PHILADELPHIA — Bill Cosby on Monday lost one of the biggest legal battles leading up to his looming sex-assault trial when a Montgomery County judge ruled that prosecutors can tell jurors about damaging, decade-old testimony in which Cosby acknowledged offering drugs to women he wanted to seduce.

The decision means the once-sealed 2005 deposition that led District Attorney Kevin R. Steele’s office last year to reopen the investigation and charge the entertainer can become a pillar of the evidence offered to try to convict him.

Cosby’s lawyers argued that he agreed to the deposition – taken to resolve a lawsuit by his accuser, Andrea Constand – only because he had been promised by a previous district attorney that he would never be charged in connection with her claims.

But Judge Steven T. O’Neill concluded that no such agreement existed.

“There was neither an agreement nor a promise not to prosecute,” he wrote, “only an exercise of prosecutorial discretion.”

O’Neill’s six-page ruling marked a significant victory for prosecutors and the latest setback for the 79-year-old comedian-actor as he inches toward a trial the judge has said he wants to begin by June.

Cosby’s lawyers declined to comment on the latest ruling. Steele praised it.

“Allowing the jury to hear Mr. Cosby’s deposition testimony is another step forward in this case and will aid the jury in making its determination,” he said in a statement. “It’s important that we are able to present all of the evidence available.”

Since he was charged last year with three felony counts of aggravated indecent assault, Cosby has lost on every issue he has raised with the court, including a bid to have the case thrown out based on the same purported 2005 oral agreement with then-District Attorney Bruce L. Castor Jr.


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