Bill Cosby debuted a new legal team on Tuesday’s hearing. The comedian hired Tom Mesereau, who defended late Michael Jackson in 2005, to lead the legal team.
Cosby’s retrial on sexual assault was postponed to 2018, with tempting dates being March and April.
Cosby is debuting a new legal team
Bill Cosby decided to bring in new defense team for his second trial. Leading the team is Tom Mesereau, a Los Angeles based lawyer best known for successfully defending the late singer Michael Jackson from child sexual abuse charges in 2005.
In a statement, the spokesman said Mesereau will join a newly constituted defense team that includes two other lawyers, Kathleen Bliss, of Las Vegas, and Sam Silver, of Philadelphia.
The trio will replace Brian J. McMonagle, of Philadelphia, and Angela Agrusa, of Los Angeles, who on Tuesday’s hearing asked to bow out of the case after representing Cosby at his first trial in June, a two-week proceeding that ended with a deadlocked jury and mistrial.
Mesereau had expressed an interest in representing Cosby as far back as 2015 when the entertainer was first charged in the decade-old case involving accuser Andrea Constand. His past celebrity clients have also included boxer Mike Tyson, actor Robert Blake and music producer Suge Knight.
Silver, a lawyer with the Center City-based Schnader firm, has been part of Cosby’s legal team since last year. Primarily focused on civil cases involving allegations from some of the more than 50 women who have accused the entertainer or drugging and assaulting them.
His move to the forefront of the criminal defense comes a year after he represented U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah in a federal corruption trial that ended in conviction. Silver also represented former Pennsylvania State President Graham B. Spanier in his child-endangerment trial.
Bliss, a former federal prosecutor, has managed her own boutique law firm in a suburb of Las Vegas since 2015.
Cosby’s retrial has been postponed for next year
Comedian Bill Cosby‘s retrial on charges of sexually assaulting a former Temple University administrator will be postponed from November to March of next year, a judge said on Tuesday. Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas Judge Steven O’Neill said the move will give Cosby’s new defense team enough time to prepare.
“To ask someone to review the voluminous record over 18 months — now 20 months in this case — simply cannot be done,” O’Neill said from the bench.
Cosby’s first trial ended in a mistrial in June after more than 50 hours of jury deliberation failed to yield a unanimous verdict on whether he drugged and assaulted Andrea Constand, who got to know Cosby while working for the women’s basketball team at the university, his alma mater.
Cosby’s retrial will be heard by jurors from the Philadelphia suburb that Cosby has long called home after Mesereau told O’Neill on Tuesday he would not seek a jury from outside Montgomery County.
The jurors in the first trial were bused in from Pittsburgh after Cosby’s lawyers argued that intense publicity would make it nearly impossible to select an impartial local jury.
The move comes as an early change in strategy from Cosby’s new lawyers, who said they’d be willing to pick a local jury.
Sexual assault accusations spanning 50 years
American comedian Bill Cosby has been the subject of publicized sexual assault allegations. With the earliest incidents allegedly taking place in the mid-1960s, Cosby has been accused by numerous women of rape, drug facilitated sexual assault, sexual battery, child sexual abuse, or sexual misconduct.
Earlier sexual assault allegations against Cosby became more public after an October 2014 comedy routine by Hannibal Buressalluding to Cosby’s covert sexual misbehavior went viral, and many additional claims were made after that date. The dates of the alleged incidents span from 1965 to 2008 across 10 U.S. states and one Canadian province.
Cosby has maintained his innocence and repeatedly denied the allegations.
In November 2014, in response to a question about the allegations, Cosby said: “I don’t talk about it.”
Cosby has declined to publicly discuss the accusations in past interviews. However, he told Florida Today, “people shouldn’t have to go through that and shouldn’t answer to innuendos.” In May 2015 he said, “I have been in this business 52 years and I’ve never seen anything like this. Reality is a situation and I can’t speak.”
In the wake of the allegations, numerous organizations have severed ties with the comedian, and previously awarded honors and titles have been revoked.
Reruns of The Cosby Show and other shows featuring Cosby have also been pulled from syndication by many organizations. Twenty-five colleges and universities have rescinded his honorary degrees.
Most of the alleged acts fall outside the statutes of limitations for criminal legal proceedings, but criminal charges have been filed against Cosby in one case and numerous civil lawsuits have been brought against him.
Gloria Allred is representing 33 of the alleged victims.
Source: Post Gazette