Bill Cosby’s Jury Asks Meaning of “Without Her Knowledge”

Summary: The jury for the Bill Cosby rape trial are on their second day of deliberation.

Jurors in the Bill Cosby sexual assault case have asked for clarification of a key term in the trial. After six hours of deliberation, they asked Judge Steven O’Neill what the phrase “without her knowledge” meant, but he said that he could not define it for them, according to KFVS 12.

TV star Cosby, 79, is being charged with the drugging and raping of former Temple University employee, Andrea Constand. He faces three counts of felony aggravated indecent assault, and one of the counts covers his alleged fondling of Constand while she was passed out.

According to KFSV 12, the jury has been carefully considering what had happened one night in 2004 when Constand had visited Cosby at his home. Constand said that he had given her a pill hidden in an alcoholic drink and proceeded to molest and sexually assault her when she was unconscious. In a deposition taken in 2005, Cosby admitted to giving Constand the tranquilizer, Quaalude, but he maintains their sexual encounter was consensual.

Cosby did not take the stand at his trial, but the jury heard his side of the story from the 2005 deposition.

Last week, the jury heard Constand speak about what had happened to her that night and what her relationship was to Cosby. She was an employee at Temple University, where Cosby was a big donor; and she said she viewed him as a mentor before the assault. Cosby’s defense team attempted to discredit her by asking why she maintained contact with him after the alleged rape, but she said that she was forced to because of her job.

The prosecution had interviewed Constand and one other woman who said Cosby had raped her in 1996. The accuser, Kelly Johnson, was an assistant at William Morris and an aspiring actress. She met Cosby and he promised to help her career. She said that she visited him at a Beverly Hills bungalow, where he allegedly drugged and raped her.

While Johnson was on the stand, the defense had visibly flustered her when they questioned why she had kept in contact with him even after the alleged incident.

On Monday, the defense re-interviewed a police detective, Richard Schaffer, who was a witness for the prosecution. After that, they rested their case, and both sides provided their closing statements.

“Hopefully, you will have the last two words in this case, and I pray those words are not guilty,” Cosby’s lawyer Brian McMonagle said yesterday.

Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele told jurors during his closing statement that they only had to look at Cosby’s words to know he was guilty.

“It comes out of his own mouth. He says he gives her drugs. He says she doesn’t say ‘yes.'” Steele said, according to NBC News. “[He] knows the effect of what he gave her. By doing what he did on that night, he took away that ability [to consent]. He took that from Andrea Constand. He gave her no choice in this matter. Why? Because of what he wanted.”