He is not expected to be in the courtroom, but Bill Cosby is front and center at a civil trial in California this week as he faces accusations from one of the many women who have accused him in recent years of being a sexual predator.
The suit in Los Angeles Superior Court accuses Mr. Cosby of drugging and sexually assaulting Donna Motsinger, a former waitress at a Sausalito restaurant, after escorting her to one of his comedy shows in 1972.
In court papers, Ms. Motsinger, now 84, says the attack happened after Mr. Cosby had given her wine and a pill that left her incapacitated.
“She woke up in her house with all her clothes off, except her underwear on — no top, no bra, and no pants,” her lawyers said in court papers. “She knew she had been drugged and raped by Bill Cosby.”
Mr. Cosby denies these allegations, and others brought by dozens of women who have come forward to accuse the once celebrated entertainer of sexual misconduct. Mr. Cosby has said that any sexual contact he had was consensual. His lawyers have depicted him over the years as someone who unfairly became a target of the emotions stirred by the #MeToo movement.
Opening statements in the case began Tuesday. The case is expected to last two weeks.
Years ago, Ms. Motsinger’s case would have been time-barred because she did not come forward with the accusation until after the expiration of what had been the statute of limitations for such suits. But California is among the states that have in recent years amended the statutes in sexual assault cases to allow accusers to come forward even after a lengthy passage of time. Several of Mr. Cosby’s accusers, fearing they had been denied their day in court, played a part in the movement that led to the reforms, and more than a dozen have now filed suits in states including New York and Nevada.
“The changes are essential to justice for survivors of sexual assault,” said Jesse Creed, a lawyer for Ms. Motsinger. “The California legislature has rightly recognized that sexual assault survivors take years to process trauma and build the courage to confront their sexual assault perpetrators.”
Mr. Cosby’s only criminal conviction for sexual assault was overturned in 2021 after he had served three years of a three- to 10-year sentence at a maximum-security prison outside Philadelphia. He had been charged with drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand, a former Temple University employee to whom Mr. Cosby had been a mentor. But the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that a “non-prosecution agreement” with a previous prosecutor meant that he should not have been charged in the case.
Ms. Constand is one of several women who have accused Mr. Cosby of sexual assault who are scheduled to be called as witnesses by Ms. Motsinger’s lawyers.
Despite his release from prison, Mr. Cosby is far from enjoying the sort of life he lived when he was widely embraced as a comic genius and the upstanding paterfamilias in the popular 1980s and ’90s sitcom “The Cosby Show.” Now 88, he is rarely in the public eye and, by his own account, has suffered a significant financial downturn.
“Due to allegations, whether they be newspaper, radio, television, magazines, or just plain internet, I have not worked in about 10 years, or more,” he said in a November deposition, taken as part of Ms. Motsinger’s case. He added, “That means I have not earned a cent through my being an entertainer, a writer, a television performer, except in reruns, and my net worth has gone down like a submarine with no motor.”
Nicki Weisensee Egan, author of a book on the comedian, “Chasing Cosby,” recalled that at one point he announced he wanted to restart his career. Instead, she said, “he has been spending a good chunk of his time involved with these court cases.”
Ms. Motsinger’s is the second civil case brought by a Cosby accuser to go to trial since his release from prison. In the first, a Los Angeles jury in 2022 awarded Judy Huth $500,000 in damages after she accused Mr. Cosby of sexually assaulting her in 1975, when she was 16, at the Playboy Mansion in California.
After facing foreclosure on two New York properties, Mr. Cosby sold a Manhattan townhouse last year for $28 million. He still owns another house in New York and has homes elsewhere including in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, property records show.
He and his wife, Camille, also became embroiled in a federal civil suit, filed in Alabama, where his former press spokesman, Andrew Wyatt, who had represented him for years, said that Mr. Cosby broke the terms of a $750,000 settlement they had come to over unpaid fees, court records show. The case has since been settled.
Mr. Cosby has been trailed for years by civil suits brought by women who have accused him of sexual misconduct, including one brought by Ms. Constand in 2005 before criminal charges were filed. Mr. Cosby settled that case for $3.4 million without any acknowledgment of wrongdoing.
In 2014, several women who accused Mr. Cosby of sexual assault but could not sue on grounds directly related to their accusations because of statutes of limitations sued him for defamation when his representatives accused them of lying. They ended up settling their claims with the company that handled his home insurance policy, which provided “personal injury” coverage in a range of circumstances, including defamation lawsuits against the policy holder.
Mr. Cosby insisted the settlements were made without his authorization and continued to deny any of the accusations
In the Motsinger case, Judge Bradley S. Phillips ruled that Ms. Constand and four other women can testify because their claims of assault are “sufficiently similar to Plaintiff’s testimony and allegations to be admitted as evidence of a common plan or design used by Defendant.”
Ms. Motsinger said in court papers that she met Mr. Cosby when she was 31 and a server in a restaurant called The Trident when they began talking. Later, when she was on her way home, she said Mr. Cosby pulled up next to her and invited her to a stand-up act he was performing at the Circle Star Theater.
After collecting her in a limo, he gave her a glass of wine on the way, the papers said. In the theater dressing room, she began to feel sick and he gave her what she believed was aspirin. Moving in and out of consciousness, she said, she remembered being put in a limo by two men with Mr. Cosby, only to later wake up in bed and recognize that she had been raped.
The case was filed under California’s Sexual Abuse and Cover-Up Accountability Act, which opened a “look back” window to revive otherwise time-barred civil claims for adult sexual assault.
In court papers, a lawyer for Mr. Cosby, Jennifer Bonjean, challenged the accuracy of Ms. Motsinger’s recollection. She said that Ms. Motsinger’s claims are time-barred and “based on nothing more than speculation and conjecture leaving no triable issues of material fact.”
“Plaintiff’s entire case is built around speculation,” the papers said. “She speculates that Defendant gave her some type of pills that were not actually aspirin. How Defendant anticipated that she would ask for aspirin is anyone’s best guess.” The filing also questioned “why Defendant would drug Plaintiff before he even took the stage to perform.”
She declined to comment on the case.
Mr. Cosby has acknowledged decades of philandering, and to giving quaaludes to women as part of an effort to have sex. But he has said the women willingly took what they knew to be quaaludes and that any sex was consensual. In this case, he said in the deposition that he recalled being in a limo with Ms. Motsinger and remembered wanting to have sex with her, but said that he couldn’t remember whether they had sex.
“I cannot remember if I did or not,” he said in the deposition.
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
Graham Bowley is an investigative reporter covering the world of culture for The Times.
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