Bill Cosby Is Likely Not To Face Rape Charges In Court.

More than a dozen women in recent weeks have accused Bill Cosby of sexually assaulting them, but's it's unlikely the 77-year-old comedian will ever face trial.

That's because many of the accusations against Cosby go back decades, meaning the maximum time for starting legal proceedings — called the statute of limitations — has passed.

But legal experts say that if the alleged incidents had occurred in countries with no statute of limitations on sexual assault, the accusers would have more "power" to seek criminal charges and launch lawsuits against Cosby.

“I don't think we should have any statute of limitations on sexual crimes," says author and lawyer Deborah King, who is also a survivor of sexual assault.

Sexual assault is reported less than half of the time, and some victims take years to work up the courage to report their attack. In King's case, it took decades and she never pressed charges against her attacker.

"Women are terrified. All they can try to do is deal with the shame and the embarrassment,” King says. “They know that if they come forward they are going to be criticized, ostracized. They are going to be laughed at, no-one's going to believe them. ... I didn't come forward for 25 years. It's really common. It's really sad.”

The absence of a statute of limitations has helped bring high-profile cases of sexual assult to court in other countries. In the United Kingdom, an alleged attacker can be arrested, charged and convicted for a crime committed even 50 years ago — even though many witnesses may be dead and the only evidence is the word of the alleged victim.

Once such attacker was a popular BBC TV personality named Jimmy Savile, who hosted the children's show called “Jim'll Fix It” and the iconic music countdown show “Top of the Pops."

What the audience didn't know about the bleached-blond, cigar-smoking star was that he used his celebrity to get close to children and adolescents to sexually abuse them.Savile died months before allegations of abuse finally became public. But after his death in 2011, more than 400 people contacted the police to report complaints against Savile, with the period of alleged abuse stretching from 1955 to 2009.

The Savile case led to an even wider and controversial police investigation into what are called “historic cases” of sexual assault. The list of people who have been investigated and charged reads like a who's-who of British TV and radio personalities.

Candians also have a once-popular figure facing sexual assault allegations, these ones going back a decade. TV and radio personality Jian Ghomeshi, who hosted a radio shoe called Q, was fired by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in October over allegations that he physically assaulted women he dated.

(Q, like The World, is distributed by Public Radio International.)

Canada also has no statute of limitations on sexual assault and Ghomeshi was arrested on Wednesday and charged with four counts of sexual assault and one count of choking.

Yet even in countries like Canada and the UK, getting a conviction is rare. It's hard to prosecute historic cases, which usually don't have any physical evidence left. Without that evidence, says King, cases come down to credibility: “Most cases are lost on consent. It's a 'he said-she said' kind of thing."

And back in the US, some states, like New York, have no statue of limitation. Others state have also lengthened or abolished statutes of limitations on prosecuting rape, especially when DNA evidence exists.

But for now, the only court likely to try Bill Cosby is the court of public opinion.