SANTA MONICA, California. (AP) — On Friday, a woman verified she was 14 years old when Bill Cosby took her to a trailer on set in 1975, grabbed her until she couldn’t move her arms, and kissed her.
“I tried my best to leave,” she said. “It was very shocking.”
The woman, now 61, first told her story in public during a Los Angeles County civil lawsuit filed by Judy Huth, who alleges Cosby raped her at the Playboy Mansion when she was 16 around the same time. . , in the spring of 1975
The woman verified that she, her mother, and other family members and friends were on the set in Los Angeles of Let’s Do It Again, starring Cosby and Sidney Poitier, where Cosby invited them as extras after meeting them in restaurant. tennis tournament a few months earlier.
She said that Cosby invited her alone to his trailer to help him fix the bow tie he wore for the scene.
“He grabbed me right away,” she said. “He started kissing me, all over my face, tongue down my throat.”
Asked by Hoot’s attorney Nathan Goldberg how tight Cosby was holding her, she replied, “Enough so that I couldn’t leave.”
After about 30 seconds, she freed herself and left.
Photographs of Cosby and the 14-year-old together at a tennis tournament were shown in court, where he smiled and hugged her. Other photos showed Cosby and the girls with their family on the set of the film. Huth later met Cosby on another set of the same film.
Old photos from the mid-1970s loomed during the lawsuit, one of the last remaining lawsuits against Cosby after his Pennsylvania conviction was cleared and other lawsuits settled by his insurance company. Two photographs of Cosby and Huth at the Playboy Mansion were shown during previous testimony. Cosby denies sexually assaulting Huth, and his lawyer says the case is about her trying to cash in on the photographs.
The woman who tested on Friday said that after leaving the trailer, she did not tell anyone about what happened to Cosby, who is not present at the trial.
“It was a once in a lifetime opportunity,” she said. “I didn’t mean to spoil everything for everyone.”
They walked for the rest of their day, appearing in a boxing scene for a movie filmed at the Grand Olympic Auditorium.
During cross-examination of the woman, Cosby’s lawyer Jennifer Bonjean showed a still from the film, in which the girl and her brother applauded in the front row next to the boxing ring.
Bonjean asked if she was upset at the time.
“Probably was,” the woman said.
“Probably?” Bonjean asked.
“I was confused when I was there,” she said.
The woman said she did not speak about the incident until she told her husband many years later, and years later told her teenage daughter.
Bonjean asked if multiple media reports alleging Cosby in 2015 prompted Gloria Allred, who along with Goldberg represents both her and Huth, to come forward and tell her story.
The woman said that one short clip of Allred prompted her to do so after she heard Cosby’s retraction, but said she had no intention of filing a lawsuit when she was looking for Allred.
The woman is not a party to the trial, but she is allowed to testify with another woman about her experiences in the Hut case.
Bonjean seriously challenged another witness, Margie Shapiro, who had previously told her story several times to the media and in a press conference with Allred.
Shapiro testified that when she was 19 in November 1975, she was at the Playboy Mansion with Cosby when he gave her a pill, which she took voluntarily. She said that she later awoke from her unconsciousness and found him raping her.
Bonjean produced a document that showed that Shapiro was due to appear in court as defense counsel on the day she said she met Cosby while working in a donut shop near the set of another film he was filming.
“I could leave,” Shapiro said. “If I needed to, I would take a little break.”
Bonjean also interrogated Shapiro for a matchbox that was shown in court, which Shapiro said she received at the Cosby house when they stopped there briefly before heading to the mansion.
On the matchbox was written: “11/18/1975, my evening at Bill Cosby’s house.”
“After this drugging and rape, do you have a souvenir?” Bonjean asked.
“It was important whether it was good or bad,” Shapiro replied.
Bonjean also challenged Shapiro due to her testimony that she knew the pill Cosby gave her was not Quaalude, a depressant popular in the 1970s, due to the code engraved on it.
She indicated that in a 2016 police interview, she said the pill was similar to Quaalude and that Cosby told her it was one of them.
“Either I was wrong, or the detective was wrong,” Shapiro said.
One of the jurors, many of whom were not born in the 1970s, raised his hand and asked the judge to clarify what Quaalude was. Shapiro compared it to Valium.
Shapiro said that a few days later, she angrily went to look for Cosby’s house, but was unable to find it.
Bonjean asked if it was true that she was upset that Cosby refused to take her to the Playboy Mansion and that she and Cosby had consensual sex at his house and she did not like the way he treated her afterwards.
“I was upset because he raped me,” she said.
The Associated Press generally does not name people who claim to have been sexually assaulted unless they are public about it, as Huth and Shapiro have done on several occasions.
Follow AP Entertainment writer Andrew Dalton on Twitter: https://twitter.com/andyjamesdalton
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