A juror who convicted Bill Cosby on sexual assault charges last Thursday said Cosby’s previous admission that he gave Quaaludes to women he wanted to have sex with was a decisive factor in his vote.
“I think it was his deposition, really,” Harrison Snyder, 22, the youngest juror in Cosby’s trial for drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand, told correspondent Linsey Davis of ABC’s Good Morning Americain a segment that aired Monday morning.
“Cosby admitted to giving these Quaaludes to women — young women — in order to have sex with them.”
Cosby made the admission in a deposition for a 2005 civil suit filed by Constand, who was an employee of Temple University in 2004 when Cosby sexually assaulted her at his Elkins Park, Pennsylvania mansion.
In his deposition, Cosby admitted he gave Quaaludes to a 19-year-old woman he met in Las Vegas he later had sex with, and said he did the same with “other people.”
He also admitted he had seven prescriptions for Quaaludes in the 1970s, and his attorney said he kept those drugs until 2000.
Cosby settled the lawsuit brought by Constand in 2006 and his deposition was later sealed, but in 2015, a judge unsealed portions of it.
Snyder told GMA that he was barely aware of who Cosby was before the trial, and said he hadn’t heard about the accusations from more than 60 women that Cosby has drugged or sexually assaulted them. Cosby has denied all of the accusations.
Bill Cosby
Mark Makela/Getty
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“I really didn’t know a lot. I knew he was an actor. I knew that he did The Cosby Show. I never watched The Cosby Show or anything — a little too young for that,” he said.
On the dozens of allegations against Cosby, Snyder said, “I didn’t know anything. I don’t watch the news, ever. So I didn’t even know what he was on trial for.”
Harrison Snyder
Good Morning America/Twitter
Last week marked the second time that a jury has deliberated Cosby’s fate. In 2017, another jury spent six days before they announced they were unable to come to a consensus. Judge Steven T. O’Neill ruled they were hopelessly deadlocked and declared a mistrial.
At Cosby’s previous trial, two of his accusers testified that he had committed similar crimes against them. At his latest one, five accusers were allowed to testify.
But Snyder, who said he has “no doubt” of Cosby’s guilt, said he would have voted to convict even without the other accusers’ testimony.
“In the deposition, he stated that he gave these drugs to other women. I don’t think it really necessarily mattered that these other five women were here because he said it himself, that he used these drugs for other women,” Snyder said.
When asked if the #MeToo movement had any impact on his decision to sentence Cosby, Snyder said it didn’t, because he wasn’t aware of the movement until after the trial.
“I really only found out about it after I got home, that I looked online to see what everything was. I didn’t really even know about the MetToo movement,” Snyder said.
Cosby was convicted on three aggravated indecent sexual assault charges, each of which carries a prison sentence of up to 10 years.
After the verdict, Cosby’s attorney Tom Mesereau said the defense plans to appeal.
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