The New York Times is reporting the Cosby story.
The entertainer Bill Cosby testified 10 years ago that he had obtained Quaaludes in the 1970s to give to young women with whom he wanted to have sex, according to a court document unsealed on Monday.
That must be the wording of the court document, since all the outlets are reporting it that way, but damn it’s bad wording. You don’t “have sex with” someone you just sedated! Having sex with is, obviously, mutual – that’s what “with” means. He wanted to fuck them, not “have sex with” them. He wanted to rape them. If he’d wanted to have sex with them, he wouldn’t have sedated them.
It was an acknowledgment, the first to become public and in Mr. Cosby’s own words, that he viewed powerful, sedating drugs as a part of his sexual encounters with women.
It was an acknowledgment that he wanted them unable to resist.
That’s an admission of rape, if you ask me.
The name of the woman Mr. Cosby cites in his testimony is redacted in the paperwork, but the discussion in the court record closely tracks an incident recounted by Therese Serignese, who says she was sexually assaulted by Mr. Cosby in a Las Vegas hotel after one of his performances in 1976.
Joseph Cammarata, a lawyer for Ms. Serignese, said the account in Mr. Cosby’s testimony of the Las Vegas encounter with a woman and Ms. Serignese’s story of her encounter with Mr. Cosby were one and the same. “It’s Therese,” he said. “It’s the same case.”
Ms. Serignese, then 19, has said in interviews that Mr. Cosby gave her pills in a backstage room and that she took them because he was an authority figure and she felt compelled. Her next memory, she said, was of feeling drugged and being sexually assaulted by him without her consent.
But everybody thought he was such a nice guy!
This next bit is fascinating in relation to that:
The records from the Constand case were released in response to a request by The Associated Press, which Mr. Cosby and his legal team had fought. “It would be terribly embarrassing for this material to come out,” his lawyer, George M. Gowen III, argued last month.
In deciding to release the documents, Judge Eduardo Robreno of United States District Court said he was guided by the sense that Mr. Cosby had fashioned himself as a moral guide with pronouncements that offered “his views on, among other things, child-rearing, family life, education and crime.”
“The stark contrast between Bill Cosby, the public moralist, and Bill Cosby, the subject of serious allegations concerning improper (and perhaps criminal) conduct is a matter as to which The A.P. — and by extension the public — has a significant interest,” the judge wrote in a memorandum issued on Monday.
Yes it is. Yes.it.is.