Cosby retrial delayed as new legal team joins case

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Bill Cosby’s retrial on sexual assault charges will be delayed until next year as his new legal team gets up to speed on the case, which pits the 80-year-old comedian against a woman who says he drugged and molested her more than a decade ago.

Judge Steven O’Neill on Tuesday granted a defense request to postpone the retrial, which had been scheduled to start in November, saying there’s no way that Cosby’s lawyers would be ready by then.

The judge asked Cosby’s lawyers to consider a start date sometime between March 15 and April 1. He said he’ll issue a firm date once they get back to him.

Bill Cosby has hired Michael Jackson’s former lawyer Tom Mesereau to represent him at his November retrial on sexual-assault charges in Pennsylvania.

Cosby’s spokesman announced Monday, the comedian is bringing in Mesereau to lead a retooled defense team. Lawyers from the first trial in June had said they wanted off the case.

Mesereau and his team – who appeared on Cosby's behalf for the first time Tuesday – argued that they needed more time to get up to speed on the case.

Bill Cosby's former defense attorneys, Angela Agrusa and Brian McMonagle arriving at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown, Pennsylvania on June 14, 2017. /AFP Photo

Mesereau is one of the three lawyers named as forming Cosby's new legal team, is best known for helping to secure an acquittal for Jackson in the pop star's 2005 child molestation trial in California.

Besides Mesereau, lawyers Kathleen Bliss and Sam Silver will represent Cosby, according to a statement by Andrew Wyatt, Cosby's publicist.

Cosby was long beloved by US television audiences for his family-friendly style of comedy, before dozens of women came forward to accuse him of a series of sexual assaults dating back to the 1960s.

He was due to be retried beginning November 6 on charges of sexually assaulting Andrea Constand, a former administrator at his alma mater Temple University, at his Philadelphia-area home in 2004.

Cosby denies wrongdoing, saying any sexual contact he may have had with his accusers was consensual.

Source(s): AP ,Reuters