The actor Cuba Gooding Jr. on Tuesday settled a civil lawsuit that had accused him of rape, averting a trial that had been expected to include testimony from three other women that he had abused them between 2009 and 2019.
Mr. Gooding, who had previously been accused by a score of women of groping or forcibly kissing them, pleaded guilty last year to a single charge of kissing a woman without her consent.
The civil case that was to have begun Tuesday, which was filed in 2020 in Federal District Court in Manhattan on behalf of a woman identified only as Jane Doe, leveled the most serious accusations to date against Mr. Gooding. It was one of a constellation of civil and criminal cases brought against prominent men amid the #MeToo movement, a broad reconsideration of sex and power in America and beyond.
Many of the allegations have involved figures in the entertainment world. Mr. Gooding, a Bronx native, played the lead role in the 1991 film “Boyz N the Hood” and won an Academy Award in 1997 for a supporting role in “Jerry Maguire.”
Jury selection in the Jane Doe trial had been scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. Tuesday. But there was no sign at that time of Mr. Gooding or of the plaintiff’s lawyer, Gloria Allred, the longtime women’s rights advocate.
An entry on an electronic docket for the case that appeared Tuesday morning said: “The parties have resolved the matter.”
The suit, which had sought unspecified damages, described events that were said to have taken place in the summer of 2013 when the plaintiff said Mr. Gooding introduced himself to her at a restaurant and lounge in Greenwich Village and later invited her to join him for drinks at the Mercer, a hotel in Soho.
There, the lawsuit said, Mr. Gooding told the woman that he needed to quickly change clothes, ushered her into his room on the fifth floor of the hotel and began to undress. When the woman tried to leave, the lawsuit said, Mr. Gooding blocked her and pushed her onto a bed and touched her sexually over her repeated objections, finally penetrating her as she tried to get off the bed.
A lawyer who was representing Mr. Gooding at the time that the lawsuit was filed called its allegations “completely false and defamatory.”
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