3 accusers confront Cosby; 1 calls him a ‘serial rapist’


Associated Press

NORRISTOWN, PA.

Decades after they say Bill Cosby knocked them out with intoxicants and sexually assaulted them, three of his accusers confronted the 80-year-old comedian in court Wednesday, with one woman pointedly calling him a “serial rapist” and another asking him through her tears, “You remember, don’t you, Mr. Cosby?”

The women’s charged rhetoric prompted several mistrial requests from Cosby’s lawyers – which were denied – as prosecutors built their case that Cosby was one of Hollywood’s biggest predators long before he met Andrea Constand, the chief accuser in his sexual-assault retrial.

Now well into middle age, the accusers spoke of entering Cosby’s orbit as starstruck young women seeking career help or, in the case of a casino bartender from Reno, Nev., simply looking for a fun time. All testified they wound up unconscious from the pills or alcohol he gave them, unable to say no or resist as he had his way with them.

“I was raped,” declared the former bartender, Janice Baker-Kinney, who was 24 when she says Cosby gave her pills she suspected to be quaaludes and had sex with her in 1982. Cosby’s lawyers say Baker-Kinney took the drug willingly.

Another accuser, sobbing as she testified, told jurors she knew Cosby through a family connection as a 17-year-old aspiring model and actress. Chelan Lasha said Cosby gave her a little blue pill he described as an antihistamine to help her get over a cold, along with two shots of amaretto. The combination immobilized her and rendered her unable to speak.

Cosby then assaulted her, touching her breast and rubbing himself against her leg, Lasha said.

“I could barely move. He guided me there, and he laid me in the bed. I couldn’t move any more after that. He laid next to me, and he kept touching my breast and humping my leg,” she said.

Asked what was going through her mind, Lasha testified: “Dr. Huxtable wouldn’t do this. Why are you doing this to me?”

Lasha, Baker-Kinney and a third woman who also testified, Heidi Thomas, are among five additional accusers whom prosecutors plan to call to make the case that Cosby, once revered as “America’s Dad,” was a Hollywood predator who is only now facing a reckoning after allegedly assaulting Constand at his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004.

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