Accuser to Cosby at His Sex Assault Trial: ‘You Remember, Don’t You?’

Mr. Cosby has denied assaulting all of the women and has said that the sexual encounter with Ms. Constand was consensual.

The first accuser, Ms. Thomas, testified Tuesday that, strangely incapacitated by a single sip of wine from Mr. Cosby, she found herself waxing in and out of consciousness during a 1984 trip to Reno for acting lessons. But one moment she remembered, she said, was being on a bed where Mr. Cosby was inserting his penis into her mouth.

Ms. Bliss asked whether she had received payments for media appearances related to the accusations. Ms. Thomas, now a private music teacher, said she had not. She said she first spoke out in January 2015 because other women had started to go public with accusations against Mr. Cosby.

“I want to see a serial rapist convicted,” Heidi Thomas, one Cosby accuser, said during cross-examination on Wednesday. Credit Pool photo by Dominick Reuter, via Reuters

“There were women coming forward and they were not being believed,” Ms. Thomas said. “I wanted to support them.”

Until then, she had blamed herself for the encounter, and had told few people about it, except her husband, a psychologist and her three daughters.

“As a mother of daughters,” she said, “and as one who is now a statistic, it was important to me that they know if anything happened to them, they could come to me.”

Ms. Bliss pressed her about what she depicted as discrepancies in the account she gave the police and in particular noted that the date on Ms. Thomas’s plane ticket to Reno — April 2, 1984 — was different than the date in her testimony, April 1.

“The change of those dates affects your testimony of your four-day odyssey,” Ms. Bliss said.

Judge O’Neill explained to the jury that Mr. Cosby is not being charged for the accusations leveled by Ms. Thomas.

“The defendant is not on trial for this conduct,” he said.

Ms. Baker-Kinney, now a 60-year-old sports broadcasting stage manager, testified that she too met Mr. Cosby in Reno, in her case at a house party. He gave her two pills, possibly quaaludes, she said, and she next remembers waking up on a couch in the living room with her shirt and pants undone and Mr. Cosby fondling her. When she woke again she was naked in bed with him, she said.

“There was evidence between my legs that something had occurred there,” she said. Asked why she had taken the pills, she said that she had taken quaaludes before and Mr. Cosby had an image as a “happy, nice comedian.”

“Even though I didn’t know him, I trusted him,” she said.

In his cross-examination, Thomas A. Mesereau Jr., a lawyer for Mr. Cosby, pressed Ms. Baker-Kinney about why she had come forward only recently. She described her response as being part of a communal action, a movement in which women found support from other women.

“People feeling empowered enough to come forward with what has happened to them,” she said, “and feeling their strength, allowing me to be brave enough to say that I, too, was in the same position — that I, too, denied it for many years.”

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