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Groton Daily Independent
Friday, April 20, 2018 ~ Vol. 25 - No. 280 ~ 29 of 43
to have sex with, but denied having them by the time he met Constand in the early 2000s.
Dr. Timothy Rohrig, a forensic toxicologist called by prosecutors, testified Thursday that quaaludes can
make people sleepy. But he and Milman said the drug came in large white pills — not small and blue. Prosecutors rested their case after Rohrig got off the witness stand. The defense immediately asked Judge Steven O’Neill to acquit Cosby and send jurors home, arguing prosecutors hadn’t proved aggravated
indecent assault charges. O’Neill refused.
The defense also contended there’s no evidence to prove the alleged assault happened within the 12-
year statute of limitations. Prosecutors countered that Constand and Cosby have both said the encounter was in 2004. Cosby was arrested in late 2015, just before the deadline to charge him.
As the legal wrangling continued, Thursday’s testimony focused on the drug taken by Constand, who has testified she thought they were an herbal supplement meant to relieve her stress.
Constand said Cosby called the pills “your friends” and told her they would “help take the edge off.”
She testified earlier this week that Cosby refused to tell her what they were when she confronted him about two months later. Her mother testified that Cosby told her in a January 2005 phone conversation that he’d have to look at a prescription bottle and would send the answer to her by mail.
She said he never did.
Cosby said in a subsequent police interview that he gave her Benadryl, then fondled her breasts and genitals. He said Constand never told him to stop.
Cosby, in a 2005 deposition read to jurors by a police detective, said he obtained seven prescriptions for quaaludes from his doctor in Los Angeles in the 1970s, ostensibly for a sore back, but added he did not use them himself because they made him tired.
He said he gave quaaludes to women he wanted to have sex with, using them “the same as a person would say, ‘Have a drink.’”
Rohrig, the director of a regional forensic science center and medical examiner’s office in Wichita, Kansas, called quaaludes “an old-timey sedative, hypnotic drug” that at one time were believed to be an aphrodisiac. Quaaludes have been illegal in the U.S. since 1982. They’re still legal in Canada and parts of Europe,
Rohrig said.
The Cosby camp dismissed the quaaludes talk.
“Quaaludes were not blue,” the comedian’s spokeswoman, Ebonee Benson, shouted to reporters after
the experts’ testimony. “Today should be the last day the discussion of quaaludes is had regarding these accusations against Mr. Cosby.”
Benson said prosecutors want jurors to accept “a fabricated story about three small, blue pills” and believe that they’re “somehow quaaludes.”
The expert testimony came on the ninth day of Cosby’s retrial on sexual assault charges that could send the star to prison for years.
The Associated Press does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sexual assault unless they grant permission, which Constand has done.
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Follow Mike Sisak at https://twitter.com/mikesisak.
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For more coverage visit https://www.apnews.com/tag/CosbyonTrial.
Rudy Giuliani to join Trump legal team in Russia probe By CHAD DAY, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump since the early days of his campaign, is joining the team of lawyers representing the president in the special counsel’s Russia investigation.
With the addition of Giuliani, Trump gains a former U.S. attorney, a past presidential candidate and a