair dryer from him as a gift, Ms. Agrusa recounted, suggesting that the conduct that prosecutors have portrayed as the grooming behavior of a predator was actually clear evidence of romantic intent. Ms. Constand, 43, spent nearly nine hours on the witness stand over two days — including four hours Wednesday — as Ms. Agrusa accused her of fabricating the assault and some details of her interaction with Mr. Cosby. But in contrast to Tuesday, when Ms. Constand cried as she recounted the incident, she remained dry-eyed and outwardly calm Wednesday, answering questions matter-of-factly.
“Mr. Cosby had already made clear that he had affection for you,” Ms. Agrusa said at one point. Judge Steven T. O’Neill has admonished the jurors to ignore anything they have heard outside the courtroom, but to the wider world, Ms. Constand walked to the stand as a sort of proxy for the dozens of women who have stepped forward to accuse Mr. Cosby of drugging and assaulting them. None of the other allegations has led to prosecution — in many cases, too much time has passed — and it may be that none will.
Ms. Constand replied, “He had never disclosed to me that he had affection for me.” A former star basketball player who grew up in Toronto, Ms. Constand worked for Temple University when she met Mr. Cosby, a Temple alumnus and trustee. Shortly after the incident at the heart of the case, in January or February 2004, she quit her job and moved back to Canada; the following year, she went to the police and sued Mr. Cosby, later reaching an undisclosed settlement.
Ms. Constand had testified Tuesday that, even when she came to understand that Mr. Cosby had intentions of that sort, she never felt the need to distance herself from him because he was an older man, a trustee of the school where she worked, and not someone she viewed as a threat. Now a massage therapist who practices yoga, she took breaks during the trial when she appeared to be meditating.
But Ms. Agrusa pressed forward with a line of questioning that tried to suggest some level of plotting by Ms. Constand, who later filed a civil suit against Mr. Cosby and won a financial settlement. Producing Ms. Constand’s phone records, Ms. Agrusa asked, Why had Ms. Constand called Temple University to get her cellphone records from a year earlier? Why had Ms. Constand’s mother, she asked, bought a recorder to record phone calls with Mr. Cosby? Ms. Agrusa suggested there was more than Ms. Constand let on to in her relationship with Mr. Cosby, 36 years her senior, who bought her gifts and introduced her to some of his entertainment industry contacts.
A relative of the family who is a police official had testified Tuesday that he had recommended that the family tape record conversations with Mr. Cosby so as to protect herself. “Mr. Cosby had already made clear that he had affection for you,” Ms. Agrusa said.
Mr. Cosby, who says the sexual encounter was consensual, has said he gave Ms. Constand nothing stronger than a few tabs of Benadryl, not to incapacitate her, but to calm her down because she was complaining of stress. The defense argued that she was not upset at the time and, in an effort to bolster that argument, went through Ms. Constand’s phone records from Temple University, showing that she placed repeated calls to him in January and February 2004 — around the time she said the alleged incident had occurred, often calling several times a day. “He had never disclosed to me that he had affection for me,” Ms. Constand replied levelly.
In one instance, Ms. Agrusa said, the records showed that Ms. Constand called him six times over several days, until Mr. Cosby appeared to call her back. “You were calling Mr. Cosby with a lot of frequency,” Ms. Agrusa said. She has said that before the alleged assault, he twice made sexual advances that she rebuffed, but she continued to see him.
“I may have been returning phone calls,” Ms Constand said. “You came back to Mr. Cosby’s home,” Ms. Agrusa said, and drove to Foxwoods resort in eastern Connecticut, where he was performing, and spent time in his hotel room there.
“He called from all over the place,” she added, suggesting that the records did not show Mr. Cosby’s calls from other numbers. Ms. Constand said she sat on the bed in that hotel room, but after he lay down on the bed, she thought, “What am I doing here?” and left.
Similarly, Ms. Agrusa focused on Ms. Constand’s statement that she planned on taking Mr. Cosby a gift of bath salts when they met on March 16, 2004. “You were going to meet the man who assaulted you and you were bringing him bath salts?” Ms. Agrusa asked incredulously. When asked why she did not tell police certain details of their meetings, she replied, “I was never asked.”
“Yes,” Ms. Constand answered. She then clarified to say that the salts were not her gift, but that of a friend. The defense pointed to extensive contacts Ms. Constand had with Mr. Cosby after the alleged assault, which contradict what she told police in 2005, and which the lawyers have suggested is not the behavior of a victim toward her abuser. They paid particular attention to phone records showing that Ms. Constand called Mr. Cosby repeatedly around the time of the alleged incident, including on Valentine’s Day, and dozens of times in the months after.
Later, on re-direct, Kristen M. Feden, an assistant district attorney, argued that Ms. Constand’s testimony had been consistent on all the major points of her account and she accused Ms. Agrusa of mischaracterizing Ms. Constand’s phone records and statements to the police. But Ms. Constand said those calls were for her work “regarding Temple women’s basketball,” and many of them, she said, were her calling him back after he had left her a message; Kristen M. Feden, an assistant district attorney, cited a pattern in the phone records of Ms. Constand calling her own voice mail to check messages, and then calling Mr. Cosby.
The defense has said that Ms. Constand called Mr. Cosby 53 times in the first three months of 2004, characterizing that as strange behavior for someone who had been assaulted. But the prosecution argued that the number was deceiving, in part because it was only natural that Ms. Constand, a coordinator for Temple women’s basketball, would make an effort to call back a trustee, Mr. Cosby, of the university where she worked. Some experts say Ms. Constand’s delayed report of the incident was not unusual in cases of sexual assault.
Ms. Constand said her calls Mr. Cosby were “regarding Temple women’s basketball.” “Delayed and partial reports of sexual assaults are normal, common and should be expected, particularly in cases of non-stranger sexual assault,” said Kristen Houser, a spokeswoman for the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, who is attending the trial. “Victims are often in a state of disbelief and trying to make sense of how a person they know and trust could betray and hurt them in such a personal way.”
She held a hand over her face and cried, describing Mr. Cosby’s “betrayal.” She described him as a man who had emerged as her daughter’s mentor, a man older than Andrea’s own father. She said Mr. Cosby drugged and assaulted Andrea, leaving her with nightmares that made her scream. “I could hear her,” she said. She held a hand over her face and cried, as she described Mr. Cosby’s “betrayal.” She spoke of him as a man who was her daughter’s mentor, a man older than Andrea’s own father. Mr. Cosby, she said, drugged and assaulted Andrea, leaving her with nightmares that made her scream. “I could hear her,” she said.
Mrs. Constand called Mr. Cosby after her daughter described what she said had happened. He apologized, she said, and tried to defend it as consensual. “He said to me, Mom, she even had an orgasm.” Mrs. Constand called Mr. Cosby in January 2005 after her daughter described what she said had happened. He apologized, she said, and tried to defend it as consensual. “He said to me, ‘Mom, she even had an orgasm.’”
She taped a second phone call with Mr. Cosby, she said, at her son-in-law’s suggestion, and he offered to pay for Ms. Constand’s schooling. The jurors heard the tape. “Would she feel comfortable going back to, applying to graduate school of her choice?” Mr. Cosby said to Mrs. Constand, in the recording played for the court. She later taped a second phone call with Mr. Cosby, she said, at her son-in-law’s suggestion, and he offered to pay for Ms. Constand’s schooling. The jurors heard the tape. “Would she feel comfortable going back to, applying to graduate school of her choice?” Mr. Cosby said to Mrs. Constand, in the recording played for the court.
At one point he asked about a beep he heard on the line. “I have a parrot,” Ms. Constand told him.At one point he asked about a beep he heard on the line. “I have a parrot,” Ms. Constand told him.
The judge, Steven T. O’Neill, warned journalists about trying to transmit from the courtroom and told them not to take photographs of the jurors, who are anonymous. Mr. Cosby, 79, whose wife, Camille, has not attended the trial, was accompanied on Wednesday by Mary Frances Berry, a former chairwoman of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, who described him as a longtime friend.
Court officials said one unidentified member of the news media had already been removed for violating the court’s decorum order, although they did not specify what the infraction was. She told reporters that she was not surprised that few members of the public had turned out to support Mr. Cosby, noting that many people remembered him not only as an amiable, even reassuring comedian and television star, but also as a scold who told black Americans to take more responsibility for their lives.
The judge also complained from the bench that someone had tried to contact a witness. In black communities, she said, “There are some people who are still irritated by that.”
Few expected that three days into the trial, both Ms. Constand and Kelly Johnson, another woman who says Mr. Cosby assaulted her, would have already testified.
Now, Kevin R. Steele, the Montgomery County district attorney, will be weighing when to introduce Mr. Cosby’s deposition testimony from a 2005 civil suit, in which he admitted obtaining quaaludes to use in his pursuit of sex.
Other witnesses the prosecution is to call include a drugs expert who will likely explain the effects of quaaludes and other drugs on behavior; and an expert on the behavior of sexual assault victims who will probably be used to counter such defense questions as why Ms. Constand took nearly a year to come forward.
The courthouse was crowded again on Wednesday, with members of the public and journalists. But with proceedings moving briskly along, it’s unlikely that the trial will last a full two weeks, as originally forecast.