On Tuesday, a jury in the state of California reached the verdict that actor Bill Cosby was responsible for sexually assaulting a minor at the Playboy Mansion over half a century ago.
The jury in Santa Monica found that Bill Cosby sexually assaulted Judy Huth in 1975, when she was just 16 years old, and awarded her damages of $500,000 as a result of their finding. Huth is currently 64 years old.
This is one of the few legal measures that may still be taken against Bill Cosby, who is now 84 years old and has been accused of assaulting hundreds of women.
In 2018, he was detained in Pennsylvania as part of a different criminal case, but in 2019, he was released from custody when his conviction in that case was overturned due to a procedural issue.
After meeting Huth and her friend Donna Samuelson, who was 17 at the time, on the set of a movie, the man who was once known as “America’s Dad” escorted both of them to the mansion, according to the lawyers who represented Huth and Samuelson during a two-week civil hearing that Bill Cosby did not attend.
Cosby denied any wrongdoing, and his attorneys made a big deal out of numerous inconsistencies in Hutch’s narrative, including the fact that both kids stayed in the estate for up to 12 hours after the alleged attack.
In addition, they asserted that Huth first said that the incident took place in 1974, when she was 15 years old, but that she then stated that it had place the year after that.
Because the time period for filing criminal charges had already elapsed by the time Huth gave his statement to the police, the matter was never investigated further.
Huth was able to bring the civil suit because of a California law that allows adults who say they were victims of sexual abuse as minors but repressed what happened to them for years to pursue such cases as civil lawsuits. Huth claims that she was abused sexually when she was younger, but she repressed what happened to her for years.