New details emerge from Cosby sexual assault suit
More details are emerging from a shocking, newly-released testimony in which Bill Cosby admits, under oath, that he obtained sedatives with the intent of giving them to women to have sex with them, reports CBS News correspondent Michelle Miller.
After a decade of denials, Bill Cosby's own words provide insight into a deposition he gave in a sexual assault suit filed in 2005. In it, a lawyer asks Cosby about a 19-year-old unnamed accuser.
"She meets me backstage. I give her Quaaludes. We then have sex... If anything, I think she may very well have been very happy to be around the show business surroundings," Cosby said.
"Star struck?" the lawyer asked
"You'll have to ask her," Cosby replied.
The case was brought by Andrea Constand, who at the time was an employee at Temple University -- Cosby's alma mater. Constand's lawyer asks Cosby about prescriptions he'd obtained for the Quaaludes.
"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?" lawyer Dolores M. Troiani asked.
"Yes," Cosby answered on Sept. 29, 2005.
"Did you ever give any of those young women the Quaaludes without their knowledge?" the lawyer asked.
But Cosby's lawyer objected repeatedly throughout the deposition, and Cosby never answered whether he actually drugged any women against their will.
The case was settled, and the were documents sealed, until the Associated Press went to court and argued successfully to have them released.
Joan Tarshis, one of Cosby's numerous accusers, said this validates what she and others have been saying for years.
I've been called a liar. I mean, he called me and the other women a liar in the press. And now people will know we're not liars anymore," Tarshis said.
The scandal forced Cosby to resign from the board of trustees at Temple University, and led NBC and Netflix to pull the plug on a comedy series he was working on. After a string of canceled live appearances, he returned to the stage, but not without frequent heckling.
"Now a lot of women who may be afraid to come forward and talk about their rapes may be empowered by this situation. And that's the best thing that I could hope for," Tarshis said.
Late Monday, a Cosby representative issued a statement to ABC News. It said the only reason Cosby settled the case with Constand was it would have been hurtful and embarrassing to put the women involved on the stand, and his own family "had no clue."
More than two-dozen women have accused the comedian of drugging and sexually assaulting them. Cosby has denied it.