NORRISTOWN, PA — Bill Cosby’s main accuser will testify during his sexual assault retrial Friday after several other women told jurors this week they believe he drugged and molested them.
Andrea Constand has accused Cosby of assaulting her at his home near Philadelphia in January 2004. As the chief accuser against Cosby, her testimony will be central in the criminal case against him.
Constand has said she worked as director of operations for the women’s basketball team at Temple University when she met Cosby, who was a powerful trustee at the institution.
Cosby has said their sex was consensual, and has pleaded not guilty. His defense attorneys argued this week that Constand was a con artist who was obsessed with Cosby’s fame and money.
Constand confronted Cosby in court last year, but that case ended in a mistrial after a Pennsylvania jury was unable to come to a unanimous decision. .
One of America’s most recognized entertainers faces three counts of aggravated indecent assault. Prosecutors said Monday that he paid Constand $3.38 million as part of a 2006 civil settlement.
Other women
Several women have testified as the jury considers whether Cosby is guilty of assaulting Constand.
Prosecutors are allowed to seek testimony from up to five other women who have said Cosby also drugged and assaulted them in previous incidents. The prosecution argues that these “prior bad acts” show Cosby has a pattern of misconduct, and did not make a one-time mistake in his actions toward Constand.
Reality TV star and supermodel Janice Dickinson testified in court Thursday that she confronted Cosby and wanted to punch him in the face after she said he drugged her and raped her in a hotel in Lake Tahoe in 1982.
“Do you want to explain what happened last night, because that wasn’t cool,” she told him, according to her testimony.
“I wanted to hit him, I wanted to punch him in the face,” she said. “I can remember feeling anger, disgust, and ashamed.”
Dickinson is the fourth “prior bad acts” witness to testify in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, court against Cosby, 80, in his trial on three charges of aggravated indecent assault.
‘I couldn’t move’
Dickinson, now 63, was a supermodel in 1982 and said Cosby flew her out to Lake Tahoe, a resort area on the California-Nevada border, to meet her.
At dinner with him and another man, she mentioned she had menstrual cramps, she testified. Cosby said he had something for that and she said she was given a blue pill.
They went to a room, and she began to feel lightheaded and couldn’t get the right words out, she testified. Cosby then got on top her, she testified.
“He smelled like cigars and espresso and his body odor,” she said. “I couldn’t move, I felt like I was rendered motionless.”
“Here was America’s dad on top of me, happily married man with five children and how very wrong it was,” she said.
She recalled feeling vaginal pain.
“I passed out after he entered me. It was gross,” she testified.
When she woke up, she was sore and remembers her pajamas were halfway off, she testified. That’s when she confronted him.
During a spirited cross-examination, Cosby’s defense attorney, Tom Mesereau, asked why a passage in Dickinson’s 2002 book about the Lake Tahoe visit does not say she and Cosby had sex.
“I wasn’t under oath when I wrote that book,” she testified.
Heidi Thomas, Chelan Lasha and Janice Baker-Kinney have each testified over the past few days that Cosby incapacitated them with drugs or wine and then assaulted them in separate incidents in 1984, 1986 and 1982, respectively.
Cosby’s defense attorneys have worked to point out inconsistencies in their stories.
Woman says she felt dizzy after Cosby gave her drink
The fifth and final prior accuser to testify, Lise-Lotte Lublin, said she remembered being in Cosby’s room and blacking out, but does not remember a sexual assault.
She was 23 in 1989 when her modeling agency arranged for her to meet “The Cosby Show” star. She said Cosby spent time with her family and introduced her as his daughter to others.
“I felt like he was representing himself as a father figure and a mentor to me,” she said.
She said Cosby offered her a drink at another meeting in Las Vegas, one about acting. She said she told him she didn’t drink but he said that it would relax her.
She testified she began to feel dizzy within minutes, and he asked her to come sit with him. She sat in front of him between his legs and he began to touch her hair, she recalled.
She vaguely remembers walking down a hallway of a hotel suite, she said. She remembers nothing from then until she woke up at home in her bed, she told the court.
Years later, in January 2015, after hearing accounts from other women, she said she realized “something else had happened after I blacked out. I don’t know what it was, but I believe I know what it was.”
Defense attorney Kathleen Bliss asked her about testimony and prior statements, in an apparent attempt to point out inconsistencies about her comments about sitting between Cosby’s legs.
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