NORRISTOWN, Pa. — A judge on Tuesday ordered Bill Cosby to stand trial for the alleged sexual assault of Andrea Constand.
The ruling by Judge Elizabeth McHugh followed a morning-long hearing in Norristown where prosecutors publicly aired for the first time the statements both Constand and Cosby gave police after she said he drugged and molested her in his Cheltenham mansion in 2004.
Over the objection of defense lawyers, prosecutors opted not to call Constand to the stand, but instead had a former detective read aloud her detailed, first-person account of the incident.
“I got scared,” Constand told detectives in 2005, a year after the alleged assault. She said Cosby gave her wine and three blue pills that made her feel woozy.
“I had no strength in my legs. They felt rubbery and like jelly,” she said. “I felt spacey. Everything was blurry or dizzy. I had no thought to call 911.”
Later, another witness read Cosby’s own statement to police from 2005, in which he offered his account of the night in question and he acknowledged that he had offered to pay for Constand’s graduate schooling after she took her accusations to authorities.
The hearing comes five months after the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office charged the comedian with aggravated indecent assault — the only such criminal charge leveled against him — more than a decade after Constand first came forward.
Cosby, 78, who has a home in Shelburne, attended the hearing. Constand did not.
In not calling her to testify on Tuesday, prosecutors took advantage of a Pennsylvania Superior Court ruling last year that cleared the way for prosecutors to use statements to police instead of direct testimony from accusers as their sole evidence at preliminary hearings.
The decision allowed prosecutors to shield Constand from the public spotlight and from tough questions from Cosby’s legal team — a move defense lawyer Brian J. McMonagle criticized throughout Tuesday’s proceeding.
At one point, as McHugh barred him from reading out portions of Constand’s statement having to do with contact she had with Cosby after her alleged assault, McMonagle’s frustration boiled over.
“So should I just leave?” he asked the judge. “They could have mailed you this statement, circled what they wanted you to read and none of us would have had to show up. … This is a travesty of justice.”
At one point, McHugh cut him off: “Mr. McMonagle, I think you’re grandstanding a little bit.”
Cosby has denied Constand’s allegations since she first came forward, calling their encounter consensual.
In her statement, Constand, who was working as an operations manager for Temple University’s women’s basketball team at the time, said she went to Cosby’s home one evening in early 2004 to ask his advice about her career.
She told him she felt “drained.” He allegedly gave her three pills and wine, saying, “The blue things will take the edge off.” Constand said Cosby positioned himself behind her on the sofa and molested her while she felt paralyzed and unable to move.
She awoke at 4 a.m. and found her sweater bunched up and her bra undone. Cosby, in a robe, gave her a muffin, said “all right,” and opened the door for her to leave, she told police at the time.
It was not until a year later that Constand reported the alleged assault to Cheltenham police.
After her complaint, Cosby offered to pay her way through graduate school, according to a statement he gave Cheltenham police in 2005 that was introduced at the hearing.
“I knew she was interested in graduate school,” he told detectives who had come to New York to interview him about Constand’s allegations. His offer was contingent, he said, upon her keeping a 3.0 GPA.
The offer to pay for her schooling came after Constand’s mother called him to confront him about the alleged assault.
“I recognized her antagonism and told her to put Andrea on the phone because I was startled by her tone,” Cosby said.
Cosby’s decade-old statement was read into the record by John Norris, chief of the Cheltenham Police Department, who was present during the interview 11 years ago.
In it, Cosby described his sexual encounter with Constand in details that often overlapped with her version of events. Both recalled that he gave her pills and wine. Both said they never had intercourse but that aggressive petting occurred.
Yet, their accounts differed on one key point: Cosby said their liaison was consensual. Constand never told him to stop or pushed him away, he said.
“We began to pet — touching, kissing with clothes on,” he said. “I never intended to have sexual intercourse like naked bodies with Andrea. We were petting and I enjoyed it.”
Asked whether he had ever had sexual intercourse with Constand, Cosby told police: “Never asleep or awake.”
But, according to the statement, Cosby said he had other romantic encounters with Constand prior to the night of the alleged assault. He always initiated, he said, but Andrea was always a willing participant.
He described one incident early on in their relationship where he said Andrea asked him to stop. He said he did immediately.
Then-District Attorney Bruce L. Castor Jr. declined to charge Cosby after an investigation in 2005, but prosecutors re-opened the investigation last summer, after dozens of women came forward with similar allegations against Cosby and a deposition in Constand’s decade-old civil lawsuit against the comedian was released.
Cosby has been free on a $1 million bail since his arrest in December. He could face up to 10 years in prison if convicted.