LOS ANGELES — Judy Huth’s sexual battery civil case against Bill Cosby finally has a trial date — after nearly seven years.
A Los Angeles County judge on Friday said the case should go before a jury April 18 as he kicked the aging lawsuit back into gear after it was put on hold by Cosby’s Pennsylvania criminal case.
The lawsuit claims the comedian met Huth while working on a film set in 1974 and later took the the 15-year-old to a location she believed to be the Playboy Mansion. Huth said Cosby, who was 37 at the time, tried to kiss her in the mouth, slid his hands down her pants and later grabbed her hand and forced her to perform a sex act on him.
At a status hearing held in Los Angeles County Superior Court, Judge Craig Karlan decided to partially lift a stay that had halted the case while Cosby’s team fought to get him out of prison in Pennsylvania. The actor was released in June after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned a 2018 sex assault conviction against him in a major victory for the comedian.
But Karlan did not rule on whether Cosby should be forced to testify in the civil case as Pennsylvania prosecutors could still appeal the June decision. The judge set a Sept. 30 hearing to discuss that issue.
“You’re one of the oldest cases, if not the oldest case, on my calendar,” Karlan said Friday. “It’s time to lift the stay.”
Huth filed the lawsuit in December 2014 accusing Cosby of sexual battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress and later filed an official report with the LAPD’s special victims unit. The Los Angeles County district attorney at the time declined to file criminal charges, saying the statute of limitations had run out on the “most applicable” 1974 offense for the alleged assault.
Cosby’s attorneys said he plans invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination because he fears prosecutors would use a potential deposition to charge him in criminal court — which is exactly what happened in Pennsylvania.
“There’s a lot of risk that what happened in Pennsylvania could happen again,” defense attorney Jennifer Bonjean told the New York Daily News outside the courthouse. “We have to consider those things, even if he would love to testify.”
An LAPD spokesperson told the Daily News this week that investigators “have nothing pending” on Huth’s claims, but Bonjean was not convinced.
“The government changes the rules all the time, frankly,” she said. “We have to do this right. My client did three years in prison when he should not have and we’re not going to rush through this.”
Civil rights lawyer Gloria Allred, who represents Huth and other Cosby accusers, said Cosby should be compelled to appear for a deposition.
“We’re looking forward to fighting the good fight,” Allred said at a Zoom news conference, noting that Cosby’s plan to plead the Fifth Amendment appears to be an effort “to delay justice for our client.”
Cosby, 84, spent more than two years at a maximum-security facility outside Philadelphia after being convicted of drugging and sexually assaulting former Temple University employee Andrea Constand in his mansion. In a stunning reversal just over a month ago, Pennsylvania’s highest court tossed the 2018 conviction and ordered him freed, ruling that Cosby was denied a fair trial when prosecutors didn’t keep a promise not to charge him.
The controversial promise was made by a former Montgomery County prosecutors who offered Cosby immunity in exchange for his testimony in a 2005 lawsuit brought by Constand. Cosby’s damning testimony included an admission that he had used Quaaludes to drug women he wanted to grope.
Cosby’s attorneys also plan to challenge the constitutionality of a California law that extended the statute of limitations for child sex assault cases, his lawyers have said. Allred said that legal battle could go on for years and have serious repercussions.
“That is going to inflict significant harm, potentially, on many victims of child sexual abuse in California,” she said, “because the new law opens up access to the courts for many victims of sexual child abuse who may have been victimized in prior years, many years ago, but for many reasons never came forward.”
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