Bill Cosby has hired himself a new legal team ahead of his sex assault retrial, which includes the high-profile lawyer who won an acquittal in Michael Jackson’s child molestation case.
A spokesman for the 80-year-old on Monday announced that a new team, including lawyer Tom Mesereau, had been hired.
Cosby, who is expected in court in Norristown, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday, will be seeking a judge’s approval to swap to the fresh legal team.
He is facing a retrial in November over the charges, after the jury failed to reach a unanimous decision in the original trial after more than 50 hours of deliberation.
The comedian was charged with three charges of aggravated indecent assault for allegedly drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand at his home outside Philadelphia in January 2004.
Constand, a former Temple University staffer, testified for seven hours during the first trial, claiming that Cosby gave her pills that rendered her unable to stop his advances, though she said she tried.
‘In my head, I was trying to get my hands to move or my legs to move, but I was frozen and those [mental] messages didn’t get there,’ she said.
Mesereau – who has also been involved in other celebrity cases including the murder trial of actor Robert Blake – has previously spoken out about the Cosby case, saying he had as much right to a fair trial as anybody else.
