NORRISTOWN, Pa. (CN) – The officer who questioned Bill Cosby over a decade ago about assault claims for which he is now on trial took the witness stand Thursday, reading aloud Cosby’s answers about the night he had sex with Andrea Constand after giving her Benadryl.
“I never intended to have sex with Andrea, like naked bodies,” Cosby had said, his answers being read aloud in court this morning by Sgt. Richard Schaffer with the Cheltenham Police Department.
In 2005, when Constand reported that Cosby had drugged and assaulted her a year earlier at his Philadelphia-area home, Schaffer had been the responding officer. Schaffer had conducted his interview of Cosby on Jan. 26, 2005, in a New York City law firm, where Cosby was flanked by his attorneys.
As the police sergeant read Cosby’s answers aloud, prosecutors projected snippets of the 2005 police report for the jury in the Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas.
Assistant District Attorney M. Stewart Ryan read the questions Cosby was asked, including whether asked he had ever had sex with Constand.
[blockquote author="Bill Cosby, 2005 interview with Cheltenham, Pennsylvania, police" style="1"]I never intended to have sex with Andrea, like naked bodies."[/blockquote]
"Never asleep or awake,” Cosby had responded. “I liked the petting and touching,” he added.
Cosby also told officers that he and Constand had participated in "petting" before — "at least three other times at my house," Cosby had said, as quoted by Schaffer.
Constand denied this in two days of testimony, which wrapped up Wednesday.
"Andrea seemed like she really just wanted to get her story out there, to me," Schaffer had said in direct examination about his 2005 interview with Constand.
Having left her job at Temple University on March 31, 2004, Constand told Cheltenham police that she was drugged and assaulted sometime between mid-January and mid-February 2004.
She moved back to her family’s home in Canada after leaving Temple, ultimately confronting Cosby over the phone in several early 2005 calls with her mother.
Cosby told police in the interview that he had felt "attacked" by Gianna Constand during these conversations.
"I told her to put Andrea on the phone … and guaranteed to her mother, that there was no penile penetration, there was only petting,” Cosby said, according to Schaffer’s report.
It was because he felt attacked by the mother, Cosby had said, that he offered to pay for Constand to go to graduate school. For the same reason, Cosby told police he contacted a lawyer after speaking with Constand’s mother. “I didn't trust her,” Cosby had said.
Though the comedian told police he had been blackmailed before, he did not comment on the circumstances of that blackmail in the interview.