COS CONFESSION OK

Judge allows ’05 drugged-sex testimony

Bill Cosby’s damning admission in a civil lawsuit that he gave women drugs before having sex with them can be used as evidence at his criminal trial, a Pennsylvania judge ruled Monday.

The ruling is a blow to the oncebeloved comedian’s defense, as he fights charges that he sexually assaulted former Temple University employee Andrea Constand.

Cosby admitted to giving women Quaaludes in a 2005 deposition for Constand’s civil case, after then-DA Bruce Castor promised not to crim- inally prosecute the comic.

“When you got the Quaaludes, was it in your mind that you were going to use these Quaaludes for young women that you wanted to have sex with?” Constand’s then-lawyer, Dolores Troiani, asked Cosby in 2005. “Yes,” Cosby replied. Cosby (inset) described in the deposition how he put his hands down Constand’s pants because he didn’t hear her tell him to stop.

“I don’t hear her say anything. And I don’t feel her say anything. And so I continue and I go into the area that is somewhere between permission and rejection. I am not stopped,” he said.

Cosby, now 79, said that he would have sex with the women he fed drugs, but that the encounters were all consensual. Cosby, however, has been accused by dozens of women of drugging and raping them.

He now contends that he gave Constand only a dose of Benadryl during their 2004 encounter at his Pennsylvania home.

The defense has always insisted Cosby agreed to answer Constand’s civil-lawsuit questions only after Castor promised not to prosecute.

But Judge Steven O’Neill disagreed and called Castor’s decision not to go after Cosby criminally an act of “prosecutorial discretion” and not a legally binding guarantee.

The ruling allowing the civil-case testimony is one of two key pretrial issues. O’Neill must also decide if prosecutors can call other accusers who have said Cosby sexually assaulted them. The trial is set for June.

A spokesman for Cosby declined to comment on Monday.