UPDATE, 15:39: Bill Cosby sexually assaulted a minor in the mid-seventies, the jury decided today.
After just over three full days of deliberations and a shift, the Santa Monica committee revealed its decision this afternoon against the much-accused creator of the Cosby Show. Handed over to Los Angeles Supreme Court Justice Craig Carlan with plaintiff Judy Hutt, her legal team and Cosby’s defense team present in a crowded courtroom, the 12-member jury also awarded Hutt $ 500,000 in damages.
Bill Cosby was not in the courtroom when the message was read.
Claiming his right to a fifth amendment against self-incrimination, Cosby did not testify in the two-week trial, unlike Hutt. A video of the actor was released during the trial before the court and jurors in 2015. With his sexual crimes conviction in 2018 for the rape of Andrea Constant in 2004, overturned by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in June 2021, Cosby, 84, is almost certain to appeal today’s sentence, sources told me.
The man, once respectfully named “America’s father”, was tried for sexual assault and more than Judy Hutt in 2014. The plaintiff claims that the attack by Cosby took place at the Playboy mansion in the mid-seventies, when she was teenage girl. Hutt initially claimed that the attack took place in 1974, when she was 15, but the plaintiff later moved the date to 1975, when she was 16.
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PREVIOUS, 14:42: Bill Cosby may find out very soon whether the jury in California has decided that he sexually assaulted a minor.
For the second time in less than a week, jurors in Santa Monica have informed Los Angeles Supreme Court Justice Craig Carlan that they have reached a verdict in Judy Hutt’s civil case against the man once known as the “Father of America.” If everything goes according to plan, the decision will be read in court within the next hour.
Unlike his criminal trials and the now overturned 2018 sentence for the 2004 rape of Andrea Constant, Cosby, 84, is not facing jail in the Huth case. However, the disgraced creator of the Cosby Show could pay millions in damages if today’s sentence goes against him.
Hutt, who first tried Cosby in 2014 for sexual assault and two other lawsuits, claims that the previously imprisoned comedian attacked her at the Playboy mansion in the mid-1970s, when she was at 16. In a language similar to that used by Cosby and his team for years, a representative of the defendant said this month when the much-delayed trial finally began that “Mr. Cosby will be completely acquitted after the jury hears the evidence and examines the many inconsistent stories given by Ms. Hutt.
“You have to decide what’s right,” Hutt’s lawyer Nathan Goldberg said in a rebuttal to jurors last week during his closing arguments. “But please keep in mind that you must hold Mr Cosby fully and completely responsible for the damage he has caused.”
Goldberg Allred, Morocco and Goldberg’s partner Gloria Allred was in court every day of the trial and during the jury hearings.
Initially identifying the date of the alleged incident as occurring in 1974, and rather shifting the time to 1975, Emotional Hutt provided vivid details of Cosby’s alleged sexual abuse during her testimony. While the absent Cosby said he had never met Hutt, and the actor’s legal team mocked her for changing the year of the incident, Hutt’s lawyers provided photos of Cosby and Hutt together taken by the latter’s girlfriend Donna Samuelson. Faced with convincing testimony from both Hutt and Samuelson, Cosby’s lawyers then postulated that the meeting between Hutt and their client took place years later, when Hutt was no longer a minor.
Cosby’s lawyers also tried to catch Hutt in claiming that she had sold the photos to tabloids and others in the past for big pay.
Cosby himself did not testify in the trial. However, his testimony from a 2015 video was reproduced in the courtroom.
Although her assault claims are time-barred to be prosecuted as criminal charges, Hutt was able to prosecute Cosby under California law, which imposes a statute of limitations if a prosecutor was mistreated as a minor and did not fully acknowledge what happened while they were not much older.
In that sense, the issue of compensation is partly what stumbled the jury and the proceedings on Friday, when it first turned out that the verdict was imminent.
After nearly two days of deliberations behind closed doors, the 12-member jury returned to the courtroom late in the afternoon to announce that it had decided on eight of the nine issues before them on the sentencing form. Demonstrating quite emphatically that the decision was against Cosby, the only question left unanswered by the jury was whether the accused had acted with “malice, oppression or fraud”, in which case Hutt could be awarded criminal damages.
This is where things have become difficult and somehow unprecedented, both in court and in the background.
From the beginning of the trial, Carlan is aware that one of the jurors had to leave the proceedings due to a previous commitment on June 20. The judge promised to meet this deadline, which means that the deputy is sitting with the other 11 jurors as of Monday. It also meant that the new jury “will have to start from scratch,” in Carlan’s words.
In debates in which the jury was already returning with a number of questions to the judge and some personal friction between two jurors, the reset may not be as restart as Carlan imagines: In a civil case like this, the verdict is not required to be unanimous. only nine of the 12 jurors have to agree for the verdict to be binding. So while the new juror may need one or two punches to pick up speed, things obviously went pretty fast.
In addition to the jurors’ drama, what made the final minutes of Friday’s trial even more unusual was the fact that the partial sentence was handed down correctly as the Santa Monica courthouse was about to close for the weekend. Although Carlan pondered, the concerns and concerns expressed by Cosby’s team in accepting the partial sentence, time and money, were ultimately not on his side.
Hearing from a court clerk that it is almost 4:30 p.m. Pacific time, the judge risks going into costly overtime for the sheriff’s deputies who run the courthouse if he takes the nearly completed sentence. He eventually overturned the sentence this week. Some time earlier today, the jury was left stagnant with questions about Cosby’s potential malice and possible criminal damages.
Sentenced to up to 10 years in prison by a Pennsylvania judge in 2018 after a second trial for the rape of a former Temple Constance University employee, Cosby saw his sentence overturned in June 2021. After a series of failed appeals and legal loopholes of a comedian and his revolving lawyer’s door, four of the seven Keystone State Supreme Court justices ruled last summer that the announced decision by then-Montgomery County Attorney Bruce Castor not to prosecute Cosby in 2005 after investigating Constance’s original lawsuit binding legal burden.
Immediately losing his label as a sexual predator, Cosby cannot be tried again on the same charges.
On March 7 this year, the US Supreme Court refused to reconsider the case, as requested by current Montgomery prosecutor Kevin Steele. This effectively put an end to the Constand case, revealing all the new and remarkable circumstances.
More than 60 women claim that Cosby drugged and attacked them over the decades with a similar combination of pills and alcohol as used in Constand. Some of these women attended the two criminal trials against Cosby, the 2018 sentencing hearing and Hutt’s trial last month.
Hutt’s allegations are the first civil lawsuit against Cosby to go to court.
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