A woman who claims Bill Cosby drugged and raped her in 1972 was awarded $19.25 million in damages in court on Monday, decades after she first came forward as Jane Doe No. 8 in the lawsuit. that former Temple University athletic program director Andrea Constand filed against the disgraced comedian in 2005.
The jury found Cosby guilty of sexually abusing a woman who was defenseless because of drugs and of committing sexual assault. Plaintiff Donna Motsinger was awarded $17.5 million for past emotional distress and $1.75 million for future distress. In another key finding, the jury found that Cosby acted with “malice, oppression or fraud” – clearing the way for punitive damages, the amount of which will be decided in a second phase of the trial.
The verdict came after an emotional trial in Santa Monica, California, that began March 10. In the same courthouse almost four years earlier, another accuser, Judy Huth, had won damages after suing Cosby: She accused him of sexually abusing her in the Playboy Mansion in 1975 – she was 16 at the time and he was 37.
Accusations from 1972
In her testimony and in court documents, Motsinger, 84, described how Cosby approached and became friends with her during her time as a waitress at the popular Sausalito restaurant The Trident. He later invited her to the taping of his stand-up program “Inside the Mind of Bill Cosby” at the Circle Star Theater in nearby San Carlos. Cosby gave her wine, which made her unwell, and then gave her two round white pills that she thought were aspirin.
“The next moment she lost consciousness again and again,” says Motsinger’s statement of claim. “The last thing Ms. Motsinger remembers is flashes of light. She woke up in her house with no clothes on except her underwear, no top, no bra, no pants. She knew she had been drugged and raped by Bill Cosby.”
During the nearly two-week trial, jurors heard testimony from Constand and two other accusers, Victoria Valentino and Janice Baker Kinney. Valentino, a former Playboy model, claims Cosby made her swallow two pills during a meeting at a restaurant in 1969, at a time when she was mourning the drowning death of her six-year-old son. The now 82-year-old says Cosby drove her to a nearby office and raped her while she was too paralyzed to fight back.
Cosby’s Quaalude confession
In his closing argument, Motsinger’s attorney, Spencer Lucas, played excerpts from a videotaped deposition in which Cosby said he received a prescription for Quaaludes while playing poker with a doctor. When asked if the prescription was written “at the poker table,” Cosby replied, “Yes.”
“When you received the recipe for Quaaludes, did you already intend to offer them to young women you wanted to have sex with?” the lawyer asked. Cosby replied again, “Yes.”
“How did you know that a woman you gave a Quaalude to was capable of giving consent?” the lawyer asked in the video. “I didn’t know that,” Cosby replied.
“Common plan and scheme”
“To fulfill his sexual perversions, he secretly drugged women with sedatives, often in combination with alcohol, with the intention of rendering them unconscious so he could do whatever he wanted with them,” Lucas said in his closing argument. He added that the evidence showed that Cosby filled the prescription seven times and received a total of 210 Quaalude pills. “He wasn’t worried about consent because that was his proven plan and scheme,” said Lucas, a partner at the law firm Panish, Shea, Ravipudi LLP.
Cosby, 88, has denied any assaults on the dozens of women who have accused him of sexual misconduct, claiming all encounters were consensual. His attorney, Jennifer Bonjean, did not respond to a request for comment.
In her pleadings, Bonjean argued that the case was based on mere speculation. “Why [Cosby] [Motsinger] “Suppose he should have been stunned before he even took the stage to perform his show remains a mystery,” she wrote. “[Motsinger] speculated, [Cosby] sexually assaulted her based solely on the fact that she felt ‘sore’ and noticed fluid in her underwear. [Motsinger] openly admits that she has no idea what happened and just assumes that [Cosby] abused her.”
Cosby’s conviction and acquittal
Cosby was convicted of three counts of aggravated indecent harassment against Constand in 2018 and sentenced to three to 10 years in prison. He appealed, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 2021, finding that Cosby had a previous “non-prosecution agreement” with a previous prosecutor that barred criminal charges unless Cosby testified in Constand’s civil lawsuit against him. Cosby ultimately agreed to a private settlement with Constand in 2006 after more than a dozen women, including Motsinger, agreed to be witnesses in the case.
On March 12, Constand described on the stand how she met Cosby through her work with the women’s basketball program at Temple University, where he was a prominent alumnus. She described the night in 2004 when he gave her three pills and sexually assaulted her at his home near Philadelphia.
Under cross-examination, Bonjean confronted Constand about a previous statement she made to “Nightline” in which she said Cosby referred to the pills as “your friends” — not something homeopathic, as she had believed. “To be clear,” Constand testified, “I never intended to spend 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 had given me that had put me in this state,” she said.
“My brain wasn’t functioning properly.”
When asked why her first interview with police did not include all the details that later came to light, Constand described that period of her life as “a very difficult time.” “I was traumatized, my brain wasn’t functioning properly,” she testified. “I didn’t want to tell them a book about everything. And I answered their questions.”
In his closing argument, Lucas said Cosby acted according to a “tried and tested perpetrator’s manual” that included “shaming, blaming and hostility” to his accusers “who had the courage to come forward.” In his final address to the jury before deliberations began, Lucas asked the panel to award his client $37.4 million in damages.
