In a 2005 deposition for his first sexual assault case, brought by Andrea Constand, Bill Cosby admitted that he did acquire — and deploy — drugs for the purpose of having sex with women.
Cosby, giving sworn testimony in the lawsuit accusing him of sexual assaulting Constand at his home in Pennsylvania in 2004, said he obtained seven quaalude prescriptions in the 1970s. Constand’s lawyer asked if he had kept the sedatives through the 1990s, after they were banned, but was frustrated by objections from Cosby’s attorney.
“When you got the quaaludes, was it in your mind that you were going to use these quaaludes for young women that you wanted to have sex with?” [Constand’s lawyer, Dolores] Troiani asked.
“Yes,” Cosby answered.
“Did you ever give any of these young women the quaaludes without their knowledge?” Troiani asked.
Cosby’s lawyer again objected, leading Troiani to petition the federal judge to force Cosby to cooperate.
Cosby later said he gave Constand three half-pills of Benadryl, although Troiani in the documents voices doubt that was the drug involved.
Deadspin has made all of the unsealed documents available online, and has pulled out a few key excerpts. Highlights:
- The efforts Cosby’s attorneys went to to keep him from exposing the number of women he’d given drugs to (the evasive and only technically grammatical “he gave the Quaaludes” being as far as the lawyer was willing to go)
- The fact that when he first spoke to Constand and her mother, they just wanted an apology and to know the name of the drug that he’d given Constand, and he was the one who later offered money
- His statement that he met one of his accusers backstage, “[he gives] her Quaaludes. [They] then have sex” (whereas Therese Serignese, almost certainly the accuser in question, would be more likely to characterize it as him giving her two unidentified pills and then raping her in a bathroom)
- And the fact that he still contends (despite his stated predilection for Quaalude-facilitated sex) that the drug he gave Constand was Benadryl
The AP asked the courts to unseal the documents, despite arguments from Cosby’s lawyers that “his embarrassment at the release of the discovery motions — deposition excerpts about sex, money, health, and marriage — would be severe.” (Whereas the women whose personal lives have been laid bare in an effort to vilify and discredit them obviously didn’t suffer severe embarrassment.)
U.S. District Judge Eduardo Robreno ultimately unsealed just part of the deposition, saying, “The stark contrast between Bill Cosby, the public moralist and Bill Cosby, the subject of serious allegations concerning improper (and perhaps criminal) conduct is a matter as to which the AP — and by extension the public — has a significant interest.”
More than two dozen women have come forward to accuse Cosby of sexual assault going back to 1965. A statement on Cosby’s website by his lawyers from November of last year (now removed) dismissed the new accusations as “decade-old, discredited allegations against Mr. Cosby,” saying that “[T]he fact that they are being repeated does not make them true.” Shortly thereafter, they clarified in another statement that the aforementioned blanket denial didn’t apply to Constand’s accusation — because, one assumes, they knew the courts had a deposition giving credit to that decade-old allegation, and that Cosby’s reputation as a friendly, fatherly, trustworthy type would be scuttled once and for all with his very own sworn testimony that he was actually a slipping-women-‘ludes-to-make-them-more-rapeable type. But yeah, all of those women are totally lying, and Bill Cosby would never do something so awful. We’ll just stick with that.