UPDATE: Bill Cosby’s trial for three counts of felony aggravated indecent assault has been scheduled to begin on June 5, Judge Steven O’Neill announced Tuesday.
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*Bill Cosby may find himself not only facing former Temple University employee Andrea Constand in his upcoming sexual assault trial, but also 13 of the more than 50 women who have accused him of assaulting and/or drugging them over the decades, reports Deadline.com.
The 79-year-old comedian attended a pretrial hearing in Norristown, PA today, where the Montgomery County D.A.’s office introduced a motion on “prior bad acts” to have 13 of his accusers serve as witnesses in the criminal case against Cosby — the lone criminal case against the actor.
Cosby is facing several defamation and other civil cases in states like California and Massachusetts, where the statute of limitations for a criminal case has expired.
“It should be noted that the relevant similarities in this case are more numerous and establish more of a pattern than those seen in many of the cases cited …where other admission of the other act evidence was permitted,” the motion stated, according to Deadline.
Cosby’s lawyers also introduced several new motions today in court, including one to suppress a telephone call of more than a decade ago between the comedian and Constand’s mother over the alleged assault. Cosby’s side says the call from Canada was illegally taped under Pennsylvania law even though the actor was actually in California when the conversation took place. Judge O’Neill said today he will likely rule of the admission of the tape in the next week or so.
Facing criminal charges in the state for the sexual assault of Constand in 2004, Cosby has been unsuccessful in his attempts to get the case by the Montgomery County D.A. office tossed out, halted or reassessed. On July 7, the last time Cosby was in the suburban Philadelphia courthouse, O’Neill ruled to deny the habeas corpus in the case of Cosby’s alleged drugging and rape of Constand. On August 12, the state judge quashed another legal maneuver by Cosby’s team to stop the matter from going to trial later this year.
Cosby could be sentenced to more than a decade behind bars if found guilty on three felony second-degree aggravated indecent assault charges.
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