Cosby jury can hear about quaaludes, not accuser’s lawsuit
PHILADELPHIA — Jurors at Bill Cosby’s sex assault trial can hear his explosive deposition testimony about quaaludes but can’t hear about the lawsuit he settled afterward with the accuser, a judge ruled Friday.
Cosby, 79, is accused of drugging and molesting Temple University employee Andrea Constand at his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004. He calls the encounter consensual.
In the decade-old deposition, Cosby said he got seven prescriptions for quaaludes in the 1970s, intending not to take them himself but to give them to women he was pursuing for sex. The powerful sedatives were banned in 1983, and Cosby said he no longer had them when he met Constand 20 years later.
Defence lawyers therefore pushed to exclude his testimony about quaaludes from the trial. But Montgomery County Judge Steven O’Neill on Friday said the testimony was fair game.