A newly-released deposition stemming from a 10-year old court case against Bill Cosby presents more damaging details about how the once-beloved entertainer used his fame and drugs to pursue young women.
On Saturday, the New York Times released portions of a nearly 1,000-page transcript of a deposition that the paper obtained through a court reporting service. A shorter memorandum of the 2006 case was recently unsealed by a federal judge, leading to the revelation that Cosby had admitted to giving women Quaaludes with the intent of having sex with them.
Cosby has not been charged with a crime and has denied sexually assaulting women. But the transcript provides explicit details of his pursuit of what he called “rendezvous” with various women over the years. He offers great detail of his calculated seduction of the plaintiff, Andrea Constand, who has said she was drugged and molested.
He admitted, for example, that after giving a Quaalude to Therese Serignese in 1976, he didn’t know whether she was able to consent to sexual intercourse. He also explain details of how he paid for Serignese’s educational expenses so that his wife wouldn’t find out.
In the deposition, Cosby asserts he had the William Morris Agency, his talent agency at the time, send her $5,000, for which he reimbursed the agency. Cosby left WMA’s successor agency, WME, after 48 years to sign with CAA. CAA quietly dropped Cosby as a client earlier this year as more than two dozen women went public with allegations of rape and doping incidents over many years.
A lawyer for Serignese and two other women who are suing Cosby, Joseph Cammarata, told the New York Times the information in the transcript is important because it “sheds light on the private practices of a man who holds himself out as a public moralist.”
Source: Variety
