Cosby guilty of sexual abuse of minor, jurors in trial find
SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Jurors at a civil trial on Tuesday found that Bill Cosby sexually abused a 16-year-old girl at the Playboy Mansion in 1975.
The Los Angeles County jury delivered the verdict in favor of Judy Huth, who is now 64 and awarded her $500,000.
“It’s been torture,” Huth said of the seven-year legal fight. “To be ripped apart, you know, thrown under the bus and backed over. This, to me, is such a big victory.”
Jurors found that Cosby intentionally caused harmful sexual contact with Huth, that he reasonably believed she was under 18 and that his conduct was driven by unnatural or abnormal sexual interest in a minor.
The jurors’ decision comes nearly a year after his Pennsylvania criminal conviction for sexual assault was thrown out and he was freed from prison. Huth’s lawsuit was one of the last remaining legal claims against him after his insurer settled many others against his will.
Cosby did not attend the trial or testify in person, but short clips from 2015 video deposition were played for jurors, in which he denied any sexual contact with Huth. He continues to deny the allegation through his attorney and publicist.
Cosby’s spokesperson Andrew Wyatt said they would appeal and claimed they had won because Huth didn’t win punitive damages.
Jurors had already reached conclusions on nearly every question on their verdict form, including whether Cosby abused Huth and whether she deserved damages, after two days of deliberations on Friday. But the jury foreperson could not serve further because of a personal commitment, and the panel had to start deliberating from scratch with an alternate juror on Monday.
Cosby’s attorneys agreed that Cosby met Huth and her high school friend on a Southern California film set in April 1975, then took them to the Playboy Mansion a few days later.
Huth’s friend Donna Samuelson, a key witness, took photos at the mansion of Huth and Cosby, which loomed large at the trial.
Huth testified that in a bedroom adjacent to a game room where the three had been hanging out, Cosby attempted to put his hand down her pants, then exposed himself and forced her to perform a sex act.
During their testimony, Cosby’s attorney Jennifer Bonjean consistently challenged Huth and Samuelson over errors in detail in their stories, and a similarity in the accounts that the lawyer said represented coordination between the two women.
A majority of the jury of nine women and three men, however, gave Huth a victory in a suit that took eight years.
The Associated Press does not normally name people who say they have been sexually abused, unless they come forward publicly, as Huth has.