Bill Cosby loses appeal of sexual assault verdict

A Pennsylvania appeals court rejected Bill Cosby’s bid to overturn his sexual assault conviction Tuesday over the trial judge’s decision to let five other accusers testify, reports the Huffington Post. The Superior Court ruling was being closely watched because Cosby was the first celebrity tried and convicted in the #MeToo era. The same issue has been hard-fought in pretrial hearings before movie mogul Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assault trial. Cosby’s lawyers in his appeal said the trial judge had improperly allowed the five women to testify at last year’s retrial although he’d let just one woman testify at the first trial in 2017. But the Superior Court said Pennsylvania law allows the testimony if it shows Cosby had a “signature” pattern of drugging and molesting women. He can now ask the state Supreme Court to consider his appeal. Cosby, 82, has been serving a three- to 10-year prison term for the 2004 encounter at his suburban Philadelphia home, which he deemed consensual. His lawyers also argued that he had a binding promise from a former prosecutor that he would never be charged in the case and could testify freely at a deposition in accuser Andrea Constand’s related lawsuit. He was arrested a decade later, after a federal judge unsealed portions of the deposition at the request of the Associated Press and new prosecutors reopened the criminal case.