NORRISTOWN, Pa. _ A day after she confronted her alleged attacker in court for the first time, Bill Cosby accuser Andrea Constand faced a challenge from his lawyers.
The defense spent much of its cross-examination Wednesday morning seeking to sow doubt about Constand's account of the attack and her relationship with Cosby.
Cosby lawyer Angela Agrusa painted what Constand claimed was innocuous friendship as a romance, seeking to create the impression for the jury that she was therefore a romantic partner, not an unwitting victim, in later sexual encounters.
Agrusa peppered Constand with questions about a night when Constand was on the bed at Cosby's hotel room at Foxwoods Casino Resort as well as at an earlier dinner at Cosby's home that involved alcohol and a lit fireplace.
The approach led to a somewhat bizarre courtroom sequence in which Agrusa tried to play up the romantic qualities of Cosby and Constand's earlier encounters while Constand played them down.
"Your bodies were touching and you laid there for at least 15 minutes," Agrusa said of the night at Foxwoods, where Cosby had invited her to see him perform.
"No, I was reclining with my elbow with my feet off the bed," Constand replied.
And did he open the door while wearing a robe? the defense asked. "He was in a white shirt and pants," Constand said, slightly annoyed.
Agrusa also recounted the details of the first dinner at his home some time before the night of the attack.
"So you knew on that first night that you were alone in his home, sitting by a fire and drinking brandy, that Mr. Cosby was interested in you in a romantic way," Agrusa said.
"No, ma'am, he ever said a word to me," Constand replied.
Constand has accused Cosby of giving her pills and violating her sexually while she was unconscious at his home, the basis of three charges of indecent aggravated assault the entertainer is facing in this trial.
Part of the defense's focus Wednesday also involved inconsistencies in Constand's initial report to Pennsylvania police the year after the attack. She had told authorities at that time that the attack occurred in March 2004, not January of that year, as she testified Tuesday.
Agrusa went through phone records on that March date, when Constand and Cosby had attended a Philadelphia high school fundraising dinner, which showed a number of calls during the hours when she would have been unconscious. Constand had said the date on the police report was incorrect and that the attack happened two months earlier.
Agrusa argued the change was the result of a more calculating change-of-tune on the accuser's part. "Once you got hold of your phone records," the lawyer said, "you changed your story."
