Bill Cosby goes to court to stop accusers from testifying

PHILADELPHIA: Bill Cosby is going to court to stop some of his dozens of accusers from testifying at his April 2 sexual assault retrial.

Cosby’s retooled defense team is due to clash with prosecutors over the potential witnesses at a pretrial hearing on Monday.

Prosecutors want to call as many as 19 women to the witness stand in an attempt to show Cosby engaged in a fivedecade pattern of drugging and harming women.

Cosby is only charged in one case, an alleged assault on a former Temple University women’s basketball administrator at his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004.

The 80-year-old entertainer’s first trial ended in a hung jury. A judge had allowed just one other accuser to testify.

Cosby’s lawyers want the same judge to limit the number of accuser witnesses again. They argue some of their claims are “virtually impossible to defend against.”

Cosby’s lawyers argue that the other accusers’ accusations are largely unsubstantiated and are not enough to meet the strict legal standard for allowing prosecutors to present evidence of a defendant’s prior bad conduct.

They said they would seek to delay the retrial if any of the women were allowed to testify so they could have more time to investigate their claims.

Prosecutors are counting on other accusers testifying to show there was a sinister flip side to Cosby’s public persona as “America’s Dad,” cultivated through his role as an affable Jell-O pitchman and the star of the top-rated 1980s family sitcom “The Cosby Show.”