Cosby’s lawyers: Accuser stories are weak

PHILADELPHIA — On the eve of a pivotal hearing in his sexual assault case, Bill Cosby’s lawyers accused prosecutors of relying on the “tainted, unreliable memories of women now in their senior years” to paper over weaknesses in their evidence against him.

The attorneys, in a motion filed yesterday, urged a judge to bar testimony from 13 women lined up to testify that they, too, were drugged and attacked by the now-79-year-old entertainer. They described the accusers’ recollections as unreliable, their accounts too influenced by media coverage and their statements too inconsistent to be believed.

“There has never been a shred of physical evidence to support such claims. They have never been reported to any authority,” Cosby attorneys Brian J. McMonagle and Angela Agrusa wrote. “The commonwealth is asking a jury to hear 14 trials in one case, and to pass judgment on claims about events that occurred outside the commonwealth, across the country, decades and decades earlier.”

Montgomery County Judge Steven T. O’Neill could take up the issue as soon as today, at the first of four scheduled hearings to determine what evidence jurors will hear at Cosby’s June trial.

Although Cosby has been charged with only one sexual attack — an alleged 2004 assault on former Temple University employee Andrea Constand — prosecutors are seeking to put the other women on the witness stand to demonstrate that he had a history of drugging and assaulting women that dates as far back as the 1970s.

Such testimony is allowed under Pennsylvania law — even if the alleged crimes have never been proven in court or fall outside the statute to limitations — but only if the allegations establish that the accused followed a pattern of criminal behavior.