The jury has ruled in the civil case brought by a California woman who accused Bill Cosby of sexually assaulting her when she was a teenager, the court announced on Tuesday.
The jury began entering the courtroom shortly before 3:30 p.m. Pacific Time or 6:30 p.m. Eastern Time, when the court said the verdict would be read. Judge Craig D. Karlan entered the room.
The woman, Judy Huth, had filed a suit in the Los Angeles Civil Court alleging that Mr. Cosby sexually assaulted her at the Playboy Mansion in 1975, when she was 16.
The jury began deliberating Thursday morning.
Ms Huth’s case has been closely watched by some of the many other women who have accused Mr Cosby of sexual misconduct, in part because it is the first civil case in which Mr Cosby has been accused of sexual assault to go to trial.
Over the course of the 10 days of testimony at the Santa Monica branch of the Los Angeles Superior Court, the jury heard the story of Ms. Huth that she and a friend Mr. Cosby had met in a park in San Marino, California, where he was making the movie “Let’s Do It Again”.
She and the boyfriend, Donna Samuelson, testified that Mr. Cosby invited them to his tennis club and then to his house, where he gave them alcohol and got them to follow him in their car to the Playboy Mansion. In sometimes emotional testimonies from the stands, Ms. Huth, 64, how a famous man she admired forced her to have a sexual act with him in a bedroom at the mansion.
Mr Cosby, 84, denied the allegations. His lawyers acknowledged that he had met Ms. Huth at the Playboy Mansion, but in an aggressive cross-examination, they described her account as “a complete fabrication”, suggesting she fabricated the attack and coordinated with her boyfriend in an effort to get money.
They asked why she claimed to have stayed in the Playboy Mansion for hours after the alleged encounter, swimming in the pool and ordering cocktails, and why she hadn’t talked about it for months and years.
Ms. Huth filed her lawsuit in 2014, at a time when many other women came out publicly with similar allegations of misconduct against Mr Cosby.
She was able to sue because California law extends the assault reporting period for adults who claim they were victims of child sexual abuse but suppressed the experience. In 2020, California law was amended to further extend the statute of limitations for sexual assault charges in civil court.
The lawsuit was largely suspended while Mr. Cosby was facing criminal charges in another case, in Pennsylvania, where he was charged with drugging and sexually abusing Andrea Constand, a former Temple University employee.
The 2018 criminal conviction in the Constand case was overturned by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court last year.
Mr Cosby invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and did not testify in court. In a videotaped in 2015, Mr Cosby denied having any sexual contact with Ms Huth. He said he didn’t know her, couldn’t remember taking her to the Playboy Mansion, and wouldn’t be able to recognize her.