Why did Andrea Constand wait a year to tell anyone that Bill Cosby sexually assaulted her?
This is the question Cosby’s defense team has for the former Temple University administrator during the early days of the only criminal case against the comedian. Over 50 women have accused Cosby of various degrees of sexual misconduct, from groping to drugging and raping. But, due to statutes of limitations, Constand is the only accuser who has been able to take Cosby to criminal court.
In a police interview transcript made public Thursday, Constand — who has been prevented in court from publicly talking about the yearlong delay in reporting — provides the fullest picture thus far about the alleged 2004 incident. Constand maintains that Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted her at his mansion in Cheltenham, a suburb of Philadelphia. Prosecutors quoted excerpts from the interview at a hearing just over a week ago, using it as evidence that Cosby should go on trial. (Cosby has repeatedly tried to have the case thrown out, to no avail.)
The first person Constand told, she said, was her mother, on January 13, 2005.
“What caused you to wait almost one year to tell someone about this incident?” the police asked.
Constand said she felt “concern about my job,” even though she was leaving. She went on:
I want to say that there was an element of fear. Before I was going to say anything to anyone I had to put my own thoughts and feelings together. I was emotionally shocked. I was still traumatized about the whole situation. I had some emotional distress that I was dealing with. I needed to come to terms with this on my own. I had to get clear enough about what happened to when I was ready to talk to someone I would be able to present exactly what happened. Because I wasn’t physically injured and that there was no violence attached to the situation, I reasoned that there was no reason to come forward at this point because I hadn’t suffered physical trauma.
Constand ultimately told her mother about what happened after she “had a flashback.” When her mother asked what Cosby did to her, Constand said, “He gave me pills and he sexually violated me without consenting… He fondled my breasts. He penetrated my vagina with his hand and he placed my hand on his penis.”
Her mother, Constand said, was “shocked” and “devastated.” The next day, Constand went through the events with her mother again, this time face to face. (Their first conversation occurred over the phone.) That day, they went to the police. Constand’s mother decided to call Cosby after filing the police report; during the call, Cosby allegedly “admitted to all the things that occurred in the incident and apologized to both me and my mother separately” while they “were both on the phone.”
In Cosby’s 2005 interview with the police, he claimed all the sexual contact with Constand had been consensual. “The only thing I could see was that maybe” the women “were upset because I wasn’t calling anymore or seeing them anymore.” He said that the only drug he gave her was Benadryl. He denied that she ever told him to stop, that her vision was blurred, or that she couldn’t move. (Constand told police that the pills Cosby gave her made her “dizzy, blurry-eyed and sick to her stomach” and made her legs feel “like jelly.”)
Constand said she received no medical treatment after the assault. About two months after the alleged incident, Constand said Cosby invited her to a dinner at a Chinese restaurant. She accepted because she wanted “to confront him and discussed what had happened and what he gave me that night that would have made that situation happen.” But she didn’t get the chance to speak with him at the dinner, an event for honor students from Central High; she said he told her that if she still wanted to talk to him, she could “come up to the house and I will talk to you.”
She went to his house, she said, but “right away he blew it off and showed no interest in discussing it.”
Instead, “He sat close to me. Too close to me and I was disturbed by that, considering what had happened in that specific place. At that point I didn’t think I was going to accomplish what I wanted to do.”