NORRISTOWN, Pa. —
The former district attorney who declined a decade ago to bring sex-crime charges against Bill Cosby testified Tuesday that the decision was intended to forever close the door on prosecuting the comedian.
Former Montgomery County District Attorney Bruce Castor took the stand at a pretrial hearing in a bid by Cosby’s lawyers to get the case against the TV star thrown out because of what they say is a non-prosecution agreement with Castor.
The current district attorney has said there is no record of any such agreement.
Cosby, 78, was arrested and charged in December with drugging and violating former Temple University athletic department employee Andrea Constand at his suburban Philadelphia mansion in 2004. He could get up to 10 years in prison if convicted.
Castor said Tuesday that he believed Constand’s story but that proving it would have been problematic because of serious flaws in the case, and so he declined to bring charges in 2005.
He said that he made the decision as a representative of the state and that it was intended to last in perpetuity.
“For all time, yes,” Castor said when pressed.
And he suggested that Cosby and his lawyer at the time had the same understanding, because Cosby later agreed to testify without invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in a lawsuit brought against him by Constand.
“Cosby would’ve had to have been nuts to say those things if there was any chance he could’ve been prosecuted,” Castor said, referring to the damaging testimony unsealed last summer.
Castor said he hoped, correctly, at the time that the decision not to prosecute would free the comedian to testify in the lawsuit and help Constand win damages. She eventually settled for an undisclosed amount.
The former DA said he “wanted there to be some measure of justice” for Constand. He added: “I was hopeful that I had made Ms. Constand a millionaire.”
In related news, a Los Angeles judge ordered Cosby to attend another deposition in a lawsuit filed by a woman who says the comic forced her to perform a sex act on him at the Playboy Mansion around 1974, when she was 15.
