*Jurors in Bill Cosby‘s sex assault trial can hear his deposition testimony about Quaaludes, but not his references to the alleged aphrodisiac Spanish fly, a judge ruled Friday.
The 79-year-old comedian is accused of drugging and molesting Temple University employee Andrea Constand at his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004. He argues that the encounter was consensual.
In the decade-old deposition, Cosby said he got seven prescriptions for quaaludes in the 1970s, intending only to give them to women he was pursuing for sex. The sedatives were banned in 1983, and Cosby claims he no longer had them when he met Constand 20 years later.
Defense lawyers therefore pushed to exclude his testimony about quaaludes from the trial.
Prosecutors argued to include Cosby’s comedic riffs about Spanish fly to show a familiarity with date-rape drugs. The defense wrote off the references, in his 1991 book “Childhood” and a Larry King interview that same year, as simply fanciful stories about adolescence.
Spanish fly is made from a green beetle called the Spanish fly, in the family of blister beetles, and has been sold as an aphrodisiac. In the book, Cosby says he and his teen friends needed the potion to get girls interested in them.
“They’re never in the mood for us,” Cosby wrote. “They need chemicals.”
Montgomery County Judge Steven O’Neill also ruled Friday to exclude from Cosby’s trial references to Constand’s lawsuit or the settlement. Jury selection is set to start May 22, and opening arguments are set for June 5.
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