Andrea Constand, the woman at the center of a 2005 lawsuit that accused Bill Cosby of raping her and at least a dozen other women, is gay, it was revealed in court documents filed on Tuesday. The court motion in question also attempted to refute the idea that Cosby claimed to know that his encounter with Constand was consensual because of his skill at picking up romantic cues.
Constand, arguably the woman most responsible for the recent revelations about sexual assault allegations against Cosby from more than 40 women, had been quiet about the civil suit because of a confidentiality agreement in the settlement. Ironically, though, it was a court motion filed by Cosby’s team earlier this month accusing her of violating the confidentiality clause that prompted the latest response from Constand.
On July 6, Constand sent out these two tweets.
Citing the tweets, Cosby’s lawyers accused Constand and her lawyers of having “violated the Settlement Agreement, enabling and fomenting negative—and largely inaccurate—publicity.”
“Throughout this case, Plaintiff made no secret of her desire to publicize it, and she fought mightily, every chance she got, to achieve that publicity,” the motion continued.
In Tuesday’s motion, Constand’s lawyers responded that the tweets had nothing to do with him, and were in fact about the fallout from the recent Supreme Court marriage equality rulings.
“In his narcississtic view of the world, Defendant believes that Plaintiff’s every tweet must be about him,” the motion read. “He is as perceptive in this belief as he claims to be in his interpretation of non-verbal cues from women he wants to seduce. The tweets do not include any hash tags and were sent during the time period that there was extensive publicity about gay marriage.”
“As defendant admits in his deposition, despite his talent for interpreting female reactions to him, he did not realize Plaintiff was gay until the police told him.”
Constand, who filed the 2005 civil suit after Pennsylvania prosecutors declined to take up the case accusing Cosby of drugging and then raping her in 2004, has remained largely on the sidelines even as 35 women came forward this week to tell their stories of Cosby’s alleged assaults in a widely praised New York magazine cover story.
The court documents were referencing a recently revealed deposition by Cosby in which he described himself as a lothario and said that he could “read” that the encounter with Constand was consensual.
“I walk her out. She does not look angry. She does not say to me, don’t ever do that again. She doesn’t walk out with an attitude of a huff, because I think that I’m a pretty decent reader of people and their emotions in these romantic sexual things, whatever you want to call them,” Cosby said in the deposition.
In the latest motion, Constand accused Cosby himself of violating the confidentiality terms of their undisclosed 2006 settlement. His lawyers had recently described Cosby’s admitted use of Quaaludes in sexual encounters as merely taking part in the consensual 1970s “disco biscuits” party scene. Constand’s motion mocked this idea.
“Plaintiff sits quietly listening to descriptions fed to the media of celebrity parties and ‘disco biscuits,’ knowing that she never attended a celebrity party or requested to take a disco biscuit (or even heard of that term for that matter),” Constand’s lawyer Dolores Troiani wrote.
“[Cosby] fails to realize that the settlement in this matter was designed to compensate Plaintiff for the injuries Defendant inflicted upon her and to silence BOTH sides,” Troiani’s motion said. “In fact, Defendant has openly engaged in a media blitz.”
