A woman who claims Bill Cosby drugged and raped her in 1972 won a $19.25 million jury award on Monday, decades after first stepping forward as Jane Doe Number 8 in the 2005 lawsuit filed by former Temple University athletics director Andrea Constand against the disgraced comedian.
Jurors found Cosby liable for the sexual assault of an intoxicated woman as well as sexual battery. They awarded plaintiff Donna Motsinger $17.5 million for past mental suffering and $1.75 million for future suffering. In another major finding, they determined Cosby acted with “malice, oppression, or fraud,” opening the door to punitive damages to be decided in a second phase of the trial.
The verdict came after an emotional trial in Santa Monica, California, that started March 10. It was in the same courthouse nearly four years ago that fellow accuser Judy Huth won a jury award after suing Cosby with claims he sexually assaulted her at the Playboy Mansion in 1975, when she was 16 years old, and he was 37.
In her testimony and court filings, Motsinger, 84, claimed Cosby befriended her while she was working as a waitress at a popular restaurant in Sausalito, California, called The Trident. She said Cosby later invited her to the recording of his standup act Inside the Mind of Bill Cosby at the Circle Star Theater in nearby San Carlos. She alleged Cosby gave her wine that made her feel sick and then gave her two round white pills she thought were aspirin.
“Next thing she knew, she was going in and out of consciousness,” Motsinger’s lawsuit said. “The last thing Ms. Motsinger recalls were flashes of light. She woke up in her house. with all her clothes off, except her underwear on – no top, no bra, and no pants. She knew she had been drugged and raped by Bill Cosby.”
During her nearly two-week trial, jurors heard testimony from Constand, as well as two other accusers, Victoria Valentino and Janice Baker Kinney. Valentino, a former Playboy model, alleges Cosby convinced her to swallow two pills during a meeting at a restaurant in 1969 while she was grieving the drowning death of her six-year-old son. Valentino, 82, says Cosby drove her to a nearby office and raped her while she was too immobilized to fight back.
In his closing arguments, Motsinger’s lawyer, Spencer Lucas, played excerpts from a videotaped deposition in which Cosby said he had obtained a prescription for Quaaludes during a poker game with a doctor. Asked whether the prescription was written “at the poker table,” Cosby responded, “Yes.”
“When you got the prescription for Quaaludes, you had it in your mind to offer them to young women you wanted to have sex with?” the lawyer asked. Again, Cosby replied, “Yes.”
“How did you know that a woman who you gave a Quaalude to was capable of consent?” the lawyer asked in the video. “I didn’t,” Cosby responded.
“To fulfill his sexual deviancy, he surreptitiously drugged women with sedatives, often combined with alcohol, with the intent of rendering them unconscious so he could have his way with them,” Lucas said in his closing argument. He added that the evidence showed Cosby filled the prescription seven times, obtaining a total of 210 Quaalude pills. “He didn’t worry about consent because that was his common plan and scheme,” Lucas, a partner at Panish, Shea, Ravipudi LLP, said.
Cosby, 88, has denied assaulting any of the dozens of women who have accused him of sexual misconduct. He has maintained that any encounters with the women were consensual. After the verdict on Monday, his lawyer, Jennifer Bonjean, said she was “disappointed in the outcome,” but not deterred. “We will of course appeal the judgment,” she tells Rolling Stone.
In court filings, Bonjean argued that the case rested on speculation. “Why [Cosby] would drug [Motsinger] before he even took the stage to perform his show … remains a mystery,” she wrote. “[Motsinger] speculates [Cosby] sexually assaulted her based on nothing more than she felt ‘sore’ and noticed fluid in her underwear. [Motsinger] freely admits that she has no idea what happened and just assumes [Cosby] assaulted her.”
Cosby was convicted in 2018 of three counts of indecent aggravated assault against Constand and sentenced to three-to-10 years in prison. He appealed, and Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 2021, finding Cosby had a prior “non-prosecution agreement” with a prior prosecutor that barred criminal charges if Cosby testified in Constand’s civil lawsuit against him. Cosby ultimately reached a private civil settlement with Constand in 2006 after more than a dozen women, including Motsinger, agreed to appear as witnesses in the case.
On the witness stand on March 12, Constand described how she came to know Cosby through her work with the women’s basketball program at Temple University, where he was a prominent alumnus. She recounted the night in 2004 when he gave her three pills at his suburban Philadelphia home and sexually assaulted her.
Under cross-examination, Bonjean pressed Constand about a prior statement she gave to Nightline, in which she said Cosby had described the pills as “your friends,” not as something homeopathic, as she had believed. “Let’s be clear,” Constand testified. “I never planned on spending the night at Bill Cosby’s house.” Constand also defended her decision to call Cosby the morning she reported the incident to police. “I wanted to know what drug he gave me that put me in that state,” she said.
Asked why her initial interview with police did not include all the details that later emerged, Constand called that period of her life “a very difficult time.” “I was traumatized, my brain wasn’t working right,” she testified. “I wasn’t looking to tell them a book about everything. I answered their questions.”
In his closing argument, Lucas said Cosby had followed a “time-tested predator playbook,” one that included “shaming, blaming and trolling” his accusers “for having the bravery to come forward.” In his final address to jurors before deliberations started, Lucas urged the panel to award his client $37.4 million in compensatory damages.
