Under oath in a hotel — away from the TV cameras and the soapbox where he did his public moralizing — Bill Cosby sketched a very different image of America’s Dad: a philanderer who plied young women with quaaludes, claimed to be adept at reading their unspoken desires and tried to use his wealth to keep “Mrs. Cosby” in the dark.
The portrait comes from Cosby’s own words in a transcript of a 2005-06 deposition taken in Philadelphia. It is the only publicly available testimony he has given in response to accusations he drugged and sexually assaulted dozens of women over four decades. Cosby has denied the allegations, calling the sexual contact consensual.
In his testimony, the comedian told of how he tried to gain women’s trust and make them comfortable by talking about their families, their education and their career aspirations.
He seemed casual about his affairs, describing his relationship with one woman this way: “We had sex and we had dinners and sex and rendezvous.”
Asked how it ended, he said: “Stopped calling for rendezvous.”
Why? “Just moving on.”
There’s no clear-cut evidence in the documents that he committed a sex crime, but his testimony adds to the unsavory details that have all but wrecked his nice-guy reputation as TV’s Dr. Cliff Huxtable and made a mockery of his preaching about decency and personal responsibility.
The full transcript, obtained by The Associated Press on Sunday, is from a lawsuit filed by a former Temple University employee who accused the comedian of drugging and molesting her. Earlier this month, a judge unsealed small excerpts from the transcript as a result of a lawsuit from the AP.
The New York Times was the first to obtain the entire transcript, after learning it was publicly available through a court reporting service.
In the deposition, Cosby said that on one occasion, he reached into Temple employee Andrea Constand’s pants and fondled her, taking her silence as a green light.
“I don’t hear her say anything. And I don’t feel her say anything. And so I continue and I go into the area that is somewhere between permission and rejection. I am not stopped,” he said.
He said she then groped him in return. Later that night, he said, he tried to have more sexual contact with her, but she said no, and “I pull back.”
He said that he avoided intercourse with her, suggesting he was afraid she would become too attached to him. Intercourse, he said, “is something that I feel the woman will succumb to more of a romance and more of a feeling, not love, but it’s deeper than a playful situation.”
He said Constand was not upset when she left that night, and he assured his questioner: “I think I’m a pretty decent reader of people and their emotions in these romantic sexual things, whatever you want to call them.”
Cosby’s lawyers and representatives did not respond Sunday to email and telephone calls.
Patrick O’Connor, the lawyer representing Cosby in the deposition, told The Philadelphia Inquirer that the transcript offers only a one-sided account since Constand’s deposition remains sealed. He said he believed the release of the transcript violated the terms of the 2006 settlement in her case.
The 78-year-old comic has never been charged with a crime. In most cases, the statute of limitations has run out, though at least one case, from 2008, is still under investigation in Los Angeles.
During the four days of questioning, Cosby and his lawyer often clashed with Constand’s attorney, with Cosby himself debating his questioner over the definitions of words.
Constand has accused Cosby of drugging her with something powerful and molesting her on a different occasion. Cosby, however, testified that he gave her three half-pills of the cold and allergy medicine Benadryl, telling her: “I have three friends for you to make you relax.” He denied assaulting her.
“I think Andrea is a liar, and I know she’s a liar because I was there,” he said under oath.
Cosby testified that in the 1970s, he received about seven prescriptions for quaaludes from a Los Angeles doctor who has since died. He acknowledged he obtained them with the intention of giving them to young women he wanted to have sex with.
He denied giving women the powerful sedatives without their knowledge. He said he used quaaludes “the same as a person would say, ‘Have a drink.”’
Constand’s lawyer, Dolores Troianai, asked Cosby about his wife’s knowledge of his affairs.
He said his wife, Camille, to whom he has been married since 1964, learned about the Constand case and others in which he was accused of wrongdoing. But he said he hid cases from her, funneling money to one woman through accounts that “Mrs. Cosby” would not see.
Bruce Castor, the suburban Philadelphia prosecutor who declined to bring charges in the Constand case a decade ago, told the AP earlier this month that if he is elected again he will review the unsealed court documents to see if Cosby committed perjury.
The AP generally does not identify people who say they have been sexually assaulted unless they agree to have their names published, as Constand has done.
Associated Press writers Anthony McCartney, Pia Sarkar and Josh Cornfield contributed.
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