NORRISTOWN, Pa. _ The cross-examination of Andrea Constand, the central accuser in the sexual assault case that could send Bill Cosby to prison for a decade or more, was anticipated as a slugging match for the ages.
For months, Cosby's top-flight defense lawyers _ and even a former Montgomery County district attorney _ had vowed that Constand had irreparably harmed her own credibility with her behavior after the night of her alleged 2004 attack and in shifting stories she told police. They had sworn that once confronted in court, her accusation would collapse under the weight of its own inconsistencies.
But by the time she left the witness stand Wednesday, after hours of pointed defense questioning over two days, Constand had held firm.
"What was the one thing I asked you to do when I met you?" Assistant District Attorney Kristen Feden asked the 44-year-old former college basketball player just before her testimony concluded.
Constand replied: "Tell the truth."
What the jury, however, made of Constand's apparent unflappability remains an open question. Did she succeed in convincing them she was a victim of a 12-year-old sex crime or succumb to the defense portrayal of a woman who welcomed Cosby's romantic overtures?
As cross-examination resumed Wednesday, Constand seemed unfazed when confronted by defense lawyer Angela Agrusa with the police statements and phone records she used to highlight to suggest holes in Constand's account.
"I don't know the contents of one to the other," she said, when asked to explain slight differences between separate statements she gave to Cheltenham police in January 2005. "I can't recall anything."
Constand answered questions in the same calm manner she showed on Tuesday, when for the first time she publicly described in detail the attack that led to Cosby's arrest on aggravated indecent assault charges. And while jurors focused on her responses from the stand, Cosby offered little in the way of reaction.
Addressing her politely as "ma'am," Agrusa suggested that Constand changed the date she originally said she was attacked by Cosby after obtaining her own phone records and realizing she had been awake and calling friends on the night she claimed to have been assaulted.
That initial date, in March 2004, she attended a dinner in Philadelphia that Cosby had invited her to with several administrators at Central High School. And the phone records showed calls to several close friends that night.
Repeating an account she gave during her first day on the stand, Constand told jurors in the Norristown courtroom that the attack had actually happened in January 2004 _ a fact she said she remembered only after giving her first statements to police.
"So once you got a hold of your phone records (in 2005) and saw that you could not have possibly been ... unconscious on the night you had told police you were sexually assaulted, you changed your story?" Agrusa asked.
Constand, with a confused look on her face, replied: "No, I never got a hold of my phone records."
Constand also rebuffed Agrusa's suggestions that she had admitted in past statements to a prior romantic relationship with Cosby.
Instead, Constand repeated her earlier explanation that when she described instances where Cosby had put a hand on her thigh or invited her over for romantic dinners that his advances were not reciprocated and ones she easily brushed off.
When pressed by Agrusa, Constand acknowledged she had told a close friend about Cosby's suggestive behavior.
But she insisted she did not think Cosby was interested in a romantic relationship with her.
"I did say that ... he had been suggestive, but what I'm saying is Mr. Cosby never disclosed to me that he was interested in a romantic interaction with me," she said.
Constand said Cosby gave her gifts, including a $225 blow dryer after he asked her if she ever wore her hair straight, in a conversation she described as focused on her interest in sports broadcasting.
Agrusa asked if Constand had changed her hairstyle for Cosby.
"He asked me if I had ever straightened my hair before," she said. "This was as in regards to head shots and having a different look for head shots. I said I hadn't had my hair straight since I was a child. And maybe shortly after that conversation I cut my hair shorter from what I had had."
Cosby has maintained since Constand first came forward that the two shared several consensual romantic dalliances. He has denied assaulting Constand or any of the more than 60 other women who have accused him of sexual misconduct.
After the alleged assault, Constand acknowledged that she had called Cosby many times _ sometimes several times in one day, according to phone records presented by defense lawyers.
Constand countered that while the records show that she called Cosby more times than he called her from his phone number in New York, he also called her frequently from other numbers. She had testified Tuesday that she felt obligated to continue taking his calls after the alleged assault because she worked for Temple University, where he was a trustee.
"I just want to say that there were many numbers that he called me from," she said. "I'm not sure. I would agree with you that I made those calls."
