lawsuits

Bill Cosby Is Back on Trial

Bill Cosby Photo: Mark Makela/Getty Images

Nearly one year after Bill Cosby walked out of prison on a legal technicality, he's headed back to court in Los Angeles, where yet another woman has sued him for sexual assault. Judy Huth says that, when she was around 16 years old, the comedian brought her and a friend to the Playboy Mansion and molested her in a bedroom.

Cosby denies Huth's allegation, just as he has denied each of the other complaints by the 60-plus women who say Cosby abused and even raped them. "While defendant does not deny that he socialized with plaintiff at the Playboy Mansion, as he did other women and men who frequented the club," his attorneys have countered in court documents, according to the New York Times, "defendant vehemently denies that plaintiff was underage." Yet Huth has been arguing her point for years, having initially filed a lawsuit against the disgraced comedian in 2014. Hers is the first of the unresolved civil cases against Cosby to go to trial since his 2018 criminal conviction. And notably, of the dozens of strikingly similar allegations made against Cosby, Huth's lawsuit is reportedly the only one that accuses him of sexually abusing a child.

Below, everything we know about Cosby's latest trial.

Huth, now 64, says she met Cosby as a teenager after seeing him on the set of Let's Do It Again in San Marino, California. Initially, Huth said the meeting took place in 1974, when she was 15; she now alleges it happened in 1975, meaning she would have been 16 and Cosby 37. She says Cosby invited her and her friend to his tennis club, where they played games and he gave them alcohol. From there, she says, he brought them to the Playboy Mansion, instructing both girls to tell anyone who asked that they were 19.

According to Huth, after they arrived at the Mansion, Cosby forced himself on her in a bedroom. She says he tried to kiss her and stick his hand inside her pants, then grabbed hers and made her perform a sex act on him. She filed her suit — accusing Cosby of sexual battery and the infliction of emotional distress — in December 2014, after the first wave of Cosby's victims began speaking publicly. Also in 2014, Huth filed a report with the Los Angeles Police Department's special-victims unit, though it never resulted in charges against the comedian: The district attorney said the statute of limitations had run out on complaints from that time period.

Cosby claims that the assault didn't happen — or not the way she says it did. His legal team has pointed to inconsistencies in Huth's account. Cosby's attorneys argue he wasn't at the Playboy Mansion, or filming in the area she described, in 1974. They point to the Mansion's guest logs for that year, noting that neither Huth's nor her friend's name are listed among the visitors.

But after she saw Cosby's filings and the evidence his team included, Huth filed new documents saying she had gotten the dates wrong. She reportedly realized that he shot Let's Do It Again in 1975, making her 16 at the time of the alleged assault. Cosby's team characterized the shift in Huth's recollections as "trial by ambush." His spokesperson, Andrew Wyatt, said of the upcoming trial, "We feel confident that the Playboy records along with Ms. Huth changing her timeline of events from 1974 to 1975 in the 11th hour will vindicate Mr. Cosby."

Still, there is a photo of Cosby and Huth together at the Playboy Mansion, which Huth says helped jog her memory. Cosby's team contends that the photo was taken when Huth was no longer a minor.

In 2020, California extended its statute of limitations for child-sex-abuse complaints. The new guidelines make accommodations specifically for adults who have repressed memories of incidents that occurred when they were minors, then find themselves dealing with psychological injury later on. Initially, Huth said the encounter left her "so mentally scarred that she only recently connected her psychological issues."

As to why the case took eight years to reach a jury, that's largely owing to the criminal trial in Pennsylvania that resulted in Cosby's 2018 conviction on three felony counts of aggravated indecent assault. He received a three-to-ten-year prison sentence, which came to an abrupt end in June 2021. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that a 2005 "non-prosecution" agreement meant not that Cosby wasn't guilty of the crimes he had been accused of but that he shouldn't have been tried for them. While the criminal case played out, momentum on civil suits stalled.

No. The remaining cases against Cosby — there's another pending in New Jersey brought by Lili Bernard, who says he drugged and sexually assaulted her in Atlantic City in 1990 — are civil. Huth is seeking damages and will likely testify; Cosby, now 84 and reportedly in poor health, is not expected to take the stand or appear in court.

The court has heard from the friend who allegedly accompanied Huth to the mansion: Donna Samuelson, who testified on June 1 that Huth confided the assault in her directly after it happened. "She said, 'I want to go, I wanna leave,' she was crying," Samuelson recalled. The then-17-year-old didn't want to go and got angry with Huth. But then, Samuelson continued, her friend "said Bill Cosby had tried to have sex with her." Samuelson told the jury that she asked Huth if she wanted to go to the police, and when Huth said no, she convinced her to stay at the mansion for a while. Cosby, she said, had left by that point: "I thought it would calm her down to go swimming and stuff," Samuelson explained in her June 1 testimony. "I said, 'We'll leave as soon as he gets back.'" By the time he did, they had already had dinner at the mansion. She said Cosby went up to Huth and put his arm around her when he walked in. The girls got up to leave, Samuelson said, but Cosby introduced them to Hugh Hefner on the way out.

During their cross-examination on June 6, Cosby's lawyers questioned inconsistencies in Samuelson's testimony — she initially told police that Huth was 15 at the time of the alleged assault and said she remembered playing a game "like Donkey Kong" at the mansion, though Donkey Kong didn't exist yet — in an attempt to undermine her credibility. They also accused Samuelson of trying to take down Cosby because he is Black. But Huth's attorneys have put two other witnesses on the stand who have similar accounts to Huth's: One, Kimberly Burr, said Cosby tried to kiss her in his trailer on the set of Let's Do It Again when she was 14. The other, Margie Shapiro, said she met Cosby in a doughnut shop when she was 19 and that he invited her over to his house before bringing her to the mansion. There, she alleges that he drugged her and forced himself on her. Cosby, of course, denies all of it.

Huth began her testimony on June 6, describing the lead-up to the alleged Playboy Mansion encounter: She said that, after meeting Cosby in a park in San Marino, she and a friend went over to his house, where they played pool as a drinking game at Cosby's suggestion. "It was an adventure," she testified. "We were kids. He was a celebrity." Eventually, she said he asked them, "Are you girls ready for your surprise?"

"I had no clue what it could be," Huth continued. She said Cosby had them follow him to the mansion in a car, and that she took a photo with the comedian — the one mentioned above, which Huth says helped her remember the timeline — about 15 minutes "before he molested" her. The next day, she spoke to the alleged assault itself. "He forced himself on me," she said, explaining through tears that Cosby had allegedly tried to shove his hand inside her pants. He then exposed himself to her, Huth continued, and made her touch him. Huth said the encounter occurred in a "blue bedroom" off the game room, and that she was "shocked, to say the least." She said she had told Cosby that she was underage and that she had her period, hoping he would leave her alone. "I was trying to deflect," she said, according to NBC. "But he didn't stop. I just closed my eyes … It was so fast. Maybe five minutes. Quick."

In their cross-examination of Huth, Cosby's team zeroed in on the discrepancy between Huth's original account and her testimony. "You lied about the date, the year this happened, and your age," attorney Jennifer Bonjean said, accusing Huth of making a false report for financial gain. Huth said that her son turning 15 had brought her own memories back to the surface; Bonjean accused her of using her child as pretext to distract from her opportunism. She also questioned Huth's silence, arguing that it was racially motivated: "You didn't tell anyone about it because Mr. Cosby is a Black man and that's not okay in your community," Bonjean said. Huth (who is white) denied this, noting that she has Black family members and explaining that Cosby traumatized her. For his part, the comedian appeared in a prerecorded deposition, denying the assault and also claiming that he didn't know Huth, did not remember ever taking her to the Playboy Mansion, and would not recognize her if he saw her now.

This article has been updated.

Bill Cosby Is Back on Trial