Judge: Another accuser can testify in Cosby case
Experts: Account could strengthen case against Cosby.
A judge ruled Friday that one additional woman who says Bill Cosby sexually assaulted her will be permitted to testify at his trial later this year on charges that he sexually assaulted a former Temple University staff member in 2004.
Legal experts have said that the account of a second woman describing what she said was an act of sexual assault could strengthen the case against Cosby, 79, who has denied any misconduct.
But the judge’s decision was far from a full victory for prosecutors in Montgomery County, Pa., who had sought to introduce testimony from 13 women who have accused Cosby of assaulting them. The prosecutors told Judge Steven T. O’Neill of the Court of Common Pleas that the testimony of the group of women was important in showing a pattern of conduct by Cosby that bolstered the account of Andrea Constand, the former Temple employee.
O’Neill agreed to allow the testimony of the one woman, identified only as “Prior Alleged Victim Six,” in a one-page decision. While the judge’s decision was too brief to completely explain his reasoning, the account given by the woman is similar to that given by Constand, who says she was drugged and sexually assaulted at the entertainer’s home near Philadelphia.
Two years ago, the new witness appeared at a news conference, with her lawyer, Gloria Allred, where she was identified only as Kacey and described working as an assistant to Cosby’s agent at the William Morris Agency in the 1990s. She and Cosby were friendly, she said, and once had dinner at his home where they read from a script, their scene ending in a passionate kiss that made her uncomfortable. Then, she said, she went to lunch at his California hotel bungalow in 1996 where, she said, she passed out after he gave her a “large white pill,” and woke up in bed next to Cosby, who was naked beneath an open robe.
“Once Prior Victim Number Six was incapacitated, defendant sexually assaulted her,” prosecutors said in court papers last year. The woman said at the news conference that she never pressed charges because she feared retaliation.
Cosby has denied all the allegations of sexual assault and has described his encounter with Constand as consensual.
Cosby’s legal team is expected to challenge Constand’s credibility. Legal experts said the judge’s ruling made that job more difficult, but that the admittance of testimony from multiple women would have been significantly more damaging.
“He has two people to challenge rather than just one; in that sense, it’s a defeat,” said Dennis McAndrews, a Pennsylvania lawyer and former prosecutor. But, he added: “If five or more had been admitted, it would have been devastating for his case. It is easier to attack the testimony of two.”
Cosby’s lawyers had fought to block the women’s accounts, which had not been the subject of criminal complaints or adjudicated at trial, and which they disparaged as vague.