Bill Cosby will be retried in November on charges he drugged and molested a woman more than a decade ago, after a Pennsylvania jury deadlocked on the question after deliberating over six days.
Cosby, who turns 80 in July, was ordered on Thursday to be ready for trial on November 6. He is accused of giving a woman he met three pills that knocked her out before sexually assaulting her at his home near Philadelphia. Cosby did not testify at the trial, but in a deposition in the woman’s civil suit called the encounter consensual.
Accuser Andrea Constand testified for seven hours over two days. She said she never gave the actor and comedian consent to engage in sex acts with her. Instead, she said, she considered him a mentor. When the incident occurred, she was a 31-year-old operations director for the women’s basketball team at Temple University, where he, then 66, was a TV icon and the school’s most famous booster.
Her lawyer said she took the deadlock “better than anybody” and is not afraid to confront Cosby in court again.
Prosecutors found themselves back to square one on June 17 after the judge declared a mistrial. The jury failed to reach a verdict in more than 52 hours of deliberations.
Cosby, in his deposition, acknowledged giving a string of young women pills or alcohol before sexual encounters over the past 50 years.
District Attorney Kevin Steele, who pursued the case after an earlier district attorney declined to press charges in 2005, is determined to put Cosby on trial again. Constand went to police in January 2005 to say Cosby had drugged and violated her a year earlier.
