Accuser to Cosby at His Sex Assault Trial: ‘You Remember, Don’t You?’

NORRISTOWN, Pa. — A former aspiring model, testifying tearily at Bill Cosby’s sexual assault retrial, told the jury Wednesday that the entertainer had drugged and sexually assaulted her inside his suite at the Las Vegas Hilton in 1986 when she was only 17.

Then the woman, Chelan Lasha, looked across the courtroom at the 80-year-old entertainer and called out: “You remember, don’t you, Mr. Cosby?”

The confrontation drew an immediate objection from lawyers for Cosby who requested a mistrial. But the judge, Steven T. O’Neill of the Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas, denied their request.

Lasha was the second of five accusers who prosecutors are calling to testify at Cosby’s retrial on charges that he drugged and sexually assaulted Andrea Constand, a former Temple University employee, at his home near here in 2004.

The first, Heidi Thomas, had testified Tuesday that Cosby drugged and assaulted her in Reno, Nevada, in 1984 after inviting her to the city, where he often performed, to help her with her acting career.

Defense lawyers suggested Wednesday that Thomas had come forward out of a desire for attention and possibly money. But she responded with a blunter rationale. “I want to see a serial rapist convicted,” Thomas said during cross-examination in the Montgomery County Courthouse.

These fiery accusations from women who say Cosby abused them filled much of the third day of testimony in the case as prosecutors worked to convince the jury that Cosby’s encounter with Constand was only one in a pattern of predatory sexual assaults on younger women.

Lasha, who now lives in California, said she had met Cosby when he contacted her about helping her with her career. At the hotel, she wet her hair to pose for modeling shots at Cosby’s request, she said, and then he gave her what he said was an antihistamine to help her cold, and also some almond liqueur.

Lasha said she consumed both because “I trusted him.”

Then, she said: “He laid me on the bed; I could not move any more after that. He kept pinching my breast and humping my leg. Waking up I was naked.”

She said she heard him grunting, and with that, Lasha imitated from the stand the sounds that she said Cosby had made. She said she was wondering, “Why are you doing this to me? You were supposed to help me?”

Afterward, Lasha said Cosby told her, “Daddy said wake up,” before pushing her out the door.

She said she prayed in her car in the parking lot, and told her guidance counselor and her sister what had happened. A few days later, she said she returned with her grandmother to see Cosby in a show. After that, she testified, he called her one last time.

“He called me and said people who talk too much can be quietened,” she said, but she said she never heard from Cosby again.

Defense lawyers questioned Lasha Wednesday afternoon and had already received permission from the judge to tell the jurors that she had been previously convicted of making a false statement to the police in an unrelated case. Cosby has denied assaulting all of the women and has said that the sexual encounter with Constand was consensual.

The first accuser, Thomas, had testified Tuesday that, strangely incapacitated by a single sip of wine that Cosby had given her, she found herself waxing in and out of consciousness during a 1984 trip to Reno to visit the entertainer and receive acting lessons. But one moment she remembered, she said, was being on a bed where Cosby was inserting his penis into her mouth.

Kathleen Bliss, one of Cosby’s lawyers, queried Thomas’ motivations for coming forward, asking whether she had received payments for media appearances. Thomas, now a private music teacher, said she had not. She said she first spoke out in January 2015 because other women had started to go public with accusations against Cosby.

“There were women coming forward and they were not being believed,” Thomas said. “I wanted to support them.”

Until then, she had blamed herself for the encounter, and had told few people about it, except her husband, a psychologist and her three daughters.

“As a mother of daughters,” she said, “and as one who is now a statistic, it was important to me that they know if anything happened to them, they could come to me.”

Bliss pressed her about what she depicted as discrepancies in the account Thomas gave the police and in particular noted that the date on Thomas’ plane ticket to Reno, April 2, 1984, was different from the date she indicated in her testimony, April 1.

“The change of those dates affects your testimony of your four-day odyssey,” Bliss said.

O’Neill explained to the jury that Cosby is not being charged for the accusations leveled by Thomas. Her account is being included, along with those of four other women, to allow prosecutors to demonstrate a signature pattern of predatory behavior by Cosby.

“The defendant is not on trial for this conduct,” O’Neill said.