Bill Cosby announces plans to tour in 2023

Bill Cosby is planning a comeback tour.

The 85-year-old comic, who was released from prison last year after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court reversed his conviction on a sexual assault charge, told a radio interviewer Wednesday he was ready to perform again.

“When I come out of this, I feel that I will be able to perform and be the Bill Cosby that my audience knows me to be,” Cosby said on “WGH Talk” with Scott Spears, after answering “yes” to the question of whether he’d tour again.

“Yes, because there’s so much fun to be had in this storytelling that I do,” Cosby said, according to Variety.

Cosby served three years in prison after his April 2018 conviction on a criminal sex assault charge before his 2021 release.

He still has legal troubles — five women sued him and NBC earlier this month under the Adult Survivors Act, a New York State law that lifts the statute of limitations for one year. Their accusations mirror those of his previous alleged victims: that he drugged and assaulted them.

Before the law went into effect, all of Cosby’s accusers were past the statute of limitations except Andrea Constand, whose accusations Cosby drugged and molested her in his Pennsylvania home dated back to 2004. His initial conviction got him sentenced to three to 10 years in state prison, but it was thrown out on a technicality.

In all, 60 women have accused Cosby of everything from groping to sexual assault and rape, dating back to the 1960s. He has denied having nonconsensual sex. In June he was found liable for sexual abuse and ordered to pay $500,000 to a California woman who had filed suit in 2014 saying Cosby had assaulted her at the Playboy Mansion in 1975, when she was 16.

The current lawsuit, filed on Dec. 5, also includes as defendants NBCUniversal Media, LLC, Kaufman Astoria Studios and The Carsey-Werner Company. The suit asserts that the companies “condoned and encouraged Bill Cosby... by doing nothing to stop it despite knowledge of his serial sexual abuse of women, and by providing Bill Cosby with staff and facilities to groom and sexually abuse women.”