Cosby Team Cites Phone Records as It Tries to Discredit Accuser

Defense lawyers for Bill Cosby hammered away at his main accuser’s account Monday, focusing on her cellphone records that they suggested contradicted her version of events.

The accuser, Andrea Constand, said she had called him as she drove up to his home on the night in January 2004 when she says he sexually assaulted her.

“Can you find one single call for the whole month of January to his Elkins Park number?” Thomas A. Mesereau Jr., a lawyer for Cosby asked Constand, as she reviewed the records.

“I might have been mistaken,” Constand replied.

Constand remained outwardly calm during two hours of cross-examination in the sexual assault retrial, fending off queries on a variety of topics that the defense brought forward to indicate she had converted a consensual sexual encounter with Cosby into a criminal assault in order to score a big payday.

She later said, in redirect testimony, that there were other numbers she was able to call to reach Cosby, whom she has accused of drugging and molesting her at his home near here.

The defense, though, continued to point to the phone records as evidence that Constand had kept in touch with Cosby in the following weeks at a level at odds with her account of having been assaulted. They said Constand had called Cosby more than 70 times in the weeks after the encounter, including two calls she made to Cosby on Valentine’s Day that year.

Constand, who was director of operations for the Temple University women’s basketball team at the time, said she was calling Cosby only on matters of business at the university, where he was a powerful trustee and its best known alumnus. In many cases, she said that she was only returning his calls, perhaps to alert him to a basketball game, and that her contacts were not evidence of any romance.

“I called many people on Valentine’s Day, sir,” she said at one point.

“I called him when he called me,” she added. “I didn’t have a reason to call Mr. Cosby.”

In the afternoon, Constand’s mother, Gianna, testified that she did call to confront Cosby after her daughter told her about being assaulted. Even before that conversation, she said she had noticed her daughter’s distressed state. She spoke of her twitching and screaming at night, and thought she was both depressed and withdrawn.

“My daughter was not the same person when she came home from Toronto,” Gianna Constand said. “She was not the same person as when she left.”

In their phone call in 2005, Gianna Constand said Cosby provided a graphic, detailed account of touching her daughter sexually. “He did say to me, ‘Don’t worry mum — there was no penile penetration,'” Gianna Constand testified.

Kathleen Bliss, a lawyer for Cosby, suggested that Andrea Constand’s mother had herself benefitted from the financial settlement.

“This isn’t about money, Bliss,” Gianna Constand responded.

Defense lawyers had similarly attacked Constand’s credibility in June when the first trial on these charges against Cosby ended in a mistrial after jurors became deadlocked. Cosby’s new crop of lawyers has been more aggressive in portraying Constand this time as a desperate “con artist” who schemed to get over on a rich but lonely man because she needed money.

The defense, for example, has accused her of running a pyramid scheme over six months during her time at Temple, suggesting she sent emails to solicit money as part of a scam. But Constand testified she had only sent one email, soliciting $65. She said she simply cut and pasted language crafted by someone else into the email that she herself had little understanding of.

“I was just helping a friend,” she said.

Prosecutors said it could not have been a pyramid scheme because the solicitation invited people to buy products like software.

Constand, 45, sued Cosby in 2005 after prosecutors initially declined to take on her case. She later received a settlement of $3.38 million. She has said that Cosby, now 80, took advantage of his position as her mentor to bring her to his home where he gave her three pills that incapacitated her.

Five other women testified last week that they, too, believe Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted them.

To support the argument that Constand’s account is a fabrication, Cosby’s lawyers plan to bring forward an academic adviser at Temple who said she had roomed with her during university basketball trips. The adviser, Marguerite Jackson, has said that Constand once told her before the incident with Cosby that she could fabricate a claim of sexual assault about a celebrity to get money.

Jackson was barred from testifying at the first trial after Constand told the court she did not know her. But the defense has brought forward two former Temple colleagues who said Constand and Jackson actually did know one another.

But Constand denied that again in testimony Monday. Jackson’s name sounded familiar, she said, but she said she had never spoken to her and had never roomed with anyone on basketball trips.

Asked directly whether she had formulated a plan to frame Cosby, Constand said, “No, sir.”

In its questioning, the defense has sought to emphasize discrepancies in the accounts Constand gave to police in Pennsylvania and in Canada, where she had moved after leaving Temple. Prosecutors have said she has been consistent for most of her accounts, such as what happened during the assault.

On Monday, the defense focused on a visit Constand made to a Connecticut casino resort, where Cosby was appearing, in 2003, just a few months before she said the encounter with Cosby occurred. During the visit, Constand dined with Cosby and another man in Cosby’s room and spent some time alone in his room with Cosby.

“Did you think it was appropriate to be in a married man’s room in a hotel at that time of night?” Mesereau asked. Constand said she had made the trip at Cosby’s request, and had gone to his room after he invited her back for some baked goods.