After describing what he depicts as a sexual encounter with Andrea Constand, Mr. Cosby explains in part why he viewed it as consensual.
I walk her out. She does not look angry. She does not say to me, don’t ever do that again. She doesn’t walk out with an attitude of a huff, because I think that I’m a pretty decent reader of people and their emotions in these romantic sexual things, whatever you want to call them.
Asked if he ever talked with anyone else about what he described as his physical interaction with Ms. Constand, Mr. Cosby says he never discusses such things.
I am a man, the only way you will hear about who I had sex with is from the person I had it with.
Q. Why is that?
A. When I was a boy it was a thing that girls used to say, please don’t tell anybody. But it is something that I’ve learned as you grow older that they’re the first people to go and tell somebody after something has happened.
Mr. Cosby was asked to talk about his relationship with Beth Ferrier, one of the women who has accused him of drugging her. Ms. Ferrier has said that in the mid-1980s, after a brief consensual affair with the entertainer had ended, she met him before a performance in Denver, drank some coffee that he gave her, felt woozy and woke up in a car with her clothes a mess and her bra undone.
Q. What was your relationship with her?
A. We had sex and we had dinners and sex and rendezvous.
Q. What are rendezvous?
A. Rendezvous is when you call somebody and say, do you want to be at such and such and they say yes and you go there.
Q. Is there sexual contact associated with the rendezvous?
A. There was with Beth every time.
Q. Where did these rendezvous occur?
A. I don’t remember.
Q. Do you know the cities?
A. Denver for sure.
Q. Do you know if any of the rendezvous happened in New York City?
A. I don’t remember.
Q. How did it end with her?
A. Stopped calling for rendezvous.
Q. You stopped?
A. Yes.
Q. Why?
A. Just moving on.
Q. What does that mean?
A. Don’t want to see her anymore.
After some debate with Mr. Cosby’s lawyer, Ms. Troiani continued her questioning:
Q. You said just moving on. What did you mean by that?
A. Changing.
Q. Had you decided to stop having extramarital affairs?
A. No.
Later Ms. Troiani asked Mr. Cosby to respond to Ms. Ferrier’s account of an earlier time when, after a dinner in Manhattan, she went back to Mr. Cosby’s New York City home with several people and stayed behind when the other people left.
Q. She says that she stayed with you and that you began talking about her career and asking about her father who had died of cancer. Does any of that ring a bell with you?
A. Yes.
Q. Do you remember talking about that?
A. Yes.
Q. Do you remember what else you talked about?
A. That’s enough.
Q. Did you ask her those questions because you wanted to have sexual contact with her?
A. Yes.
Mr. Cosby acknowledges in the deposition that he secured seven prescriptions for Quaaludes in the 1970s over a period of two to three years from a Los Angeles doctor. He says that, while he told the doctor he had a sore back, he imagined that the doctor understood that he was not using them to treat his pain.
Q. You testified that he knew you were not going to take them. And I’d like to -- explain your answer. How did he know that, or why do you say he knew that?
A. What was happening at that time was that that was -- Quaaludes happen to be the drug that kids, young people were using to party with and there were times when I wanted to have them just in case.
Mr. Cosby says he never took the Quaaludes himself because they made him sleepy and because he was using them in his efforts to have sex with women. He also says that, with the exception of one glass of beer, he stopped drinking alcohol when he was 16.
Q. Why didn’t you ever take the Quaaludes?
A. Because I used them.
Q. For what?
A. The same as a person would say have a drink.
Though he shows flashes of jocularity, Mr. Cosby is often testy under questioning, as in one sequence where Ms. Troiani asks him about the account of Therese Serignese, who says she could not have consented to the sex she had with Mr. Cosby one night in Las Vegas because she was incapacitated after taking Quaaludes he had given her. Mr. O’Connor, below, is Patrick O’Connor, Mr. Cosby’s lawyer.
Now, would you agree with me if she’s right that this incident of you meeting her when she was 19, then you would be in your late 30s, early 40s at that time?
MR. O’CONNOR: Well, it’s 1976.
THE WITNESS: I was born in 1937.
MS. TROIANI: Q. Would you agree with me that would place you around 39, 40?
A. Do the math.
In another instance, Ms. Troiani, after some debate with Mr. O’Connor about her line of questioning, asks Mr. Cosby about his state of mind after getting off the telephone with Ms. Serignese years later.
Q. Now, what do you think about? Do you have a problem answering that question?
A. I was waiting for you to stop talking.
Q. Okay. What did you think about?
A. Am I allowed to think?
Mr. Cosby at one point acknowledges to Ms. Troiani that his chef met Andrea Constand when she visited Mr. Cosby’s Pennsylvania home, and Ms. Troiani proceeds to ask some questions about the chef.
Q. Have you spoken to him about the accusations that Andrea has made in this case?
A. Yes.
Q. When was that?
A. I don’t recall.
Q. What was the conversation?
A. My lawyers wanted to talk to him.
Q. Did you say anything else to him?
A. No.
Q. Why did he leave your employ?
A. That’s confidential.
Q. What do you mean it’s confidential?
A. Look it up in the dictionary. I’m getting a little tired.
At several junctures in the deposition, Mr. Cosby describes how he tried to keep his wife, Camille, from finding out about the women he had been pursuing and, by his account, having sex with. In one instance, he describes how he once planned to pay for Ms. Constand’s educational expenses, not through a foundation he had established that provides education grants, but by “our writing a check.”
Q. And our being who?
A. The family.
Q. Would your wife know about that?
A. That’s family. My wife would not know it was because Andrea and I had had sex and that Andrea was now very, very upset and that she decided that she would like to go to school or whatever it is. We can get back on track.
Q. How would you explain to your wife that you were giving this personally as opposed to using the foundation?
A. I would say to her that there is a person I would like to help.
At another point, Mr. Cosby describes how he routed a payment to Therese Serignese, the woman who said she had been taken advantage of while drugged in Las Vegas, through his agent at the William Morris Agency. He says the agency sent Ms. Serignese $5,000 and he reimbursed them.
Q. And did that come from your personal account or from the business?
A. That’s from my personal account.
Q. So, was the purpose of that to disguise --
A. Yes.
Q. I have to finish my question. Was to disguise that you were paying the money to Theresa?
A. Yes.
Q. And the reason you were doing -- who were you preventing from knowing that?
A. Mrs. Cosby.