NORRISTOWN, Pa. (CN) – Arguments became heated Monday afternoon as prosecutors fought to have the jury in Bill Cosby’s upcoming assault trial hear the comedian, in his own words, say that he gave women quaaludes before having sex with them.
“Cosby was asking if he used quaaludes with other women, and he responded ‘yes,'" Assistant District Attorney M. Stewart Ryan told the court. “That is what makes it relevant.”
Cosby made the infamous quaalude admission while being deposed in 2005 for a civil case involving Andrea Constand, the only one of Cosby’s dozens of accusers dating back to the 1970s whose criminal assault claims are not barred by the statute of limitations.
Because 79-year-old Cosby admits only to giving Constand a Benadryl, which he says she ingested willingly, the defense says the quaalude evidence opens the door to women whose testimony the court has barred.
"What does quaaludes have to do with Andrea Constand?” defense attorney Brian McMonagle asked the court at Monday’s pretrial hearing. “Well, nothing."
“What the prosecution wants to do in this case is try everything else, the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s," added McMonagle, an attorney with the Philadelphia firm McMonagle, Perri, McHugh, & Mishak.
McMonagle said the quaalude admission is linked to a woman identified only as Accuser Number Four, a woman with whom Cosby claims he had a consensual sexual relationship.
Judge Steven O’Neill ruled earlier this year that he would not allow Accuser Number Four to testify when Cosby goes on trial this June at the Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas for Constand’s alleged assault.
McMonagle said this makes the quaalude evidence inadmissible.
“They are just trying to smear,” he argued. "If you introduce these statements in a vacuum, then the defense, we will have to defend it, and now we are knee-deep in Accuser Number Four."
Judge O'Neill seemed skeptical. "But they're not saying, ‘we want to call the witness to corroborate,’” O’Neill said, of the prosecution. “It’s his words! Isn't this relevant?"
McMonagle disagreed. "They are spinning it,” he exclaimed.
"Quaaludes taken 30 years prior with someone else is not relevant for a separate instance that happens in 2004 and that he was charged for in 2014,” McMonagle added.
ADA Ryan countered that the deposition provides "context and included information about references to quaaludes.” The jury should be allowed to consider the deposition since it provides a critical perspective “of an individual who freely admits to facilitating sexual assault by administering an intoxicant,” Ryan added.
O’Neill appeared more receptive to the defense’s arguments involving references to a date-rape drug in Cosby’s 2004 nonfiction book “Childhood.”
“Spanish Fly,” Cosby wrote, “an aphrodisiac so potent that it could have made Lena Horne surrender to Fat Albert.”