Former DA Flip-Flops on Cosby

Former Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, District Attorney Bruce Castor refused to prosecute Bill Cosby in 2005 after Andrea Constand alleged that the comedian drugged and sexually assaulted her.

After an exhaustive investigation, Castor said he had trouble with Constand’s credibility and that there was no evidence to support her claims. He issued a press release to those facts in 2005 and proceeded to make a deal with Cosby.

The deal: If Cosby sat for a sworn civil deposition, no prosecutor would ever be able to use his statements against him in any criminal proceeding. Taking Castor at his word and on the advice of his own attorneys, Cosby sat for that deposition.

Thirteen years later, a juror that found him guilty in his retrial in April cited that very deposition for his reason to convict Cosby.

After the verdict, Castor said: “The masterful use of Cosby’s incriminating civil deposition, plus the other witnesses who came forward and testified after unprecedented publicity, proved to be an unbeatable courtroom one-two combination in buttressing the victim,” Castor said. “I wish [Steele] the best at sentencing and on appeal.”

It was a far cry from what Castor told The Washington Informer just weeks ago.

Infuriated by what he called an unjust prosecution of the comedian, Castor fished for someone to sell his story that Judge Steven T. O’Neill had an illicit, extramarital affair and should step aside. It was an argument Cosby’s attorneys also made, but to no avail.

Castor acknowledged he made the deal, even though he initially balked at talking to this reporter because he said he didn’t know “if I could trust you.”

Nonetheless, on March 27, 2018, Castor told The Informer in an email:

“What is happening to Cosby, as bad a man as he undoubtedly is, should never happen to anyone in America. I’m 36 years in the justice system, much of it at a pretty high level. I attach my [cover letter] as an example.

“I’m disgusted that any citizen entitled to the presumption of innocence has been treated this way. And that a judge with an enormous potential bias did not disclose that possible bias to the lawyers to give them the option to seek a new judge.

“Or that a sitting prosecutor spent a million dollars proving Cosby guilty in campaign ads before charges were brought in direct contravention of a written ethics rule which says prosecutors cannot do that. I didn’t say anything, because it is up to the judge and the lawyers to police their own conduct. I kept waiting for someone to ask me, but it never happened.”

In her statement to the media Thursday, Cosby’s wife, Camille, summed up her family’s frustrations.

“The worst injustices, however, have been carried out in the Pennsylvania Montgomery County Courthouse,” she said. “Three criminal charges, promised during an unethical campaign for the district attorney’s office, were filed against my husband … all based on what I believe to be a falsified account by the newly elected district attorney’s key witness.”

“I firmly believe her recent testimony during trial was perjured; as was shown at trial, it was unsupported by any evidence and riddled with innumerable, dishonest contradictions,” Cosby said of Constand. “Moreover, Bill Cosby’s defense team introduced the testimony of a witness who confirmed that the district attorney’s witness admitted that she had not been sexually assaulted, but that she could say she was and get money … which is exactly what she did.”

Married to the comedian for more than 50 years, Cosby said she’s publicly asking for a criminal investigation of the district attorney and his cohorts.

“This is a homogeneous group of exploitive and corrupt people, whose primary purpose is to advance themselves professionally and economically at the expense of Mr. Cosby’s life,” she said. “If they can do this to Mr. Cosby, they can do so to anyone.”