Bill Cosby attorneys slam media coverage, says there is a ‘smear’ campaign

Bill Cosby and his team of attorneys have finally begun to fight back against the media coverage of his 2005 deposition, in which he did admit to obtaining Quaaludes and giving them to women and outlining how he seduced young women. Cosby’s team believes that Andrea Constand is trying to “smear” the embattled comedian.

Back on July 6, the Associated Press published excerpts of the deposition in Constand’s sexual assault lawsuit against Cosby that were included in a previously-sealed memorandum. Then on July 18, the New York Times published even more excerpts after discovering that a court reporting service had posted the nearly 1,000-page transcript.

“How that deposition became public without being court-sanctioned is something we are going to pursue and deal with very vigorously,” Patrick O’Connor, the lawyer who represented Cosby in the 2005 case, told the Philadelphia Inquirer on Monday. “It's an outrage that the court processes weren't followed here.”

It turns out that part of the plans for dealing with this is a legal filing made on Tuesday, reports The New York Times. In it, his lawyers said that the media is incorrectly portraying what Cosby’s admission of obtaining Quaaludes actually means.

Cosby “admitted to nothing more than being one of the many people who introduced Quaaludes into their consensual sex life in the 1970s,” the filing read. “Quaaludes were a highly popular recreational drug in the 1970s, labeled in slang as ‘disco biscuits,’ and known for their capacity to increase sexual arousal.”

The lawyers blamed Constand, who was a Temple University basketball manager, for the way the media is covering the deposition. Constand had settled with Cosby out of court in 2006.

Cosby’s team suggests that the court reporting service, Kaplan Leaman & Wolfe, made the entire deposition public by mistake. When the memorandum was made public, that did not mean that the entire deposition should have been as well, the Cosby attorneys argue.

According to the BBC News, Cosby’s attorneys want Constand “sanctioned” for breaching the confidentiality agreement. The motion was filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. The attorneys are asking that no further sections of the deposition are released.

The Times reports that Constand’s lawyer did sent a letter to Cosby’s, insisting that her client was not responsible for the release of the deposition.

Image courtesy of INFphoto.com