PHILADELPHIA _ Prosecutors will be allowed to use Bill Cosby's decade-old testimony about his sexual past and his use of drugs in previous encounters with women at his sexual-assault trial next year, a Montgomery County judge ruled Monday.
The defense had claimed that the 79-year-old entertainer only agreed to testify in the 2005 lawsuit brought by accuser Andrea Constand because he had been promised by a prior prosecutor that he would never be prosecuted.
But in a ruling Monday, Judge Steven T. O'Neill concluded that Cosby no such promise ever existed.
"This court concludes that there was neither an agreement nor a promise not to prosecute, only an exercise of prosecutorial discretion," he wrote.
O'Neill's decision delivered a major pretrial victory to District Attorney Kevin R. Steele, who has cited Cosby's deposition, portions of which were unsealed for the first time last year, as a reason his office decided to reopen the investigation into Constand's allegations.
The probe led to charges a year ago that Cosby sexually assaulted Constand at his Cheltenham home in 2004.
His deposition was taken during the litigation of the lawsuit Constand filed against him. Both parties later settled the case for an undisclosed sum.
Cosby acknowledged in the deposition in a 2005 lawsuit Constand filed against him that he had given young women drugs or alcohol in past sexual encounters he maintained were consensual. He also admitted to having sexual contact with Constand.
Many of the women Cosby discussed in the deposition, including Constand, have since claimed he drugged and abused them.
The ruling preceded court hearings scheduled for next week on the remaining significant pretrial issue in the case _ whether Steele will get to call 13 of Cosby's more than 50 other accusers to bolster Constand's story on the stand.
