NORRISTOWN, Pa. _ Did Bill Cosby devise a plan to drug and rape women and secretly carry it out over the course of decades in the public eye?
Or is he a popular entertainer being railroaded by opportunists with stale accusations and dubious motives?
Lawyers laid out dramatically competing views of the comedian in a Pennsylvania courtroom Wednesday, part of a high-stakes battle that puts both the women's right to testify and Cosby's freedom on the line.
"This is a lifetime of sexual assault on young women," Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele said at a pretrial hearing. "He's doing things to instill trust in (victims), then exploiting that trust."
Countered Cosby lawyer Brian McMonagle: "(This is) a bandaged bandwagon of claims that have been put together in Pandora's box. And they were put in that box by some clever and cunning lawyers who had as their agenda the bringing down of an American icon."
Cosby's sexual history is a critical element to what activists say may be a final opportunity to bring the entertainer to justice. Many of the accusations against the performer that have surfaced in the last two years have seen their statute of limitations expire.
But prosecutors here a year ago, just before a Dec. 31 deadline, arrested Cosby, charging him with three felony counts of indecent assault for a 2004 incident at Cosby's Pennsylvania home in which he provided then-Temple University basketball employee Andrea Constand with a pill, then penetrated her with his fingers.
To help persuade a jury to convict Cosby, Steele wants 13 women who say Cosby had unwanted sexual contact with them in the past to testify about their experiences.
But Pennsylvania law only allows testimony in unrelated cases if the prosecution can demonstrate a "common scheme" _ that Cosby essentially had a modus operandi.
On Wednesday, the second day of the hearing, prosecutors sought to weave common threads through the cases of the 13 women. Running through similarities in alleged incidents that date to 1969 and continued through the 1990s, Steele built a case for how Cosby, in the context of his work travels, met significantly younger women, befriended them, then invited them to an environment he controlled _ a dressing room, a home or hotel _ where he proceeded to drug and rape them.
This is "distinctively recognizable as the handiwork of the same perpetrator," the prosecutor said. "The proof of one tends to establish the proof of another."
McMonagle followed Steele by taking aim at both the claims of the 13 women and their similarities to the Constand affair.
In the first part of his argument Wednesday morning, McMonagle noted that the allegations of the 13 women, which have been entered as court statements, simply stretch too far back and are too murkily detailed to have any place in a trial.
"Sometime in 1982, some house owned by somebody ... somewhere in Reno," McMonagle said, mocking Steele's line of questioning. "Where were you that day, Mr. Cosby? We don't need the day; we don't need the month.
"That's why we have statutes of limitations," he said.
Defense attorneys then spent much of the afternoon going through the accusers' stories, spending as much as a half hour on each of the women with the help of a detailed PowerPoint spreadsheet, McMonagle and co-counsel Angela Agrusa switching off at the podium.
The line of defense veered between calling into question the reliability of the 13 alleged victims _ where did this happen? Why did they take so long to come forward? Why were so many of them represented in civil lawsuits by Gloria Allred? _ and drawing a contrast with the Constand matter.
For the purpose of Wednesday's hearing, however, only the latter issue is truly pertinent.
Though many of the distinctions between the incidents were of the decidedly minor variety _ an accuser might be a high-school-educated aspiring model compared to Constand's college-graduate world traveler, for instance _ the defense argued that there were sufficient differences to disqualify the accusers from testifying at the trial.
The fight for the women to testify has become a cause celebre for feminist groups and their advocates, who say Cosby epitomizes how a man can use his privilege to abuse and exploit women.
But the stakes are more specific: Legal experts say that without the women's testimony, a jury could well be unpersuaded to convict Cosby of assaulting Constand. The prosecution's case contains a number of flaws, including time lapses in when the alleged victim came forward and the fact that, unlike some of the other accounts, the woman accepted a pill from Cosby.
Steele himself acknowledged the importance of the 13 women to his argument Wednesday. "The commonwealth (of Pennsylvania) has a significant need for this evidence," he said. "Without (it) we're forced to rely on what ... will be argued as the uncorroborated testimony of the victim."
McMonagle fired back that Steele was trying to use Constand as a Trojan horse. "Andrea Constand has never been the reason we're here; Andrea Constand walked away from this case 11 years ago," he said, referring to a civil settlement at the time. "This is a means to overcome a statute of limitations because somebody decided to bang the drum with an American citizen."
