A California jury in a civil case ruled on Tuesday that Bill Cosby sexually assaulted a woman at the Playboy Mansion in 1975.
When she was a teenager and well-ordered the comedian to pay her $500,000 in compensations for emotional suffering from the incident.
Judy Huth had testified that the comedian called her and a friend to the mansion when she was 16 and he was 37, and enforced her to perform a sex act.
The outcome came nearly a year after Cosby was freed from prison when Pennsylvania’s highest court pitched out his sexual assault persuasion in a different criminal case there.
Huth’s lawsuit was the first civil case in contradiction of Cosby to come to trial.
Huth, now 64, said she “elated” by the presiding in the case, which she filed in 2014 after media reports comprehensive allegations in contradiction of Cosby by several women. Those reports facilitated stir up memories of her happenstance with Cosby, Huth said, and triggered four years of anxiety and other symptoms.
“It’s been so many years, so many tears,” Huth told reporters outside California Superior Court in Santa Monica. “It’s been a long time coming.”
Huth told the jury that Cosby had invited her and the friend to the mansion a few days after they met the then-famous actor and comedian at a public park. After she appeared from a bathroom, Cosby took her hand and used it to masturbate his penis, she said.
Cosby, who did not look in person at the trial, denied Huth’s accusation. His security team will petition the verdict, Cosby spokesman Andrew Wyatt said.
“Mr. Cosby continues to maintain his innocence and will vigorously fight these false accusations, so that he can get back to bringing the pursuit of happiness, joy and laughter to the world,” Wyatt said in a declaration.
Cosby, 84, is best known for his role as the lovable husband and father in the 1980s television comedy series The Cosby Show, getting him the nickname “America’s Dad.”
But his family-friendly reputation devastated after more than 50 women accused him of sexual assaults over nearly five decades.
Huth carried the case under a California law that permits:
People who privilege they abused as children to file civil cases years later as adults.
Three other women who have suspects Cosby of abuse joined the trial and told reporters.
They felt justified by the verdict. Lili Bernard, who has a civil lawsuit pending against Cosby in New Jersey, said:
The ruling was “important for every sexual assault survivor who has not received justice.”
“We will never give up,” she said.
The jury did not rule completely in Huth’s favour. By a 9-3 vote, they said:
She had not providing “clear and convincing evidence” that Cosby had acted with “malice, oppression or fraud.”
If jurors had voted yes on that question, they could have provided supplementary punitive compensations to Huth.
In video of a statement shown to jurors, Cosby said he did not reminisce Huth. But he said the incident could not have occurred.
Because he would not have chased sexual contact at that time with someone who was under age 18.
Cosby attorney Jennifer Bonjean confronted Huth’s account during the trial, including her reviewed timeline.
When the lawsuit was filed in December 2014, Huth said the incident happened in 1974, when she was 15. She told jurors she freshly decided that:
She had been mistaken about the year and now believes it happened in 1975.