LA accusations against Cosby may figure in Pa. case

Los Angeles Times (TNS)

LOS ANGELES

One woman was a former Playboy playmate who says she met Bill Cosby in the Hollywood Hills. Another was a secretary at a Beverly Hills talent agency who says the actor invited her over to his home. A third, an aspiring comedy writer, says she was awestruck to see the inside of his bungalow on set at Universal Studios.

Of the dozens of women who have come forward accusing Bill Cosby of attacking them over the last five decades, many say the assaults took place in the LA area. During the peak of Cosby’s career, he was a familiar face at the Playboy Mansion and on the Hollywood celebrity party circuit.

But even as the public accusations against Cosby reached a fever pitch over the last year, LA authorities have struggled to build a criminal case against him.

Legal experts say those hurdles remain even after Cosby last week faced his first criminal charges, filed in Pennsylvania, on allegations of drugging and assaulting a woman there nearly 12 years ago.

The LA district attorney’s office is reviewing a single accusation against Cosby that dates back to 2008. Los Angeles Police Department detectives investigated the allegations in 2015 and submitted their findings to prosecutors in September.

But most allegations against Cosby are much older – some from the 1960s and 1970s. The statute of limitations for adult sex cases in California is generally 10 years or less. The biggest hurdle for prosecutors reviewing more than 50 women’s claims against Cosby is the years that passed between the purported attacks and the accusers’ coming forward. With no police reports or lawsuits alleging any sexual improprieties before 2005, lawyers for the comedian could raise questions about the accusers’ credibility and motives, experts say. Cosby has denied any wrongdoing and said any sexual conduct was consensual.

“It is going to play into the defense’s hand – that there is a piling-on of women who may have had consensual contact with Cosby but are now coming forward to make certain allegations that they were assaulted,” said Alan Jackson, a former deputy district attorney for Los Angeles County, now in private practice.

Cosby’s accusers, on the other hand, could argue that his status made it difficult to go public with their accusations, Jackson said.

Statutes of limitations vary from state to state when it comes to sexual crimes, from as short as a year for misdemeanors in some states to no deadlines for rape in others. The charges of aggravated indecent exposure filed last week in Montgomery County, Pa., came barely a month before the end of the 12-year window prosecutors there had to charge Cosby in the purported 2004 assault.

In California, if the purported victim is a minor, there is leeway to stall the legal clock until he or she becomes an adult or belatedly remembers an incident.

The LAPD in late 2014 submitted to prosecutors for review the 40-year-old case of Judy Huth, who said she was 15 when she met Cosby at a San Marino park, where he was working on a film. She said Cosby later took her to the Playboy Mansion and forced her hand down his pants.

In the Pennsylvania case, unlike many of the cases in LA, prosecutors have the advantage that the incident was reported to police less than a year after Cosby’s purported drugging and assaulting of Temple University employee Andrea Constand. When Constand moved home to Canada and showed a change of behavior in the months after the incident, her mother found out what had happened and reported the incident.

Even though prosecutors there ended up not filing charges in 2005, the investigation generated statements from Constand, her mother and Cosby while the incident was relatively fresh. Constand also filed a civil lawsuit soon after, in which Cosby was questioned by her attorneys about his sexual history and admitted that he had purchased Quaaludes with the intention of giving them to women he wanted to sleep with.

Laurie Levenson, a Loyola Law School professor and former federal prosecutor, said authorities on both sides of the country may have compared cases to see who has the better hand in pressing criminal charges.