Bill Cosby's Days of Reckoning Rapidly Approaching
Jury selection for Donna Motsinger's sexual assault lawsuit against Cosby is scheduled to begin on Monday in Santa Monica, Calif. Nearly 30 other women have filed similar lawsuits against him
For most of his professional life, actor and comedian Bill Cosby lived in a bubble, protected by his fame, his fortune, and a bevy of enablers who fiercely safeguarded his pristine image and, for the most part, shielded him from facing any public consequences for allegedly drugging and sexually assaulting more than 60 women throughout his 50-year career.
Now, thanks to a wave of so-called lookback window laws passed in several states over the past five years, which give sexual assault victims a brief window of time to file a lawsuit against their abuser no matter how long ago the abuse was, he’s spending his twilight years defending himself against these allegations. At a time in his life when many people look inward and try to right any wrongs they’ve committed, he’s being forced to confront his sins, ones he still denies, over and over again, like some cosmic form of comeuppance. Everything that protected him for so long - his wealth, power, and privilege - has been stripped away by these laws. Is this his purgatory?
Nearly 30 women have filed sexual assault lawsuits against Cosby in three different states under these lookback window laws. The majority of the cases have survived motions to dismiss filed by Cosby, which is a massive victory in and of itself, and appear headed to trial, according to my review of court records. Cosby has been deposed three times. Portions of his deposition for Donna Motsinger, one of the women suing him, became public last month when they were attached to a motion filed in her case. In the deposition, Cosby once again admitted to giving Quaaludes to women before he had sex with them. He also refused to reveal his net worth, prompting the judge to order him to turn over a smorgasbord of financial records for both him and his wife by March 6. Cosby’s attorney, Jennifer Bonjean, did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Motsinger’s attorneys, Jesse Creed and Hunter Norton.
For many sexual assault survivors, civil lawsuits, especially ones with lookback windows, are the only form of justice they can access. Most rape victims, silenced by shame and self-blame, never go to the police, making it the nation’s most underreported crime, and when they do muster up the courage to pursue criminal charges against their assailant, they rarely see their assailant arrested, let alone convicted or sentenced to prison. Or the statute of limitations has expired. It’s why so many of the Cosby survivors are grateful to Andrea Constand for agreeing to participate in Cosby’s criminal prosecution in 2015 despite the terrible way she’d been treated by then-Montgomery County District Attorney Bruce L. Castor Jr. a decade earlier, after she’d first gone to police. When Cosby was convicted in April 2018, they felt it was their victory as well.
“Justice has been served,” Motsinger told NPR after Cosby’s conviction. “And it couldn’t have happened without her because all the rest of us had a statute of limitations. And all the rest of us didn’t come forward when it happened. … Most of us have a story that’s similar without any power. And she put power behind our story. And so she got justice. Yes, it looks like for one person, but it sends a message that there’s over 60 of us that were not lying.”
Nearly eight years later, Motsinger, now 84, finally has that power too. Jury selection begins Monday in Santa Monica, Calif., for her lawsuit against Cosby. Constand, who became close with Motsinger after her own case exploded into the news again in 2014, plans to attend at least part of the trial to support her friend, maybe even walk to and from court with her, holding her hand. It’s possible she could even take the stand. Constand is one of nine women Motsinger’s attorneys have asked the judge to allow to testify as so-called prior bad act witnesses to prove a pattern of behavior. Cosby’s attorney filed a vigorous motion against that on Friday. The judge has yet to rule on the matter.
None of this was an easy decision to make for Constand. She may have looked strong and courageous in the photographs that captured her outside the courtroom for both of Cosby’s criminal trials, but that doesn’t mean the ordeals didn’t take a toll on her emotionally.
“I swore I’d never get on the stand again, but I’ll do it for Donna,” she told me. “There aren’t a lot of people I can say I could do this for. It’s hard for me to walk that walk … after what I went through… but now, as a friend, as a supporter, I’m going to be doing that walk. She’s so courageous. This is an 84-year-old woman seeking justice for what happened to her. It’s so inspiring, and I’m really proud of her."
In 1972, Donna Motsinger was a 30-year-old single mother, supporting her nine-year-old son with a waitressing job at The Trident, a jazz club turned restaurant and bar in Sausalito, California, owned by famed folk band The Kingston Trio and frequented by the likes of The Rolling Stones, actor Clint Eastwood, Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin, and Joan Baez.
She’d worked there off and on for seven years, and had waited on many megastars herself, including Miles Davis, Lily Tomlin, Johnny Carson, and Crosby, Stills & Nash. Frank Werber, the manager of both the Kingston Trio and The Trident, was a father figure to her, she told Cheltenham Township, Pa., police in July 2016. Then, sometime in 1972, she can’t recall exactly when, she met Cosby, a 35-year-old comedian and actor who’d already won three Emmys for his portrayal of intelligence agent Alexander “Scotty” Scott in the espionage series I Spy.
Cosby came in alone one afternoon while she was working the lunchtime shift and sat down at the bar. He struck up a conversation with her as she walked back and forth to her tables, she said in her Sept. 11, 2025, deposition for her case. “He would say something to me, and I would engage him,” she said. “And he was flirtatious and fun … I would see him and then go wait on people, and then he would engage me again.”
This went on for the rest of her shift. Cosby was so obviously taken with her that her coworkers later teased her about it, she said. When her babysitter dropped off her son, Jeff, she introduced him to Cosby, who offered to have dinner with him while she finished her shift. “As I recall, it happened really quickly,” she said. “I introduced them. They chatted. I was working. And then the next thing I know, Jeff says, ‘We’re going to eat.’ So I got them a booth. Somebody else served them, and they had dinner together.”
The following day, when she was working the lunch shift, Cosby popped in again. “I remember it was just a continuation of this kind of little back and forth,” she said. “It was just an extension of day one. It was the same, just very friendly and engaging, and just talking to me.” This time, though, he asked her if he could call her son. “Sure. He would love that,” she said. “And that’s when I gave him my number.” Cosby walked over to the phone booth in the restaurant and called her son, she said.
She didn’t hear the conversation herself, which only lasted a few minutes, but afterward Cosby told her Jeff was “a fine young man,” she said. “And I just thanked him for calling him. I just remember being very grateful that he took the time to talk to my kid.”
After she finished her shift, she said her goodbyes to everyone, including Cosby, then headed home to the Mill Valley duplex she shared with her son and a roommate. As she was walking toward her home, Cosby pulled up beside her in a little sports car and asked her if she’d like to go with him to his show at The Circle Star Theatre that night. “I, of course, was absolutely, yes, that would be great,” she said. Cosby told her he’d pick her up around 5 or 6 p.m. She was so excited that she never thought to question how he knew where she lived. “I was very naive and just didn’t think like that,” she said. “I don’t recall telling him where I live… It’s a mystery to me to this day.”
She walked into her duplex, told her son about Cosby’s invite, changed, and got ready. Her roommate agreed to watch Jeff while she went out with Cosby. Not long afterward, Cosby showed up in a black stretch limo with a driver. “He came to the door, then Jeff looked and saw the limo,” she said. “And he asked if he could go in it because he’d never seen anything like that. So we stayed there chatting. I don’t know what about.” Jeff ran out and jumped in the limo, she said. “And then we went out, and I kissed Jeff goodbye,” she said. “He went back in the house, and we left.”
On the way to the show, Cosby pulled out a bottle of red wine and poured them each a glass, she said. She drank hers, but could not recall if he drank his. “I was really excited, really happy to be there,” she said. “I was anticipating just having a good time, all happy.”
They went backstage together, and she told him she wanted to hear Diahann Carroll perform. “Just go stand over there,” she said he told her, pointing to a nearby spot where she could see the famed singer and actress. She walked over to watch. “I remember … how pretty she looked,” she said. “And then I just started feeling bad. I had a headache, and my body didn’t feel good… My head felt weird. My body felt weird… And it seemed like it just came on really fast.”
She walked to the room where Cosby and others were congregating backstage and asked Cosby for an aspirin. “He said he would get it for me,” she said. “And he went somewhere… I don’t remember what he did, but he came back with these two pills and a glass of water. And I took them….I don’t recall even looking at them.”
The next thing she knew, two men were helping her into the limo with Cosby. “I kind of came to,” she said. “It was like I woke up kind of or something, and then I blacked out again. I woke up again in the limo… And I looked up, and I looked over. Cosby was here with me, with his arm around me. And I looked up, and there were all the lights of the city, like all bright lights, and I blacked out again.”
She woke up the next morning in her own bed, naked except for her underwear, certain she’d been raped, though her last memory was of those bright city lights. “I felt…sore…. around my vaginal area,” she said. “And I looked at my underwear and …. there was like fluid in there, like semen. And then I just knew something had happened to me sexually because of … that area….that’s all I knew at that point. I was scared to death.”
But she had to go to work, to the place where she’d first met him, because she had a child to support. “I felt all kinds of things, like guilt, shame, embarrassed, humiliated, fear,” she said. She stayed silent. But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t certain about what he did to her.
“I believe that I was drugged by Bill Cosby,” Motsinger said in a January 9, 2026, declaration filed in her lawsuit. “This led to my incapacitated state and inability to resist. I was feeling fine earlier that day. I drank a small amount of alcohol that evening. I took pills that Mr. Cosby gave me. A short time later, I experienced a loss of consciousness. I do not believe the pills that Mr. Cosby gave me were aspirin. Aspirin does not knock somebody out. … I believe Mr. Cosby sexually assaulted me after I was drugged.”
In his deposition, taken on November 13th and 14th, 2025 in Springfield, Mass., excerpts of which were attached to that same January 21 court filing, Cosby said he recalled having sex with a blonde white woman who was a waitress at The Trident after he picked her up in a limo and took her to one of his shows at the Circle Star Theater, where he was recording the album Inside the Mind of Bill Cosby. He said he didn’t recall her name, when it happened, or if he gave her Quaaludes, though he admitted he could have had Quaaludes at the time it happened.
As for where he got those drugs, Cosby said that over the years, his friend, Dr. Leroy Amar, a gynecologist for many of the Playboy bunnies whose medical license was later revoked in California, gave him a prescription for Quaaludes for his back when they were playing poker sometime before 1972, and he refilled them seven times. (Though it led to some juicy headlines last month once reporters got hold of this tidbit from his deposition, this is not new information. Cosby said the same thing in his deposition in Constand’s civil suit against him in 2005, an excerpt of which was included as an exhibit in the recent court filing in Motsinger’s case.)
Cosby said he never took the pills himself but instead offered them, “the same as I would a drink of wine or a drink of whatever that happened to be some kind of libation that people use,” to women before he had sex with them. “If they wanted one, they got one,” he said.
He admitted he did have sex with women after he gave them a Quaalude, but didn’t know if a woman who took a Quaalude was capable of consenting, and didn’t recall how many women he’d offered them to. “This pill, the Quaalude, was made in different powers,” he said. “I think. And they were used in – from what I understand, I have no proof – I understand that different places would have them in a bowl, and they had a nickname that I don’t recall. But it was something that people took in place of an alcoholic drink, like a martini or two glasses of wine. Something like that.” He later admitted he did remember the nickname for Quaaludes in the 70s and 80s. “Something to the effect of disco biscuits,” he said. “In the discoteques I’m told there could be a bowl of Quaaludes and people that wanted them would take them.”
Cosby was evasive, dismissive, combative, and arrogant during the deposition – just like he was in his deposition for Constand’s civil suit – and even mocked Motsinger’s attorney for his grammar. “I don’t know what English you’re speaking,” Cosby said to Creed at one point. He really bristled when Creed pressed him on the current state of his finances.
“I will tell you this, sir,” Cosby said. “Due to allegations, whether they be newspaper, radio, television, magazines, or just plain Internet, I have not worked in about 10 years or more … That means I have not earned a cent through my being an entertainer, a writer, a television performer, except in reruns, and my net worth has gone down like a submarine with no motor.”
After Creed asked him more questions about his net worth, Cosby, who once regularly topped Forbes’ list of the highest-paid entertainers, slipped into referring to himself in the third person, which he seems to do when he’s really agitated, like when he lashed out at Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele after he was sentenced to three to ten years prison for Constand’s sexual assault in September 2018.
“My net worth is not what I’m discussing,” he said. “I’m talking about am I earning? It’s a very simple answer. Mr. Cosby is not earning any money. He is not working. He is not hired. Therefore, the last whatever years, he has paid lawyers, he has paid lawyers, he has paid lawyers and they are very expensive. He has lost all types of insurance. He has had law firms cancel him. A life insurance policy that is no longer good due to publicity. And net worth? I owe a lot of people.”
When Creed asked him how much his art collection was worth, Cosby said he’d had it appraised but no longer had insurance on it and refused to say how much the collection was appraised for. “Let me just tell you something, sir,” Cosby said. “What you’re leaving out is, for any person with assets, how do you sell off the assets that are art, automobile collection, houses, if nobody likes you and wants to buy from you… The problem is the selling of assets to pay people I owe money to, lawyers, when I wasn’t working and I was in prison.”
Cosby’s truculence aside, what he did say, especially about Quaaludes, was very revealing, just like in the explosive deposition he gave for Constand’s lawsuit, which was the impetus for reopening Constand’s case in 2015. While the Pennsylvania Supreme Court bought the argument (though I did not) that Cosby was so forthcoming because Castor, the former Montgomery County, Pa. District Attorney, had promised not to prosecute him if he cooperated with Constand’s civil suit and therefore using excerpts of those depositions at his criminal trial violated his due process rights, which meant his conviction should be overturned, it now seems even more likely that, in both instances, his behavior was just Cosby being Cosby.
For decades, Motsinger told no one other than her husband and a couple of close friends what Cosby had done to her. Until January 2005, when she learned of Constand’s drugging and sexual assault allegations against Cosby. Motsinger was one of 13 women who reached out to Constand’s attorneys, Dolores Troiani and Bebe Kitivz, and Castor’s office to prove Constand wasn’t lying, saying Cosby had done something similar to them. Twelve were later Jane Doe witnesses in the civil suit Constand filed against Cosby in March 2005 after Castor declined to file criminal charges against him.
Constand was both grateful for their support and devastated that there were other women like her out there, carrying the same wounds she did because of what Cosby had done to them. But she settled her lawsuit against Cosby in November 2006 without being able to tell them any of that.
“I think it’s a human thing to want closure, and I didn’t really get that closure,” she told me. “I got the closure of the case and being able to move on, but I did not get to be able to say thank you and to actually have a heartfelt connection back to these women who came forward to support me at the time, and I think it was a little heartbreaking moving on. I just had to say, ‘OK. That’s it. I can’t really reach out to these women.’ It was just a mystery I lived with for a long, long time.”
On October 17, 2014, Philadelphia magazine journalist Dan McQuade posted what became an explosive story and video (I wrote more about his contributions to the Cosby case earlier this month) about comedian Hannibal Buress calling Cosby a rapist. The video went viral, women I’d interviewed for the Philadelphia Daily News in 2005 and had included in our 2006 story in People magazine, began publicly sharing their stories again, even as Cosby’s team furiously denied each and every accusation. Some of them were anonymous Jane Does in Constand’s civil lawsuit against Cosby, who were so horrified by how the women were being vilified that they made the gutwrenching decision to reveal their identities publicly for the first time. Motsinger, who was Jane Doe Number One, was one of them. “These women are not lying,” she told a San Francisco TV station in November 2014. “I’m not lying. It’s the honest-to-God truth.”
Watching from afar was Constand. Now there was nothing to prevent her from reaching out to the women who’d been there for her in 2005, as well as the others who were coming forward publicly for the first time. “I think what I started to realize is that I’d kept my circle of support so small for so long that I actually started to feel the importance of sisterhood and survivors supporting each other,” she said. “I needed it for my own emotional well-being and to put a voice to the name and to say, ‘I know who you are. And thank you.’”
One by one, she reached out to them. Beth Ferrier was Jane Doe Number Six. Barbara Bowman, who wrote a scathing op-ed for The Washington Post in November 2014 asking why it took 30 years for people to believe her, was Jane Doe Number Seven. Jennifer Thompson was Jane Doe Number 2. And Motsinger.
“I said thank you for voicing what happened to you and having the courage to come forward, and being a part of my case in some way,” she said. “You’re brave. I think I honored the fact that we all had a story. Even though I didn’t know their stories, I knew they came forward in some way. I realized how much shame I walked around with for the year I didn’t say anything. I knew these women didn’t talk about it for years. I think I dispelled some of that shame and the silence they had. I do remember tears and crying. It was very emotional.”
She did not ask them – nor did they discuss – what they said Cosby had done to them. “I kept everything very clean,” she said. “How are you? How has your life gone for you? Do you have animals? Do you have pets? Do you have hobbies? Just life stuff. I didn’t want to discuss our cases in any way.”
Motsinger recalled that January 2015 phone call from Constand in her interview with the Cheltenham, Pa. police on July 12, 2016. “Andrea called me out of the blue and said ‘Hi,’” Motsinger said. “I had heard about her and read about her and never dreamed I would meet her. In March of 2015, Andrea came to see me.”
The two quickly formed a bond, one that has only strengthened over time. They became close, talking frequently on the phone, but never about the details of what each had been through with Cosby. “Donna and I talk more about how she’s doing emotionally from day to day,” Constand said. “We talk heart to heart. We talk about emotions. We talk feelings. We talk dogs. We talk animals. We talk health. Her husband is going through a lot right now, so I’m there for her just as a friend to say, ‘How’s Ted doing?’”
When Constand was preparing for each of her trials, Motsinger’s support was unwavering, she said. “She used to say to me, ‘I can’t wait until this is all over for you. I can’t wait to see who you’re going to be when this is all over for you,” Constand said. “That was our conversation toward the end of the trials, her looking to put all this behind me.”
Now it’s Constand’s turn to do the same for her friend. “You came forward for me,” she said. ‘I’m going to support you, and now I can’t wait to say ‘This is all over for you.’ “
Motsinger’s trial will be held in the same courthouse where Cosby was found liable for sexually assaulting Judy Huth when she was 16. Cosby appealed, but just last month, his appeal was dismissed, clearing the way for Huth to finally collect her share of the $500,000 in damages the jury awarded her in June 2022. Cosby was not present for Huth’s trial, and he won’t be for this one either, but Constand will, and fellow Cosby survivors will attend as well. “This is definitely a sisterhood, and the connection we’ve got has literally lit a fire under her,” Constand said. “Survivors can’t survive without other survivors. We need each other.”
Whatever the outcome in Motsinger’s trial, it’s possible, if not likely, Cosby could face more lawsuits in the future. On February 10, New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer introduced legislation to eliminate the ten-year statute of limitations for federal sexual abuse lawsuits, offering a whisper of hope to those whose abuse did not happen in states with lookback window laws. If they are someday able to do so, Constand will be cheering them on. “Justice shouldn’t have a timeline or an age,” she said. “I’m just praying that everybody who is seeking justice gets justice.”
Nicki Weisensee Egan is the author of the book CHASING COSBY, host and executive producer of the podcast based on the book, coauthor of VICTIM F, and an investigative journalist. You can see more of her work, including her more than 20 years of Cosby coverage, at https://www.nicoleweisenseeegan.com/