A Pennsylvania district attorney can use a massage therapist's history of "prior bad acts" to prosecute him on indecent assault charges for grabbing a customer's penis, a state appeals court panel has determined.

Information that Jerome McNeill inappropriately touched female clients is pertinent to the prosecution's claim that McNeill's grabbing of the man's genitals wasn't merely a mistake, President Judge Emeritus Kate Ford Elliott wrote in a Superior Court opinion this week.

The state court decision overturns a Montgomery County judge's ruling that barred the DA from using evidence of McNeill's other alleged molestations. McNeill also is being prosecuted by Philadelphia authorities in one of the incidents the Montgomery DA wants to cite.

McNeill, 37, was arrested in the Montgomery County case after a 65-year-old client reported McNeill reached into the man's underwear and grabbed his penis while messaging him in July 2014, Elliott wrote. The victim didn't consent to the touching and told McNeill to stop, the judge noted. She said McNeill "stopped and subsequently told the victim that he was 'sorry for any misunderstandings'.

According to Elliott, prosecutors sought permission to use other reports that McNeill had touched a woman's genitals in April 2014 - his employer ordered him to undergo training after that - and had supposedly fondled another woman between her legs four days before the alleged incident with the man.

The Philadelphia charges stem from an October 2014 incident where McNeill is accused of touching another woman's genitals while massaging her at a city hotel, the state judge noted. Records show McNeill is awaiting trial on charges including aggravated indecent assault in the Philly case.

"The very nature of massage raises the inference the (McNeill) might have come into contact with the victim's penis as a result of a mistake or an accident," Elliott wrote in siding with the DA. "The prosecution should not be deprived of dispelling the inference of mistake."

The fact that all the alleged inappropriate touching occurred during a 6-month period reinforces the justification for presenting evidence of those other incidents during McNeill's Montgomery County trial, the judge added.