How Bill Cosby used fame and drugs to sleep with vulnerable women and hush money so his wife wouldn't find out
In a never-before-seen deposition from 2005, disgraced comedian Bill Cosby explains in his own words how he used his fame, fortune and powerful sedatives to prey on vulnerable women - and then paid them off to keep his wife from finding out.
Interviewed in a Philadelphia hotel over four days by a lawyer acting on behalf of a 30-year-old Temple University employee Andrea Constand, Cosby admitted to engaging Constand in a conversation about her father's cancer with the sole aim of then having sex with her.
The deposition was thought to have been confidential as part of the lawsuit settlement, but the New York Times obtained the documents through a court-reporting service, where it was publicly available.
Primarily he spoke of Constand, but also of other victims, including a 19-year-old model who sent him a poem and ended up on his couch where she pleasured him with lotion.
After describing a sexual act he had with Constand, Cosby explained why he believed it to be consensual.
'I walk her out. She does not look angry. She does not say to me, don't ever do that again,' he said. 'She doesn't walk out with an attitude of a huff, because 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.'
Constand's lawyer, Dolores M. Troiani, accused Cosby of 'making light of a very serious situation'.
'That may very well be,' Cosby responded.
Cosby has repeatedly denied all alleged sexual assault, though dozens of women have accused him of such acts.
And although he's had the support of several public figures throughout the allegations, this 1,000-page deposition could change people's views.
During the deposition, he described frustration with Constand after she failed to follow his advice of pursuing sports broadcasting.
'Here's a mentor, Bill Cosby, who is in the business, Bill Cosby, who happens to know something about what to do and Andrea is not picking up on it,' he said.
Cosby also described an early moment in their courtship, when he arranged an intimate meal at his Pennsylvania home and they were out of sight from his chef.
'I take her hair and I pull it back and I have her face like this,' he said. 'And I'm talking to her... And I talked to her about relaxing, being strong. And I said to her, come in, meaning her body.'
Cosby said he refrained from intercourse because he didn't want women to fall in love with him. He said it '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 added that he was not in love with Constand.
After their association carried on for a few years, the incident in which he said he gave her half a tablet of Benadryl occurred.
Cosby said it was to relieve stress, and they kissed and had sexual contact. Her lawyer said what he had given her was more powerful than Benadryl.
Some time later, Constand moved to Canada and Cosby spoke with Constand's mother on the phone.
Cosby said in the deposition that he was worried that Constand's mother thought of him as a 'dirty old man'.
During the call, once he was speaking to Constand, he told her to tell her mother 'about the orgasm' so that she would realize their sexual contact was consensual.
In the deposition, Cosby went on to explain the extraneous lengths he would go through to keep his wife, Camille, from finding out about his extramarital affairs.
He explained blocking a magazine article to avoid publicity and passing money through a private account with his agent to one woman so 'Mrs Cosby' wouldn't find out about their relations.
In the lawsuit, it's said that Contstand never sought funds, but Cosby thought his wife would have known he was helping her with education funds.
'My wife would not know it was because Andrea and I had had sex and that Andrea was now very, very upset and that she decided that she would like to go to school,' he said.
Cosby also insisted that the only drug he gave Constand was Benadryl, but was open about his use of quaaludes, a sedative and popular party drug, in the 1970s.
He said he obtained seven prescriptions for the drug from a Los Angeles doctor over the course of two or three years. He claimed it was for a sore back, but actually gave the drug to women.
He said he gave women the drug at that time 'the same as a person would say have a drink', but without them knowing.
He insisted the drug-taking and the sex were consensual.
When he was asked about giving quaaludes to Therese Serignese, a woman he met in Las Vegas in 1976, he said: 'I don't know'.
Joseph Cammarata, a lawyer for Serignese and two other women suing Cosby for defamation said of the deposition: 'This information is important because it sheds light on the private practices of a man who holds himself out as a public moralist.'
Also in the deposition, Cosby explained a relationship with a woman named Beth Ferrier in the 1980s, where he recalled asking her about her career and her father, who had died of cancer.
'Did you ask her those questions because you wanted to have sexual contact with her?' Troiani asked.
'Yes,' Cosby responded.
Cosby continued, however, to view himself as a standup man and said he was private about his relationships.
'I am a man, the only way you will hear about who I had sex with is from the person I had it with,' he said.
When Constand cried during her own deposition, Cosby appeared to be unfazed.
'I think Andrea is a liar and I know she's a liar because I was there. I was there,' he said when Troiani asked him about the incident.
Cosby also described sexual 'rendezvous' with at least five women in Denver, Las Vegas, New York and Pennsylvania.
Thirteen women had come forward with anonymous sworn statements to support Constand's 2005 lawsuit, but their claims were never pursued because six months after questioning, Cosby settled the case with Constand on undisclosed terms.
The release of the deposition came as a former Playboy model claimed Cosby had plied her with drugs to make her 'feel better' after the death of her son, then raped her.
Victoria Valentino, now 72, says Cosby drugged her and a friend during dinner after he bumped into them at Cafe Figaro in Hollywood in February 1970, and she had told him about the death of her six-year-old son, Tony, who had drowned in the swimming pool at her home.
Ms Valentino said Cosby had taken her, and her friend Meg, to dinner at a steak restaurant called Sneaky Pete's, where he had placed two tablets on the table in front of the women.
'He said they’d make us all feel better. I’d take anything that would make me feel better as I was hurting so much,' she said
'Then he popped another one in my mouth. I started to spin. I couldn’t hold my head up, I couldn’t speak. I managed to say I wanted to go home and he said his driver would take me.'
According to Ms Valentino, he then drove them to his luxury office in the Hollywood Hills where he raped her as her friend lay unconscious.
She says she had pulled Cosby away from her pal, provoking the entertainer to launch an attack on her instead.
She said: 'It was so frightening, so awful. I felt I was the sacrificial lamb for my friend. Then he had sex with me twice, standing up while he was doing it.'
Ms Valentino, who lives in Pasadena, California, said the revelations revealed in the deposition had not surprised her, but they had forced her to relive painful memories from her past.
Ms Valentino, who had been Playboy magazine's Playmate of the Month for its September 1963 issue, said she never came forward because she felt she had no credibility, and only decided to tell her story in November last year, when she became the 16th woman to accuse Cosby of sexual assault.
