Judge agrees to criminal trial for Cosby

NORRISTOWN, Pa. — A judge ruled Tuesday that entertainer and comedian Bill Cosby should stand trial on a felony charge of aggravated indecent assault involving a former Temple University employee who said he drugged and molested her at his Cheltenham mansion in 2004.

District Judge Elizabeth McHugh agreed to a trial for the 78-year-old Cosby on the strength of Andrea Constand’s decade-old police statement, sparing her the need to testify at the preliminary hearing.

In the statement read into the record, Constand told police in 2005 — about a year after the incident — that about 20 minutes after Cosby offered her three blue pills and told her to take them with the wine he had set out, her legs began to wobble “like jelly,” her eyes went blurry and her head began to throb. She told police she later realized he had violated her as she lay helplessly in a stupor.

Cosby has denied Constand’s allegations, calling their encounter consensual in his own statement to police in 2005. He settled with Constand for an undisclosed sum in 2006 after testifying privately about his extramarital affairs, his use of Quaaludes to seduce women and his efforts to hide payments to women from his wife. But prosecutors reopened the criminal case last year after dozens of women leveled similar allegations and after Cosby’s sealed testimony in Constand’s lawsuit was made public.

AP/MATT ROURKE Bill Cosby departs the Montgomery County Courthouse after a preliminary hearing Tuesday in Norristown, Pa. Cosby was ordered to stand trial on sexual assault charges.