“I could see that my experience was just one small link in a vast chain of predation,” writes Andrea Constand in her new memoir, The Moment: Standing Up to Bill Cosby, Speaking Up for Women, out this week from Viking. The book delves into Constand’s life over the nearly two decades of legal battles since an acquaintance introduced her, then the 29-year-old director of operations for Temple University’s women’s basketball team, to Cosby, a Temple alum. In 2004, after fostering what she understood to be a mentorship, she writes, during a meeting at his house Cosby offered her three blue pills that he claimed would help her relax; as she fell in and out of consciousness, Cosby sexually assaulted her. When she came to the next morning she writes that Cosby, clad in a bathrobe, offered her a blueberry muffin on her way out the door.
The events of that night became central to a civil trial in which Cosby paid Constand a $3.38 million settlement, and later two criminal trials—Constand has been referred to as the “linchpin” of the case against the comedian—the second of which found Cosby guilty of three counts of felony aggravated assault. Constand’s memoir details her anxiety while testifying and waiting for jury decisions, the effect of her assault on subsequent romantic relationships, and the trauma she felt when she learned about Cosby’s prior alleged assault victims: “Listening to these accounts often brought me to tears,” she writes. “It was shattering to hear haunting echoes of my past.” But she also describes the vast support she found in these women, and in an ever-expanding network of sexual violence survivors who have sought her out in the years since her own assault—an inspiration, in part, for the Hope Healing and Transformation foundation she began, aimed at aiding victims heal from trauma.
Constand’s memoir may seem to convey a neat arc, from its initial defining adversity through to vindication—but by 2020, when Constand finished her memoir, Cosby was still incarcerated; at publication, his conviction has been vacated by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on the grounds that Bruce L. Castor Jr. (who in 2005 served as the Montgomery County district attorney and declined to prosecute Cosby in a criminal trial) testified that he had made a secret deal that Cosby would never be prosecuted for his alleged crimes.
Constand’s is a story of sadness and joy, of disappointment and triumph, on every level: Early on in the memoir, she writes about her poodle, Maddy, who became her therapy dog two years after her assault. When reached by phone the week before her memoir was published, Constand was in mourning: At age 15, just 24 hours after Constand received the first finished copy of her book, Maddy had died. “It was very emotional that this animal who was my therapy, my best friend, everything—that the day the book gets in my hands, within 24 hours she’s gone,” Constand said. Still, a few weeks before, she had a new addition to the household: Chase, a now 12-week-old puppy. “It was a stark reminder of closure,” Constand said. “New beginnings, sad endings.”
Vanity Fair: How did you feel this summer when you learned that Cosby’s conviction had been overturned?
Andrea Constand: District attorneys should not have the wherewithal to be able to give immunity. Judges should be able to give immunity. My lawyers and I came out with a statement about how we felt, which was that we didn’t want it to deter other victims from coming forward, other survivors from reporting what happened to them. There shouldn’t be any backroom deals done on a handshake. Victims deserve much more than that. We deserve more.
The director of communications, Kate Delano from the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office called me, and she gave me a heads-up and she said, I have a feeling something will be decided today, I’ll call you back. She called me back shortly after, and in not so many words told me, without reading the opinion, that Cosby was going to be getting out of jail, literally within the next couple of hours. And that his conviction had been vacated. And I didn’t know what that meant. [My lawyers] Kristen Fedin and Stewart Ryan both called me and asked if I had any questions. The only questions I had were, is he going to be designated a sexually violent predator? What about his sexual offender status? And they just said, “There is none. He’s going to walk free out of jail, and with no designation.”
I got the biggest lump in my throat, because I just thought to myself, if survivors do come forward and want to be protected by a system—regardless of whether their perpetrator serves jail time or not—how are they going to feel about this? I never just thought about what this means for me. I thought, What does this mean for everybody? What does this mean for the system, for survivors coming forward, and in this climate? And I just had to process that.
After processing it I thought, This is a person who almost served their minimum sentence in jail. We got justice. And I wasn’t angry. Other Cosby survivors were angry. They were devastated. But I quickly turned it around to not feeling shame for what had happened. I had done all that I could do. I felt like that burden was lifted and it was now with the courts, back where it should be. I wasn’t in control of making that decision. At the end of the day, I could walk away from this saying, yes, I did everything I possibly could and this is no longer mine, this shame. I no longer carry that shame.
If he were to come out and re-offend, I thought, this is no longer mine. I felt no longer responsible for that. It is what it is. And it was a burden lifted.
Throughout your memoir, there are so many moments where you describe being under extraordinary pressure and stress—during the first trial, when the jury was deliberating, you write about breaking down and crying in the bath. Did you ever feel regret about coming forward?
Never. The pressure was gut wrenching, but I didn’t think in terms of just how I was feeling—my tears were for the jury, my tears were for my team. My tears were for actually thinking like, how did this moment come to be? There could have been so many things along the way that might’ve not put me in that situation or for that moment not to have happened, but in life you just have to keep going.
But I never regretted it, I never once looked back and said, Did I do the right thing? It was just, How do I just keep breathing in this moment? How do I just keep going? I have to keep going. And I knew there were so many people on the outside that were paying attention, paying very close attention to what was happening. And I drew strength from that.
One difficult aspect throughout the trials was that although you were able to connect with other survivors, you couldn’t talk about the details of your trauma for fear of breaking the NDA or being accused of colluding with other witnesses. How did that feel?
I felt a lot of pain. I felt a lot of lives damaged. And so I think the thread of the trauma with the other women, and with even perfect strangers who I met while I was in Philadelphia who came up to me and shared their stories with me in person, I just felt the pain and I felt their trauma. It was important for me to feel that, as difficult as it was, and to let that be my guiding light, internally knowing that I was standing up and speaking up for them.
Although I had heard many of their stories, I didn’t need to necessarily discuss it with them therapeutically in a way that you might talk about your trauma with your therapist. I just felt like that was a bond that was very spiritual. The journey was very spiritual, and it was bigger than me, and I was very aware of that, but it was something that gave me a lot of strength.
In the book you write about seeking out therapy, and your journey in spirituality and meditation. Are those all practices that you continue now?
The meditation grounded me—the connecting to your mind, and psychologically how the mind and the spirit and the body all work together to create a wholeness. That’s something I will never leave behind. It’s something that I practice to this day, although life’s distractions can really get in the way. At the end of the day, it’s a foundation that I strongly believed in as a young woman, as an athlete and, later in life, something that guided me through these trials.
And I think also to take it like onto a little bit of a deeper level, getting support. If I didn’t have that support, I would’ve crumbled. And the support came from my family, it came from a community of other Cosby survivors, it came from complete strangers in a community I knew I was stepping up to the plate for, and it also came from the district attorney’s office in the victim services that they offered. So I did have that support. And that’s really, really important.
The first opening up the door to healing is finally saying to someone, whether it’s a policeman, or a lawyer, or your mother, or a good friend, or a stranger, to say, “It happened to me, too.”
I felt for you when I read that one of your romantic relationships ended, at least in part, because you had trust issues in relationships.
I think this is fairly common. When somebody has been through trauma, especially sexual violence or sexual trauma, you just don’t know who you can trust. You may feel that way about other people, and unfortunately for me it was everybody close to me. Because of the tight non-disclosure about how the civil case had resolved, I think I carried a bigger secret forward: that I heard [Cosby] say that he drugged a woman with Quaaludes to have sex with her. That was an eye-opening experience, to hear that.
Who do I trust with that? Who can I tell? I went into that situation with a secret, but I came out of the situation with an even bigger secret that I had to carry around for many years—almost 10 years. I didn’t trust anybody.
When everything resurfaced in the media, those issues were coming up for me again. And I couldn’t trust the person closest to me, who I had built a relationship with for many years. That person ended up being really supportive and a great friend throughout the process. But I think that breakdown, it’s a cycle. When you’re a survivor, it’s a cycle. You heal and you move on, but there’s always new stuff that comes up and you have to just learn how to manage your trauma.
Even to this day, I think you work on yourself psychologically, mentally, physically to prepare, to open up, to take chances. I’m at a point where I’ve circled back around, I’ve had this lived experience of having been through this. I know I’m stronger. I have a great foundation underneath me, and now all I can do is just be patient. But that’s so much of the damage. And it’s not just me. I know a handful of other Cosby survivors who’ve been through divorces, break-ups in relationships, trust issues. It’s not just me. And knowing I’m not alone gives me hope.
Having that network has been so important.
For sure. And the therapy continues. The moments where you might be sailing along and doing just fine, you’re going to have those moments, but it’s like anything, eventually things will come up and they need addressing.
Can you tell me about the app you’ve developed?
I started that foundation just several months before I started writing the book. I wanted the book to serve as a way to support the foundation, so the proceeds are going to get distributed to different charities, as well as HHT, and hopefully we’ll get some people writing grants to us. The SAFEAPP is just there to support survivors through their healing process. There’s a trauma-informed library, which I think serves its purpose. It just lets people know what being trauma informed is. There’s a program there that people can take to understand how it impacts the mind, the body, and the spirit. We also offer emotional support links so people can get support right through the app. And we also have free legal assistance. So if somebody is looking to get legal assistance, they sign up for the safe app, they go to the legal form, and they have access to the top trial lawyers in North America. If you need a great lawyer to support you, it’s free. You fill out the form and within 24 to 48 hours, you will have access to a lawyer who can review your case. This is important, because so many survivors aren’t going to the police anymore. There’s so many barriers along the way. And these are all barriers that I faced. The reason I thought about the SAFEAPP was because I wish there was something like that when I was really struggling.
When I circle back and I think about what I’ve done here, writing my story in a nutshell, I really hope other people get inspired and get the grounding and the hope and the foundation that they need in order to know that their stories are important. I want to hear those stories. And I hope that we can start a conversation, because we need to have those conversations, whether they’re through social media or just through sharing through friends, through family, through support. But I think our stories need to be told, and I’m really looking forward to hearing those stories as I embark on a new journey here.
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