UPDATE, 3:39 p.m .: Bill Cosby sexually assaulted a minor in the mid-1970s, a jury decided today.
After just over three full days of deliberations and a replacement, the Santa Monica panel has this afternoon revealed its decision against the much-accused creator of Cosby Show. Delivered to LA High Court Judge Craig Karlan with plaintiff Judy Huth, his legal team, Cosby’s defense team present in the courtroom, the 12-member jury awarded Huth $ 500,000 in damage.
Bill Cosby was not in the room when the message was read.
Claiming his right to the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination, Cosby did not testify at the two-week trial, unlike Huth. A video of the 2015 actor was played during the trial in court and jurors. With his 2018 sex offender conviction for raping Andrea Constand in 2004, he left the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in June 2021, 84-year-old Cosby, almost certain to appeal today’s verdict. say sources.
The man named “America’s Dad” was charged with sexual assault and more by Judy Huth in 2014. The plaintiff alleged that Cosby’s assault occurred at the Playboy mansion in the mid-1970s when she was a teenager. . At first, Huth claimed that the attack took place in 1974, when she was 15 years old, but later the plaintiff changed the date to 1975, when she was 16 years old.
MONTH
PREVIOUS, 14:42: Bill Cosby could soon find out if a California jury has found him guilty of sexual abuse.
For the second time in less than a week, Santa Monica jurors have informed Los Angeles High Court Judge Craig Karlan that they have reached a verdict in Judy Huth’s civil case against the man formerly known as “the father of America “. If all goes according to plan, the decision will be read in court in the next hour.
Contrary to his criminal convictions and the now-vacant 2018 conviction for raping Andrea Constand in 2004, 84-year-old Cosby is not facing jail time for the Huth case. However, the disgraced Cosby Show creator could end up paying millions in damages if today’s verdict goes against him.
Huth, who first sued Cosby in 2014 for sexual assault and two other charges, alleges that the previously jailed comedian assaulted her at the Playboy mansion in the mid-1970s when she was 16 years old. In a language similar to what Cosby and his team have been using. For years, a representative of the defendant said this month when the trial finally began, so delayed, that “Mr. Cosby will be completely acquitted once the jury hears the evidence and examines the numerous inconsistent accounts given by Mrs. Huth.
“You have to decide what’s right,” Huth’s lawyer, Nathan Goldberg, said in a sort of rebuttal to the jury last week during the final arguments. “But please keep in mind that you have to make Mr. Cosby fully and completely responsible for the harm he did.”
Gloria Allred, Goldberg’s partner of Allred, Maroko and Goldberg, has been in court every day of the trial and during the jury’s deliberations.
At first, she identified the date of the alleged incident as having occurred in 1974, and more recently changed the time to 1975, an emotional Huth provided vivid details of Cosby’s alleged sexual assault during her testimony. While an absent Cosby said he never met Huth, and the actor’s legal team mocked her for changing the year of the incident, Huth’s lawyers provided photographs of Cosby and Huth. together made by the latter’s friend, Donna Samuelson. Given the convincing testimony of both Huth and Samuelson, Cosby’s lawyers postulated that the meeting between Huth and her client had taken place years later when Huth was no longer a minor.
Cosby’s lawyers also tried to catch Huth in claims that she had been posting photos to tabloids and others in the past for a large fee.
Cosby himself did not testify at trial. However, his 2015 videotaped statement was played in the courtroom.
Although his assault charges are prohibited from being prosecuted as criminal charges, Huth was able to sue Cosby under California statute-barring statute of limitations if an accuser was abused as a minor. and he did not fully acknowledge what had happened until they were many. older.
In that regard, the issue of damages is in part what stumbled upon the jury and the proceedings on Friday, when a verdict first appeared nearby.
After nearly two days of closed-door deliberations, the 12-person jury returned to the courtroom in the late afternoon to announce that it had made a decision on eight of the nine questions posed to them on the form. verdict. Strongly stating that the decision was being enforced against Cosby, the only question the jurors left unanswered was whether the defendant acted with “malice, oppression or fraud,” in which case punitive damages could be awarded to Huth.
That’s where things got complicated and unprecedented, both in a judicial and substantive way.
From the start of the trial, Karlan is well aware that a member of the jury had to leave the proceedings due to a previous engagement from June 20th. The judge had promised to meet this deadline, meaning an alternate sat down with the other 11 jurors as of Monday. It also meant that the new jury “will have to start from scratch,” in Karlan’s words.
In the deliberations that had already seen the jury return with numerous questions for the judge and some personal friction between two jurors, the re-establishment may not be so much a restart as Karlan explains: in a civil case like this, the verdict does not have to be unanimously, and only nine of the 12 jurors must agree for the verdict to be binding. So while the newly seated jury may have needed a pace or two to catch up, things clearly moved pretty quickly.
Adding to the jury’s drama, what made the closing ceremony of Friday’s trial sessions even more unusual was the fact that the partial verdict was pronounced correctly when the Santa Monica court was ready. to close the weekend. Although Karlan reflected, he expressed the concerns of Cosby’s team, accepting the partial verdict, time and money were ultimately not on his side.
Hearing from a court official that it was almost 4.30pm PT, the judge ventured to spend costly overtime for the sheriff’s deputies who run the court if he took the almost complete verdict. He finally suspended the verdict until this week. For some time before today, the jury appeared stopped with questions again about Cosby’s potential malice and possible punitive damages.
Sentenced to up to 10 years behind bars by a Pennsylvania judge in 2018 after a second trial for raping former Constand Temple University employee, Cosby saw his sentence overturned in June 2021. After a series of failed appeals and legal loopholes by the comedian and his revolving door of lawyers, four of the seven Supreme Court judges in Keystone State van decided last summer that then-announced Montgomery County Attorney Bruce Castor’s decision not to prosecute Cosby in 2005 after investigating Constand’s original lawsuit had binding legal weight.
Immediately losing his label of sexual predator, Cosby cannot be tried again on the same charges.
On March 7 this year, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the case, as Montgomery Attorney Kevin Steele had so far requested. This effectively ended the Constand case by revealing any new and notable circumstances.
More than 60 women have claimed that Cosby drugged and assaulted them over the decades with a combination of pills and alcohol similar to that used in Constand. Some of these women attended Cosby’s two criminal trials, the 2018 sentencing hearing and Huth’s trial during the last month.
Huth’s allegations are the first civil case on allegations of sexual offenses against Cosby to reach trial.