*Patrick O’Connor, one of the attorneys representing Bill Cosby, is vowing to find out how The New York Times was able to obtain a decade-old deposition given by the comedian that most folks presumed was confidential.
Turns out, it wasn’t, according to The Hollywood Reporter’s Eriq Gardner.
In its story on Saturday, the Times reported that despite an intense media effort to unseal documents in an old lawsuit brought by a female accuser, “the deposition itself was never sealed” and was in fact publicly available through a court reporting service.
“How that deposition became public without being court-sanctioned is something we are going to pursue and deal with very vigorously,” O’Connor told The Philadelphia Inquirer. “It’s an outrage that the court processes weren’t followed here.”
The NYT story came on the heels of the release of excerpts of the 2005 deposition contained in court papers. Earlier this month, a judge agreed to a media motion to unseal some of the records in the case over Cosby’s objections. But until the Times obtained it, nobody but the parties involved and the one who transcribed it had a copy of the full transcript of the deposition, which according to the newspaper, showed Cosby presenting himself “as an unapologetic, cavalier playboy; someone who used a combination of fame, apparent concern and powerful sedatives in a calculated pursuit of young women.”
As for obtaining the entire deposition transcript, a spokesperson for the newspaper told THR: “The Times legally obtained the transcript from a court reporting service. The judge in the case had declined in 2005 to enter a confidentiality order making the depositions confidential so there was no court order sealing the testimony, then or now. Once we obtained the transcript, we were free to report on Mr. Cosby’s testimony. ”
Read the entire story at The Hollywood Reporter.
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