Sex-assault trial caps Cosby’s life and legacy

Associated Press

PHILADELPHIA

Bill Cosby doesn’t plan to testify when he goes on trial today on sexual-assault charges, but the rambling, remarkable testimony he gave in the accuser’s lawsuit could still prove pivotal.

The deposition from a decade-old sexual battery lawsuit, unsealed by a judge in 2015 at the request of The Associated Press, showed the once-beloved comedian’s dark side.

Cosby, a champion of family life after a 50-year marriage and five children, detailed his practice of inviting young actresses, models, flight attendants and waitresses to meetings that often featured pills and alcohol – and turned sexual.

He called some of them mere “liaisons.”

But Andrea Constand, he said, was different. Cosby was a mentor and friend to the former Temple University basketball team staffer. She will take the stand this week and tell her story in public for the first time.

Judge Steven O’Neill hopes to keep the media frenzy from dominating the case as it did at O.J. Simpson’s murder trial. Like the Simpson case, the Cosby jury will be sequestered. On the other hand, cameras aren’t allowed in Pennsylvania courtrooms, as they were in the Simpson trial. But scores of photographers will be lined up outside the courthouse.

“We’ve had an O.J. hangover for many years,” said Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson. “What you worry about as the judge is that the lawyers don’t showboat, the evidence gets presented fairly, and that you have a jury that does its job and is not being thrown into the whole milieu of the trial outside the courtroom.”

Cosby’s lawyers have spent the past 18 months trying to have the criminal case thrown out.

They say Cosby testified only after being promised he could never be charged. And they argue the delayed prosecution makes the case impossible to defend, given that witnesses have died, memories have faded and the 79-year-old Cosby, they say, is blind.