They couldn't get Bill Cosby's criminal trial for the 2004 rape of Andrea Constand tossed out on a mistrial today, but the actor's defense lawyers made sure a key witness for the prosecution wasn't getting off the stand unscathed.
Prosecutors from the Montgomery County district attorney's office read jurors in Cosby's sexual assault trial excerpts of a more than a decade-old deposition in which he recounts that exchange.
Sixty women have accused Cosby of drugging them, sexually assaulting them, or both.
Cosby said it was on her second visit to his home that she rebuffed him.
"What am I hoping to get [by speaking to the Constand women by phone] if I'm guilty of drugging somebody?" he said in the deposition.
He said: "I apologized but my apology was, 'My God, I'm in trouble with these people because this is a dirty old man with a young girl.' And the mother seizes on this...." He said he failed to mail the information because he felt he was being attacked feared his phone call with Costand's mother, Gianna Costand, was being recorded.
When the deposition first became public in 2015 after media reports, Cosby's representatives dismissed the Quaalude admissions as artifacts of the wild 1970s, with no relevance to the Constand allegations.
Constand alleges that Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted her in his home when she was an employee at his alma mater, Temple University.
Cosby said in the deposition that he gave her Benadryl from his own reserve because Constand had complained about stress and neck pain, and he wanted to help her relax.
Seventy-nine-year-old Bill Cosby is currently facing three counts of aggravated indecent assault (stemming from a single incident) related to a sexual encounter with now-44-year-old alleged victim Andrea Constand.
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Jurors in the comedian's sexual assault trial have heard a recording of one of Cosby's phone conversations in 2005 with Gianna Constand, the mother of his alleged victim, Andrea Constand.
He testified previous year that he had talked with Cosby's lawyer before making his decision and that it was meant to let Cosby speak freely at a potential civil deposition - the same deposition that prosecutors are now relying on at his trial.
Cosby says he gave the trial accuser only Benadryl.
Bill Cosby's attorney Angela Agrusa, center, and defense attorney Brian McMonagle, left, arrive for Cosby's sexual assault trial at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown, Pa., Thursday, June 8, 2017.
The prosecution called 12 witnesses over five brisk days of testimony in the sexual assault case that could send the 79-year-old TV star to prison for the rest of his life.
"Quaaludes happen to be the drug that. young people were using to party with, and I wanted to have them just in case", Cosby said then. The defense will begin presenting its side on Monday. Constand's lawyers have long maintained that she could not have been romantically interested in Cosby (as he claims) because she is gay.
He said to her, 'Andrea don't you remember?
"Do you think there would be a financial outcome to you if the public believed that you gave Andrea a drug that took away her ability to consent and then had sexual contact with her?"
It also could spoil successful efforts by Cosby's lawyers to prevent jurors from hearing about the more than 60 other women who say he assaulted them since the 1960s.
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