NORRISTOWN, Pa. _ The mother of the former talent agency assistant who claimed Bill Cosby drugged and assaulted her two decades ago testified Tuesday that her daughter was despondent after the purported attack.
Taking the witness stand on the second day of Cosby's trial, Pattrice Sewell told jurors that her daughter, Kristen Johnson, didn't tell her all the details of the forced sexual liaison until much later. But it was clear, Sewell testified, that something was wrong with her daughter.
"She changed considerably," Sewell said. "It almost appeared as if she folded in on herself. ... She'd go to work. She'd go home. ... She lost her ability to take risks on friendships and relationships."
Even after learning the extent of the allegations, Sewell and her husband _ a retired Los Angeles police detective _ never urged their daughter to report it to police.
"Her father didn't want her to be humiliated and feel shame and embarrassment like he had seen other women go through when they went to police at that time," she said.
After her daughter endured a bruising cross-examination by defense lawyers Monday afternoon, Sewell's spell on the witness stand Tuesday seemed an attempt by Montgomery County prosecutors to substantiate Johnson's allegation and demonstrate a pattern by Cosby. They hope to persuade jurors in the Norristown courtroom he used the same tactics to drug and molest Andrea Constand in 2004 at his Cheltenham Township home.
Johnson, a 55-year-old Atlanta resident, tearfully testified Monday about a forced sexual liaison she says occurred in a bungalow at the Bel-Air hotel in Los Angeles in 1996.
At the time, Johnson was an assistant to Cosby's agent at the William Morris Agency. Cosby _ a man she described as a fatherlike figure in her own life _ invited her over for lunch, only to greet her at the door of his bungalow in a bathrobe and offer her a white pill.
Johnson said she felt pressured to take it because Cosby was one of her firm's biggest clients and a man her boss was eager to please. But within minutes she began to feel woozy, Johnson said, and later woke up on Cosby's bed to find her dress undone around her waist and Cosby forcing her to touch him.
In cross-examination, Cosby's lawyers highlighted several conflicting statements Johnson previously made about the attack _ including that she once said in a deposition that the attack occurred in 1990.
But the account Sewell gave jurors Tuesday mirrored much of what her daughter had said a day earlier. She recalled Johnson extending an invitation from Cosby to the rest of her family to attend one of his shows in Las Vegas in 1991.
"She was very proud to introduce her family to Mr. Cosby," Sewell testified. "She knew that we admired him and that we watched 'The Cosby Show.'"
Later, days before Johnson left her job at the talent agency, Johnson made clear to her mother that something had happened between her and Cosby _ and that she might be fired.
"She called me at work, she was nearly hysterical and she was crying," Sewell testified. "She said, 'They're telling lies about me. Mr. Cosby is saying all these things about me and I don't know what to do.'"
Sewell said it was only later that she learned the specifics of their encounter.
"I didn't know until much, much later," she said. "She had told her sister more details. I told her I didn't want to know."
Constand, the case's central accuser, alleged a similar set of facts when she reported to police in 2005 that Cosby assaulted her.
A former Temple University employee, Constand said Cosby had taken her under his wing and approached her as a mentor _ only to later invite her over to his Cheltenham house, offer her drugs, and take advantage of her when she could not resist.
It is not clear when prosecutors plan to call her to the witness stand for what will be her first public statements about that alleged assault _ but her testimony could come as soon as Tuesday.
Constand has not been seen at the Montgomery County Courthouse since the trial started Monday. Her lawyers _ Dolores Troiani and Bebe Kivitz _ were seated in the courtroom gallery on Tuesday, their first appearance since the trial began.
Charged with three counts of aggravated indecent assault, Cosby, 79, faces up to a decade in prison if convicted.
