Gay Accuser Questions Cosby's Ability To 'Read' Sexual Cues
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The accuser in the only sex assault case settled by Bill Cosby is questioning his self-described ability to "read" people's cues in sexual situations.
Cosby did not recognize that the Temple University employee he had befriended was gay, the woman's lawyer noted Tuesday in a court filing. Andrea Constand, then an operations director for the women's basketball team, was dating a woman around that time, according to court filings unsealed this month.
"Despite his talent for interpreting female reactions to him, he did not realize plaintiff was gay until the police told him," lawyer Dolores Troiani wrote in the motion.
Cosby's lawyers didn't immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday and haven't returned repeated calls for comment this month.
The two sides continue to battle in court a decade after they settled Constand's sexual-battery and defamation lawsuit. Each side is accusing the other of breaking the agreement's confidentiality clause through public comments, online posts and court filings.
Constand now wants terms of their settlement made public. Her 2005 lawsuit accused Cosby of drugging and sexually assaulting her at his Philadelphia-area home. More than two dozen women have since come forward to say that Cosby also molested them.
Cosby in his deposition released this month said he considered his sexual contact with Constand to be consensual.
"I think that I'm a pretty decent reader of people and their emotions in these romantic sexual things, whatever you want to call them," Cosby said.
Constand considered Cosby a friend and mentor and had gone to his home one night in early 2004 to discuss making a career change. He offered her pills for her reported stress. She thought she was taking an herbal medication. Cosby told police he had given her Benadryl, but Constand believed it was something stronger that left her semiconscious. She woke up on his couch at 4 a.m. feeling sore, with her clothes askew.
Cosby said he saw her before she left and did not sense anything amiss.
"I walk out. She does not look angry. She does not say to me, don't ever do that again. She doesn't walk out with an attitude of a huff," he said in his deposition.
Cosby also acknowledged under oath that he had obtained quaaludes in the 1970s to give to women he hoped to seduce. He said that he gave the so-called disco biscuits to one of his accusers when she was 19 and that she had taken the powerful sedative knowingly. His lawyers argued this month that he was "one of the many people who introduced quaaludes into their consensual sex life in the 1970s" and said that does not make him a rapist.
Constand "never attended a celebrity party or requested to take a disco biscuit (or ever even heard that term, for that matter) or any other drug ... that would render her unconscious," Troiani said in the motion Tuesday.
She argued that Cosby has hired a team of lawyers, agents and publicists to attack accusers and media reports, while Constand, now a physical therapist in the Canadian province of Ontario, has been forced to remain silent.
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