President Obama addressed the growing movement to have Bill Cosby’s Presidential Medal of Freedom revoked— today and suggested he believed that the once-beloved comedian did commit rape.

Dozens of women have accused Cosby of drugging and then raping them. Cosby has denied any wrongdoing, but a 2005 deposition, released earlier this month, shows he admitted to procuring Quaaludes to give to young women. The NY Times reported:

In the records, Mr. Cosby, now 77, did not admit drugging unwitting women. When asked if the women had known they were taking the quaaludes, Mr. Cosby’s lawyer abruptly cut off the questioning. And Mr. Cosby suggested in his answers that the pill taking and sex had been consensual.

“I meet Ms. (redacted) in Las Vegas,” said Mr. Cosby in the 2005 deposition cited in a memorandum of law filed in United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. “She meets me backstage. I give her quaaludes. We then have sex.”

The name of the woman Mr. Cosby cited in his testimony was redacted. But the discussion in the court record closely tracks the encounter described by [Therese] Serignese. She said Tuesday she could not comment because of her pending litigation. In the past she has said that nothing about the episode was consensual, that she only took the pills because Mr. Cosby was an authority figure and she felt frightened and compelled.

Serignese was 19 at the time of the encounter.

Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Claire McCaskill support a petition asking that the Presidential Medal of Freedom—given to Cosby in 2002 by President George Bush—be stripped away. But today Obama said there was no “mechanism” to do so.

After explaining that he doesn’t comment about criminal or civil suits, the President said, “I’ll say this. If you give a woman — or a man, for that matter — without his or her knowledge a drug, and then have sex with that person without consent, that’s rape. And I think this country, any civilized country, should have no tolerance for rape.”