Cosby lawyer urges jurors to consider only trial proof
SANTA MONICA » A lawyer for Bill Cosby told jurors they need to look past years of public accusations against the actor and comedian and consider only the evidence presented by a woman who says he sexually abused her at the Playboy Mansion in 1975 when she was 16 years old.
During closing arguments at a California civil trial Tuesday that would devolve into bizarre bickering over the video game Donkey Kong, Cosby attorney Jennifer Bonjean said plaintiff Judy Huth and her lawyers didn’t come close to proving “her 50-year-old, he-said-she-said case.”
“Can you imagine how hard it is to defend a case when you start with the label of sexual predator?” Bonjean told the jurors, reminding them they were chosen because they promised they would be able to consider only the facts presented in court. “If we were just going to try people based on labels, then why have trials at all?”
Huth’s attorney Nathan Goldberg told the jury that “my client deserves to have Mr. Cosby held accountable for what he did.”
“Each of you knows in your heart that Mr. Cosby sexually assaulted Miss Huff,” Goldberg said.
Cosby, who was freed from prison when his Pennsylvania criminal conviction was thrown out nearly a year ago, is not attending the trial. He denied that any sexual activity took place between himself and Huth in a 2015 video deposition shown to jurors. The denial has been repeated throughout the trial by his spokesman and his attorney.
Bonjean began the defense’s closing argument by thanking jurors and then telling them, “All I have to say is, it’s on like Donkey Kong,” a callback to what both sides during the trial called “The Donkey Kong defense.”
Huth testified that Cosby exposed himself and forced her to perform a sex act in a bedroom adjacent to a game room at the
mansion, where Cosby had brought Huth and her then-17-year- old friend Donna Samuelson, a key witness at trial.
In previous depositions and police interviews, the women discussed Samuelson in 1975 playing Donkey Kong, a game Nintendo didn’t release into arcades until 1981.
Goldberg told jurors in his closing that Samuelson had said “games like Donkey Kong” in her first reference to it during the deposition. She gave a similar explanation during trial testimony.
But Bonjean said it was clear evidence of a pattern of Samuelson and Huth coordinating their stories despite testifying that they had barely talked in the decades since.
“They both get things wrong in the exact same way,” Bonjean said.
At the end of her closing argument, Bonjean said, “This was in some ways the Donkey Kong defense, and it’s going to end as it should. Game over.”
Goldberg reacted angrily during his rebuttal.
“This is about justice!” he shouted, pounding on the podium. “We don’t need game over! We need justice!”