After Tuesday’s hearing, Cosby’s lawyers spoke out against prosecutors, accusers, and lawyers such as Gloria Allred, who represents some of Cosby’s accusers.
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Bill Cosby arrived at court with a wide smile on his face today for a hearing in which a date for his sex assault trial was set.
A trial date has been set for June 5 next year.
NORRISTOWN, Pa. (AP) They were models and aspiring actresses.
Like Constand, the 13 women say they were drugged or intoxicated when Cosby allegedly assaulted them, according to the Associated Press.
Cosby has only been charged criminally in the case in Pennsylvania involving Andrea Constand, who says Cosby molested her in 2004.
Andrea Constand leaving her home in Toronto, Ontario. The judge has not yet ruled on whether to allow this.
District Attorney Kevin R. Steele, the lead prosecutor in the Cosby case, said in the motion filed Tuesday that he wants to use the testimony to show a pattern of behavior by Cosby that is similar to that alleged by Constand.
One of the prospective witnesses, then an aspiring actress, said Cosby assaulted her at a home near Reno, Nevada in 1984 after telling her agent and her parents that he wanted to mentor her. One woman told investigators she refused to take what Cosby identified as Quaaludes, but later agreed to drink champagne and had difficulty staying conscious. He had been a university trustee and she managed the university’s women’s basketball team.
In charging documents, prosecutors alleged Constand returned to her native Canada in March 2004 and later in January 2005 confided in her mother that “Cosby had sexually assaulted her”. She later woke up naked in a hotel room and said she had been sexually assaulted. They hope to suppress several days of testimony Cosby gave in the accuser’s lawsuit a decade ago.
Cosby’s defenders instead suggest he is a wealthy target for the many women he met during five decades as an A-list celebrity.
“I don’t know the names, and right now I don’t need to know the names”, O’Neill said.
“The time has come to shine a spotlight on the trampling of Mr. Cosby’s civil rights”, they wrote.
Allred called the attack “desperate” and “pathetic” in a statement.
However, Montgomery County Judge Steven O’Neill did not immediately rule on any of the pretrial disputes over evidence, including the prosecution effort to call other women as witnesses.
During the pre-trial hearing on Tuesday, prosecutors also urged O’Neill to allow into evidence Cosby’s own words, taped in a phone conversation with Constand’s mom.
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Constand claims that Cosby gave her pills that he said were an “herbal supplement” and proceeded to fondle her breasts and penetrate her vagina with her fingers, after she was rendered incapacitated by the drugs. “I’m apologizing because I’m thinking this is a dirty old man with a young girl”, he said in a 2005 deposition describing the phone call.
