Why Did Bruce Castor Pass on a Chance to Lock Up Bill Cosby?

One would think that it’s not very easy these days being the former prosecutor who failed to charge Bill Cosby a decade ago. Bruce Castor was the guy who fielded the case of Andrea Constand, the only one of Cosby’s accusers to file criminal charges, back in 2005. Constand was the respected director of operations for Temple University’s basketball team. Cosby was one of the biggest donors to the University. They became friends. He became her mentor. And so it went. Until she came to Castor—whose jurisdiction, as the district attorney of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, included the five acres of Cheltenham, PA (a lovely area of Philadelphia) that surround Cosby's mansion, where she said he assaulted her.

There was Castor, a blustery, striving lawyer in pinstripes—the quintessential Philadelphia lawyer but with a bit more panache—who had a talent for being on TV (which he loved) and ambitions beyond the Montgomery County DA’s office. Now the Montgomery County Commissioner, he tried to run for Pennsylvania Governor in last month’s election, but his party, the GOP, supported the incumbent Tom Corbett, who got beat in one of the bigger Dem wins; “I’m quite sure I would have won,” he told me on the phone shortly after the Cosby rape story reignited.