Bill Cosby hits back at woman claiming sex assault

In this Friday, November 21, 2014 file photo, comedian Bill Cosby performs at the Maxwell C. King Center for the Performing Arts, in Melbourne, Florida.  His lawyers launched a counter-attack on a woman who has accused him of sexual assault. AP

LOS ANGELES, United States – Embattled US comic Bill Cosby went on the counter-attack Wednesday against a woman he alleges breached a confidentiality deal the pair made in settling a sex assault claim 10 years ago.

The veteran actor also charged that the media had misinterpreted comments he made in a lurid 2005 court deposition, details of which have only emerged this month in the press.

“Reading the media accounts, one would conclude that (Cosby) has admitted to rape” in the decade-old deposition, in which the entertainer admitted obtaining sedative Quaaludes to have sex with at least one woman.

“And yet (Cosby) admitted to nothing more than being one of the many people who introduced Quaaludes into their consensual sex life in the 1970s,” added the court document filed in Pennsylvania on Tuesday by Cosby’s lawyer, obtained by AFP.

The New York Times last week obtained a transcript from a deposition Cosby gave 10 years ago as part of a lawsuit from former Temple University employee Andrea Constand, who accused him of drugging and molesting her.

The deposition suggested he offered pills and payments to women he had sexual encounters with, and tried to hide it from his wife.

The 1,000-page document offered more details from court documents unsealed earlier this month, in which Cosby admitted to having obtained seven prescriptions for Quaaludes and giving them to other people.

Cosby’s lawyer Monique Pressley took to the airwaves Wednesday to defend the actor, who has remained almost entirely tight-lipped about the allegations, even as his reputation has been shredded.

“Mr. Cosby has denied the accusations that have been lodged thus far,” Pressley told ABC television, adding: “The sheer volume, or number of people who are saying a particular thing does not make it true.”

Cosby, a pioneering African-American comedian who played a beloved family doctor on the hit 1980s sitcom “The Cosby Show,” has lost public supporters in the wake of the sex scandal.

He has canceled a string of engagements and a Cosby television special planned for late last year. The entertainer was also forced to resign from the board of Temple University, his alma mater, last December.