Meet Bill Cosby’s new legal team
Celebrity lawyer takes over; trial moved to 2018
Bill Cosby signed up new lawyers to defend him at his retrial on sexual-assault charges, including Thomas Mesereau, the flamboyantly mop-haired lawyer who famously defended accused celebrities Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson, Robert Blake and Marion “Suge” Knight.
Already the new team is having an effect: After Mesereau argued for a delay at a pretrial hearing Tuesday, Judge Steven O’Neill granted his motion, saying the retrial will take place something in mid-March or early April 2018.
The second trial had been scheduled to start Nov. 6 in Montgomery County outside Philadelphia, but Cosby’s original team of defense lawyers sought and received permission from O’Neill to withdraw from the case. That meant the new team needed more time to prepare, O’Neill said.
“To ask someone to review the voluminous record over 18 months — now 20 months in this case — simply cannot be done,” O’Neill said.
Cosby spokesman Andrew Wyatt announced Monday the new Cosby defense team will consist of Mesereau of Los Angeles, Kathleen Bliss of Nevada, a former federal prosecutor for 22 years, and Sam Silver, a litigation specialist and lecturer in the law school of the University of Pennsylvania, who represented nowimprisoned former U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah in a corruption case.
Cosby, 80, will be retried on three counts of aggravated indecent assault stemming from an encounter with Andrea Constand at his home in 2014.
In another change, the new lawyers said they are willing to pick a new jury from Montgome- ry County. The old team insisted on going outside the county, partly due to pretrial publicity and partly because the case was a campaign issue in the 2015 race for county district attorney. Kevin Steele won that race and is now prosecuting Cosby.
The first jury, picked from the Pittsburgh area, was sequestered in Norristown, Pa. They deliberated for more than 50 hours over five days in June before failing to reach a unanimous verdict, leading to a mistrial.
The Tuesday hearing was the first appearance for Cosby’s new lawyers, and all eyes were on Mesereau, best known for winning acquittal for Jackson in 2005 at his six-month trial in California on more than a dozen child molestation charges.
Mesereau, who regularly appears on lists of the nation’s best trial lawyers, was widely respected in California but shot to international fame after the Jackson case.
His first celebrity client was Tyson, the former world heavyweight boxing champion and convicted rapist, who was investigated on different sexual assault charges in San Bernardino County in 2001. Mesereau persuaded prosecutors to drop the case.
Early in 2005, Mesereau became Blake’s second lawyer, defending him against murder charges in the death of his wife, and managed to obtain bail for the actor after he spent months in jail in Los Angeles. But Mesereau quit the case, declining to explain why. Blake eventually was acquitted in March 2005.
In 2015, Mesereau was retained by rap mogul Knight to represent him on murder, attempted murder and hit-and-run charges after a man was killed by a vehicle driven by Knight near the set of Straight Outta Compton. But he was Knight’s fourth lawyer by that point and he, too, eventually quit in January 2016. The case is still pending.
Cosby’s first defense team, Brian McMonagle and Angela Agrusa, asked to withdraw from the case but haven’t said why.
After the Tuesday hearing, the old team and the new team were spotted shaking hands.