Bill Cosby Denied Retrial In 1970s Playboy Mansion Sexual Assault Case
(Updated with Gloria Allred statement) Bill Cosby will not get to re-litigate a sexual assault civil case involving a minor from the 1970s, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge says.
“Cosby has failed to establish he received an unfair trial or that insufficient evidence existed to establish his liability for Plaintiff’s harm,” Judge Craig Karlan said in a September 27 ruling. The decision denies the man once known as America’s Dad’s desire for a retrial on the decades-old claims by Judy Huth.
The ruling by the LASC judge came fairly quickly after hearing arguments on September 23 in the Santa Monica Courthouse.
Attorneys for Cosby had sought to have Karlan overturn the June jury decision against their client, based primarily on timeline inconsistencies in Huth’s case. The Gloria Allred-represented Huth initially had claimed back in 2014 that Cosby assaulted her in Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion when she was 15 years old. Mere weeks before the civil trial, Huth said that she had a cleared memory of events and moved the year of the assault to 1975.
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“Judge Karlan denying Mr. Cosby a new trial was expected but it’s unfortunate that this judge ignored the inconsistencies in Ms. Huth testimony during cross examination and the mere fact that Ms. Huth changed her time line of events in the 11th hour before the trial,” Cosby’s longtime rep Andrew Wyatt said in a statement to Deadline. “We have always stood our ground by saying, ‘This was a trial by assassination against Mr. Cosby.’ The after glow for Mr. Cosby is that he maintains his innocence and vehemently denies all alleged allegations waged against him; but most importantly, Mr. Cosby will move forward with his appeal, which will preclude any monies ($500,000) being awarded to Ms. Huth.”
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“We believe that Mr. Cosby must be bitterly disappointed with the outcome, but that won’t change the Judge’s decision,” noted Huth’s lawyer Allred today. “The jury found that Bill Cosby was responsible for sexual battery of a child. Child sexual abuse is reprehensible. Mr. Cosby should take responsibility, rather than continuing to fight the jury’s verdict which our law firm, (Allred, Maroko & Goldberg) fought for and won.”
Unlike in his criminal trials and now-vacated 2018 conviction for the 2004 rape of Andrea Constand, the 85-year-old Cosby Show creator-star does not face jail time in this civil case. During the two-week trial in June, an emotional Huth provided vivid details of the alleged sexual assault. An absent Cosby said he never met Huth, and the actor’s legal team derided her for changing the year of the incident, but Huth’s lawyers provided photographs of Cosby and Huth together taken by the latter’s friend Donna Samuelson. Facing compelling testimony from both Huth and Samuelson, Cosby’s lawyers then postulated that the encounter between Huth and their client had happened years later when Huth no longer was a minor.
Cosby’s lawyers also attempted to snare Huth in claims that she had been peddling the pics to tabloids and others in the past for a big payout.
Cosby himself did not testify in the trial. However, his 2015 videotaped deposition was played in the courtroom.
Erik Pedersen contributed to this report.
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