Nearly a year after being freed from prison, Bill Cosby is facing yet another sexual assault allegation in a court case kicking off in California Wednesday.
The embattled 85-year-old actor is not expected to appear in the Santa Monica courtroom to face Judy Huth, who claims that she and a friend met Cosby while he was in Los Angeles in 1975 to shoot “Let’s Do It Again” with Sidney Poitier.
A few days later, she claims, Cosby got her drunk and forced her to perform a sex act on him at the Playboy Mansion when she was just 16.
Huth, now 64, filed a civil lawsuit against Cosby in 2014, seeking financial damages, and a police report, but no criminal charges were ever brought.
Cosby’s lawyers have publicly admitted the pair met at Hugh Hefner’s sprawling home after a photo already confirmed their meeting, but claim that Huth was 18, not 16, at the time.
The trial, likely to last about two weeks, is one of the last for Cosby, who has been accused of sexual assault by multiple women dating back to the 1960s and crossing states.
In 2018, he was found guilty of three counts of aggravated indecent assault against Andrea Constand, a former college and Canadian national team basketball player, for drugging and assaulting her in his Philadelphia home.
He was sentenced to three to 10 years in state prison, but was released in June 2021 and had his conviction overturned when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that District Attorney Bruce Castor had broken his word when he promised not to file criminal charges.
Huth’s trial was delayed more than eight years as Cosby sat through two other trials and the COVID-19 pandemic.
