Bill Cosby is looking for a criminal defense lawyer to fight the 2005 sexual assault complaint brought against him by Andrea Constand, a then-Temple basketball player—again.
The new hire, according to the Associated Press, swirls around the reopening of Constand’s original complaint that Cosby drugged and sexually abused her ten years ago.
Montgomery County District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman wouldn’t confirm her office is reinvestigating the complaint by former Temple University employee Andrea Constand. However, she said in a recent statement “prosecutors have a responsibility to review past conclusions … when current information might lead to a different decision.”
As a part of the settlement before the case went to trial, neither she nor her lawyer Dolores Troiani can comment on the case, however Troiani did confirm that Constand is willing to cooperate.
“She’s a very strong lady,” lawyer Dolores Troiani said Tuesday. “She’ll do whatever they request of her.”
In Cosby’s deposition in the 2005 case, which a judge made public earlier this summer, he admitted to “obtaining quaaludes in the 1970s” to give women he slept with “the same as a person would say, ‘Have a drink.’” He said he had consensual extra-marital affairs and none of the his partners were drugged unknowingly. This flies in the face of the scores of women who have said that Cosby systematically drugged and sexually assaulted them over the last 40 years.
According to Bruce Castor, a former Philly district attorney back in 2005, Constand actually “lodged more serious sexual-assault allegations in the civil lawsuit than she had divulged to police.”
“If the allegations in the civil complaint were contained with that detail in her statement to the police, we might have been able to make a case out of it,” said Castor, a county commissioner who’s running for another term as district attorney as Ferman gives up the post to run for judge.
He remembers investigating the case as a misdemeanor, rather than a felony.
Of course, Constand’s lawyer rebuked Castor’s statement and accused him of going soft on Cosby because Castor was running for governor at the time of the investigation and didn’t want to rock the boat.
Meanwhile, Cosby’s lawyer have yet to comment and speculation about a possible investigation is running concurrent with Gloria Allred’s push for Cosby to give a deposition in the separate case of Judy Huth, a woman who alleges that she was 15 years old when Cosby assaulted her at the Playboy Mansion in 1974.
Contact the author at Hillary@jezebel.com.
Image via AP.
DISCUSSION
Is his argument seriously that the women were drugged knowingly? That they said, “oh sure, you can put that in my drink and then have sex with my unconscious body”? Do people actually believe that?