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Monday, March 18, 2024 | Back issues
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Cosby Quaalude Admission Will Factor Into Trial

A judge presiding over the Bill Cosby assault case refused Monday to suppress old deposition testimony in which the comedian admitted to drugging women before having sex with them.

NORRISTOWN, Pa. (CN) – A judge presiding over the Bill Cosby assault case refused Monday to suppress old deposition testimony in which the comedian admitted to drugging women before having sex with them.

Pennsylvania authorities had charged Cosby in mid-2015 shortly after a federal judge ordered the release of civil deposition testimony that had been sealed for a decade.

By that point dozens of women were speaking out about Cosby having drugged and raped them dating back to the 1970s.

The only accuser whose claims hurdled the statute of limitations is Andrea Constand, a former director of operations for the women's basketball program at Temple University, where Cosby had been a trustee.

Constand says Cosby drugged and raped her at his Cheltenham, Pa., home in 2005, and but the Montgomery County district attorney in office at the time declined to prosecute her case.

She instead brought a civil complaint and reached a settlement with Cosby whose terms remain under wraps.

Now facing a trial in the Court of Common Pleas over his night with Constand, 79-year-old Cosby wanted his incriminating deposition testimony from 2005 and 2006 suppressed as evidence.

"When you got the quaaludes, was it in your mind that you were going to use these quaaludes for young women that you wanted to have sex with?" Dolores Troiani, one of Constand's attorneys, had asked Cosby in one deposition.

"Yes," Cosby said.

A defense attorney would not let Cosby answer when Troiani asked if he "ever give any of those young women quaaludes without their knowledge?"

Judge Steven O’Neill refused Monday, saying Cosby cannot show that former DA Bruce Castor made any agreement or “promise not to prosecute, only an exercise of prosecutorial discretion.”

The 6-page ruling comes just over a month after Cosby’s last court appearance, where his attorney, Brian McMonagle,  said Cosby is nearly blind and suffers memory problems in his advanced age that make it highly prejudicial for him to go on trial now for a 2005 encounter.

Another round of pretrial hearings in Cosby's case is scheduled for Dec. 13 and 14.

O'Neill is still set to rule on whether prosecutors can call 13 other women who claim that Cosby drugged and assaulted them.

Categories / Criminal, Trials

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