On eve of pivotal hearing, Cosby calls accusers' accounts 'tainted, unreliable'
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.
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 Monday, 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 Tuesday, 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.
And in a case with no physical evidence that will largely turn on jurors' assessment of Constand's and Cosby's credibility as witnesses, such testimony could help tip the balance.
But in their filing Monday, McMonagle and Agrusa argued that the accounts of the 13 women, selected by prosecutors from the more than 50 that have publicly accused Cosby during the last two years, are too different from Constand's - and each other - to meet the legal standard.
Some of the accusers say they were raped, while others say they were merely groped. Others say they voluntarily took drugs such quaaludes, while some only assume Cosby gave them drinks laced with sedatives before their attacks.
Some of the women, said a defense expert witness quoted in Monday's filing, "did not realize they were victims" until after the torrent of media scrutiny on Cosby's sexual past began in 2014.
Peppered throughout their dissection of each woman's story were small personal digs meant to undermine the credibility of their accounts.
One of the accusers kept a sweatshirt Cosby allegedly forced her to wear during her rape "like a treasured souvenir," and even photographed herself wearing it later while she was pregnant, the attorneys said. Another pleaded guilty to stealing cars around the time of her purported assault. A third, McMonagle and Agrusa said, had previously dated "a founder of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love - aka the 'Hippie Mafia' - a group that smuggled hashish and marijuana and made LSD.
"Not one of the proposed witnesses tells the same story as Ms. Constand, let alone all 13 of them," Cosby's attorneys said. "Instead, the narratives . . . span many different eras (from the 1960s to the 1990s) and places (from New York to Toronto to Reno to Los Angeles to Chicago to Las Vegas to New Jersey); involve different scenes and settings (from movie dates to hotel suites to dressing room backstages); describe different relationships (from one-time encounters to decades-long quasi-romantic entanglements), and ultimately level completely different accusations (from one brutal rape to the banality of waking up at home and not remembering how she got there)."
Despite those differences, prosecutors maintain that a pattern emerges from each of the accounts of Cosby using his celebrity to get close to vulnerable young women only to drug and attack them.
Cosby has denied sexually assaulting anyone, but in a 2005 deposition, he admitted to having consensual sex with Constand and some of the 13 other women.
O'Neill, the judge, also will consider Tuesday whether to allow prosecutors to show jurors the transcript of that testimony - which includes potentially damaging admissions about Cosby's sex life, including his past use of drugs during encounters with women.
Cosby's lawyers have also asked the judge to reconsider throwing out the case, citing many of the same arguments that O'Neill rejected in earlier proceedings.
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