TIME TO TRY, TRY AGAIN VS. COSBY
New lawyers, new accusers
NORRISTOWN, Pa. — Bill Cosby will head back to court Monday for Round Two of his sexual-assault case — and although the charges remain the same, the battle will be anything but a repeat. The freshly minted jurors and the public can expect a whole new cast of characters as the comedian’s retrial plays out over the next month, including a new defense team, a new defense witness and an additional five women who have accused Cosby, 80, of sex assault. Hollywood attorney Tom Mesereau, procured by Cosby after his old legal team jumped ship, has adapted the funnyman’s defense. Joined by Kathleen Bliss, Lane Vines and Becky James, Mesereau is best known for winning Michael Jackson’s stunning 2005 acquittal on child-molestation charges. While the fallen Jell-O pitchman’s previous attorneys, Brian McMonagle and Angela Agrusa, painted accuser Andrea Constand as a spurned lover — and mounted a sixminute defense — his new team of lawyers is expected to portray the accuser as a money-grubbing opportunist. Montgomery County Court Judge Steven O’Neill had ruled during Cosby’s last prosecution that the defense would be barred from calling Constand’s ex-colleague Marguerite Jackson to the stand because her account was “hearsay,” yet last week said he would allow Jackson to testify.
In a letter signed by Jackson and handed to reporters last June, the Temple University employee said Constand admitted to her that she planned to concoct allegations against the actor.
During a stay in a Rhode Island hotel, Constand allegedly told Jackson “she could say it happened and file charges, file a civil suit, get the money, go to school and open a business,” according to the document.
When asked during the first trial if she knew Jackson, an adviser in Temple’s Boyer College of Music and Dance, Constand told Agrusa that “the name sounds familiar,” but concluded she didn’t know her.
O’Neill has also allowed five other accusers to take the stand against Cosby this time. Last year he permitted only one, Kelly Johnson, in addition to Constand.
While Johnson will not return to the stand, Janice Dickinson, Janice Baker-Kinney, Heidi Thomas, Chelan Lasha and Lise-Lotte Lublin are expected to testify that they were administered some sort of intoxicant, as Constand contends, and sexually assaulted by Cosby.
Constand, 44, claims that she was visiting Cosby at his Cheltenham, Pa., home in early 2004 and accepted three blue pills which he said would relax her.
She then allegedly awoke, unable to move, to the comedian groping her breasts, his fingers inside her, and him putting her hand on his penis.
Cosby’s last trial ended in a mistrial last June after almost 60 hours of deliberation.
If convicted, he faces up to 10 years behind bars on three felony count of aggravated indecent assault.