On Monday night, a federal court unsealed documents from Andrea Constand’s 2005 lawsuit against Bill Cosby following a request from the Associated Press. Constand accused Cosby of drugging and raping her, and found numerous Jane Doe witnesses who said the same. (The suit was settled out of court in 2006.) Cosby and his lawyer had tried to block the release of the records by claiming the comedian was not a public figure; judge Eduardo C. Robreno disagreed, ruling that Cosby had “donned the mantle of public moralist†and thus “voluntarily narrowed the zone of privacy that he is entitled to claim.â€
Before the official release, the AP reported that Cosby had admitted to obtaining quaaludes to give to women he intended to have sex with. The full records reveal that Cosby had seven prescriptions for quaaludes, which he used for this purpose. In his testimony, the comedian said he did give the drugs to other people, and confirmed a Jane Doe witness’s account that they had sex after he gave her the pills: “She meets me back stage. I give her Quaaludes. We then have sex.†Cosby did not answer the question of whether he gave women drugs without their consent.
Elsewhere in the testimony, Cosby remembered calling Tom Illus at the William Morris Agency and telling him to send money to one of the accusers. On another occasion, Cosby admitted to offering Constand money for her “education†(she had asked only for an apology) and testified that he had set up a similar “educational trust†for one of the Jane Does. When pressed, Cosby said only that he had made similar donations “for a variety of people, for a variety of reasons.â€
Other documents reveal additional details of the comedian’s damage-control strategy. When he learned that The National Enquirer was going to interview Jane Doe witness Beth Ferrier, Cosby testified, he got famed attorney Marty Singer to negotiate a compromise with the tabloid. In the words of Constand’s lawyer, Cosby “decided to give the paper an ‘exclusive interview’ in exchange for their not printing the Beth Ferrier story, which he had been given the opportunity to review.â€
The full 400 pages of court documents are online at Deadspin’s Scribd page. In response to the records, prominent Cosby defender Jill Scott walked back her earlier support of the comedian on Twitter: