Lawyers for Bill Cosby slam accuser’s story change as ‘trial by ambush’
Attorneys for Bill Cosby have lost their eleventh-hour efforts to kill Judy Huth’s long-delayed sexual battery case against the former funnyman over allegations that he sexually assaulted her at the Playboy mansion nearly 50 years ago.
In recent court filings, Huth said she now believes the incident involving Cosby happened in 1975 when she was 16, not in 1974 when she was 15 as she had initially alleged. The shift in her narrative triggered a fiery wave of backlash from the comedian’s attorneys, who requested to delay or dismiss the trial on the grounds that Huth’s latest version of events undermined their defense, and with jury selection just days away.
“It is extraordinarily difficult to defend against an allegation from 50 years ago. Nobody could do it, innocent, guilty or something in between,” said one of Cosby’s lawyers, Jennifer Bonjean, who is also defending R. Kelly in his Chicago child pornography trial.
“You work you work you work to create a defense, and then all of a sudden at the last minute, it’s a bait-and-switch.”
Huth’s attorneys defended the change in story, noting that it came upon further examination of evidence archived in the case, specifically an old photo of their client and the actor, who sported a beard at the time. The additional research ultimately allowed them to conclude Cosby was filming the movie “Let’s Do It Again” at the time in a Los Angeles-area park, where Huth has alleged the two met before he took her to the mansion.
The 1975 movie is only one of two where Cosby is bearded, her legal team noted.
The shift was first revealed in a declaration that was attached as an exhibit to a May 5 motion, but Bonjean contended she should have been directly notified.
“It’s not fair,” she told reporters. “It’s called trial by ambush.”
At a hearing in a Santa Monica courthouse on Tuesday, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge David Karlan agreed to let Bonjean further question Huth but declined to toss the sexual assault case altogether.
Cosby’s attorneys said they built the bulk of their defense around the timeline provided by Huth and her trip to the Playboy mansion, and that they went to great lengths to establish the former television star’s whereabouts at the specified time and planned to question Huth on the witness stand about the chronology she provided.
Her lawyer, Noah Goldberg, balked at the defense’s pushback, suggesting they always knew when the alleged incident occurred and that they were trying to conceal that fact in particular.
“They’ve known all along it was 1975,” Goldberg said.
Huth initially filed her lawsuit in 2014, not long after after Cosby became the subject of dozens of allegations raised by woman who accused him of drugging them and raping them in incidents dating as far back as the mid-1960s. Her lawsuit, however — alongside several other similar civil suits — was delayed when Cosby was arrested in Pennsylvania on sex-crime charges in 2015.
Following two criminal trials, he was convicted in 2018, though the decision was ultimately overturned by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court last summer. Cosby was subsequently freed from a state prison, where he served nearly three years of a 10-year sentence.
The 84-year-old actor is not expected make the trip to California from his Pennsylvania home for trial, with his representatives citing glaucoma that has left him blind.
Jury selection in the case is set to start in Santa Monica on Monday.
With News Wire Services
