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Cosby’s Quaalude Admission From 2005 Case Revealed

PHILADELPHIA (CN) - Bill Cosby admitted 10 years ago that he bought quaaludes to give to women before having sex with them, documents unsealed Monday in Federal Court show.

U.S. District Judge Eduardo Robreno released the deposition records, as requested by the Associated Press, from a case filed in 2005 against the comedian.

As in a spate of more recent claims against Cosby, the plaintiff in the 2005 case, Andrea Constand, claimed that Cosby had drugged and raped her. At the time, Constand had been the director of operations for Temple University women's basketball program.

The documents reveal a particularly acrimonious dynamic between the attorneys representing Constand and Cosby, respectively, and most of the unsealed files relate to motions to either seal the deposition transcripts or make them public.

In support of a motion to sanction Cosby's lawyer, Constand's lawyers provided an alleged instance of attorney obstructionism during a deposition of Cosby in which Patrick O'Connor, Cosby's lawyer and a founding partner of the Philadelphia law firm Cozen O'Connor, instructed Cosby not to answer.

"When you got the quaaludes, was it in your mind that you were going to use these quaaludes for young women that you wanted to have sex with?" Dolores Troiani, one of Constand's attorneys, asked Cosby, according to the transcript.

"Yes," Cosby said.

"Did you ever give any of those young women quaaludes without their knowledge?"

"Object to the question," O'Connor said. "Restrict it to Jane Does, would you please."

"No, I will not," Troiani said.

"Do not answer it."

Though the AP had pushed unsuccessfully to see the records in 2005, citing privacy concerns for Cosby, it renewed the effort this past December, arguing that enough time had elapsed and that the documents did not merit a permanent seal.

Constand did not raise any objections to the unsealing.

Judge Robreno's somewhat passionate order Monday notes that the documents were not simply prurient tabloid fodder.

"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 AP - and by extension the public - has a significant interest," he wrote.

Robreno rejected Cosby's claim that unsealing the files would subject him to a public awareness of the most intimate deals of his personal life.

"This case, however, is not about defendant's status as a public person by virtue of the exercise of his trade as a televised or comedic personality," Robreno wrote. "Rather, Defendant has donned the mantle of public moralist and mounted the proverbial electronic or print soap box to volunteer his views on, among other things, childrearing, family life, education, and crime ... he has voluntarily narrowed the zone of privacy that he is entitled to claim."

By way of example, Robreno, in footnotes, cited a speech Cosby gave for the NAACP in 2004, criticizing young black men for lack of personal responsibility and for using black vernacular.

Robreno also noted that Cosby undermined his privacy claims by publicly denying the sexual-assault claims 18 women have brought against him,

"By joining the debate about the merits of the allegations against him, he has further diminished his entitlement to a claim of privacy," Robreno wrote.

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