Bill Cosby to return to court for evidence dispute in sex assault case

The 79-year-old is accused of drugging and molesting a woman he mentored at Temple University in 2004.

In 2005, complainant Andrea Constand filed a lawsuit regarding the matter.

He had been a university trustee and she had managed the university’s women’s basketball team at the time.

In the deposition, Cosby had admitted having extra-marital affairs and giving women drugs and alcohol before what he described as romantic “rendezvous”.

Cosby is helped into the court in July

With regard to Ms Constand, he told the deposition he had gone “into the area that is somewhere between permission and rejection (and) I am not stopped”.

He said he had given her several pills, which he later said were Benadryl, before what he described as a consensual encounter.

Ms Constand said she had thought the pills were herbal products and that she was later floating in and out of consciousness.

Cosby’s lawyers say that he was told he would not be charged as a result of what he had said but this year a judge ruled that he had never been granted immunity from prosecution.

As well as hoping to exclude the deposition evidence, Cosby’s lawyers want to prevent any trial jury from hearing a tape of a conversation between Cosby and Ms Constand’s mother.

The secretly-recorded phone conversation took place a year after the alleged sexual assault and was described by Cosby in the 2005 deposition as “I’m apologising because I’m thinking this is a dirty old man with a young girl”.

District Attorney Kevin Steele, however, will fight to include both pieces of evidence during the hearing, which will take place in Philadelphia.

A date for the trial may also be decided at the hearing.

Cosby was the star of The Cosby Show, which told the story of a fictional black family during its 1984 to 1992 run. – news.sky.com