NEW YORK — When Bill Cosby walks into a Pennsylvania courtroom Monday for the opening of his sexual assault trial, the issues before the jury will involve only what he may have done 13 years ago to one woman in his stone mansion outside Philadelphia.
But to his many accusers, Cosby’s trip to the Montgomery County Courthouse began decades ago in hotel rooms and other spots where, they say, the entertainer led a less public life — as a sexual predator who attacked them, as well.
Cosby was once embraced as a television legend, father figure, and moral force. The trial is perhaps the highest-profile US celebrity trial since that of O.J. Simpson, and a conviction would be seen by many of those women as vindication of their accounts.
An acquittal would keep Cosby out of prison and provide some momentum to his efforts to portray the cascade of accusations as fabrications, though it would be unlikely to erase the stain on his legacy.
The trial, forecast by the judge to last about two weeks, will focus on charges that in 2004 Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted Andrea Constand, then a Temple University employee to whom he had become something of a mentor.
Prosecutors are expected to produce three main lines of evidence:
Constand’s testimony; the testimony of a second woman, who says she was assaulted by Cosby in 1996; and Cosby’s own acknowledgment in a 2005 deposition that he often obtained quaaludes to use in his pursuit of sex with women.
Cosby has described the sexual encounter with Constand as consensual and has characterized the drugs as a lure he used to attract women to party, not a tool he used to incapacitate them. (He says he gave Constand some Benadryl on the night in question because she was experiencing stress.)
Cosby’s legal team is expected to try to undermine the accounts of Constand and the second woman, known only as “Kacey.’’ Constand, 44, will undoubtedly be asked why she returned to Cosby’s house after what she said were two earlier unwanted sexual advances and then stayed in touch afterward.
Cosby, 79, has said he will not testify. He will probably sit, as he has during pretrial hearings, at the front of the courtroom, fighting blindness, a largely quiet presence far removed by age and circumstance from the vital comedian and actor who in the 1960s became the first black man to star in a television drama, “I Spy.’’
Bill Cosby is charged with three counts of aggravated indecent assault; each carries a sentence of up to 10 years and a fine of up to $25,000.
The trial will pit Kevin R. Steele, Montgomery County district attorney, against Cosby’s legal team, led by Brian J. McMonagle, a prominent Philadelphia trial lawyer whose track record leads some experts to suggest the chance that striking new evidence is likely to surface during the proceedings.
“I think there will be a couple of surprises,’’ said Barbara Ashcroft, an associate professor at the Temple University Beasley School of Law and a former prosecutor in the Montgomery County district attorney’s office.
The defense will probably try to anticipate the order in which the prosecution might present its evidence. How quickly will Steele introduce the testimony of Constand? Will he wait until after he has set the stage by first recounting for the jury Cosby’s use of quaaludes?
Most experts agree that Constand’s testimony — and whether jurors like and believe her — will be crucial.
“You are hoping she is a credible witness who is not undermined too much or at all,’’ said David Rudovsky, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
McMonagle and Angela C. Agrusa, another lawyer for Cosby, will probably attack the prosecution’s motives in bringing the charges nearly 12 years after a former district attorney decided there was not enough evidence to go to trial.
“I expect the defense to take the position that not only is he not guilty but the whole process borders on the offensive because this is an old case, and this is just a further effort to have publicity and to knock down an icon of the entertainment business,’’ said Dennis McAndrews, a Pennsylvania lawyer and former prosecutor.
The presiding judge, Steven T. O’Neill, of the Montgomery Court of Common Pleas, has ruled that jurors will not hear about a civil suit Constand brought against Cosby in 2005, or the financial settlement that ended the suit before it went to trial.
Nor, apart from Constand or Kacey, will they hear from the more than 40 other women who have made similar accusations of sexual assault against Cosby.
Steele tried to introduce 12 other accusers to the trial. Their testimony altogether, however, was viewed as too prejudicial for the jury as it considers the facts that are before it.
Both sides are likely to introduce character witnesses or expert witnesses. Prosecutors plan to call a drug expert and a psychologist to testify about the behavior of sexual assault victims to counter defense questions such as why Constand took nearly a year to go to police.
The jurors — seven men, five women; two African-American, 10 white — come from the Pittsburgh area, 300 miles west of Norristown in Montgomery County, because of defense concerns that the jury pool in Montgomery County had been tainted by pretrial publicity.
The jurors will be bused to Norristown and sequestered.
