Bill Cosby will be facing his accusers in court on Monday as his sexual assault trial begins in Pennsylvania.
According to the Daily Mail, Cosby arrived to Pennsylvania from Massachusetts on his private yet.
Though the trial concerns only the charges stemming from his alleged assault of one woman, other women who have accused the once-beloved comic of drugging and raping them will be in the room.
“I hope he makes eye contact because I’d love to look him in the eye and stare him down,” Victoria Valentino, 74, told NBC News.
Valentino has accused Cosby of assaulting her in his Hollywood Hills home in 1969, while the she was grieving the accidental death of her young son just months before.
“I was already a broken woman,” Valentino told the Guardian.
“To be so callous and so remorseless to take advantage of that – to ruin me again – it was like one more nail in my coffin,” Valentino said.
She told NBC News she had not seen Cosby since then, and came forward along with dozens of other women in recent years. While we can expect several of them to be in attendance at the trial, only one will be permitted to testify as a witness: A woman known by the pseudonym “Kasey” who said Cosby drugged and assaulted her in 1995, when she was working as an assistant to his then-agent.
The plaintiff, Andrea Constand, is expected to take the witness stand. She will testify and face-cross examination about an alleged assault that took place at Cosby’s home in 2004.
Constand’s friend and fellow accuser Donna Motsinger told NBC News that the former Temple University basketball team manager was ready to face her alleged assailant in court.
“There’s no trepidation, no fear,” Motsinger said.
Cosby supporters are also expected to be present at the two-week trial. NBC News reports that Keshia Knight Pulliam, who played Cosby’s youngest daughter on the 1980s sitcom The Cosby Show, will be in the courtroom.
Phylicia Rashad, the actress who played Cosby’s wife, has spoken out in support of her former co-star before, but it is not yet known if she will be present at the trial.
Photo: Associated Press
