A woman says that when she was 14, Bill Cosby kissed her.
She testified at a civil trial in Los Angeles where Mr. Cosby was accused of sexual assault by another woman. A spokesperson for Mr. Cosby said that all of the claims against him were false.
Kimberly Burr said in court on Friday that she was 14 years old in 1975 when Bill Cosby kissed her in his trailer on a movie set in Los Angeles.
Ms. Burr was a witness in the civil trial against Mr. Cosby in Los Angeles. Another woman, Judy Huth, is suing him because she says he sexually assaulted her when she was also a teenager in the same year.
Ms. Burr, who is now 61 years old, said that she met Mr. Cosby at a tennis tournament in Palm Desert that year. He invited her to be an extra on the set of the movie “Let’s Do It Again” in Los Angeles. She said that while her mother and other family members waited outside, he took her into his trailer to help him fix his bow tie. Once they were inside, she said, he grabbed both of her arms and kissed her.
Ms. Burr told the court, “I was stuck.” “I was fighting and trying to escape.”
She said that when he let go, she “walked right out of the trailer down the steps” and didn’t tell her family because she didn’t want to ruin their day.
Jennifer Bonjean, a lawyer for Mr. Cosby, questioned her story during cross-examination. She asked how, after such a traumatic event, she could have kept photos of the meeting with Ms. Burr and her brother with Mr. Cosby in the family home. She asked, “Did it bother you that they were there?”
Andrew Wyatt, a spokesman for Mr. Cosby, said that the testimony was not true. In an interview, he said, “These are just false claims made to back up Judy Huth, whose claims are not true at all.”
Ms. Huth’s case is the first civil case to go to trial in which Mr. Cosby is charged with sexual assault. In her lawsuit, Ms. Huth says that Mr. Cosby sexually assaulted her at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles in 1975, when she was 16. She and a friend met him in a park where he was filming “Let’s Do It Again,” the same movie he was working on when he met Ms. Burr.
Mr. Cosby invited Ms. Huth and her friend to his tennis club a few days after they met, according to Ms. Huth’s lawyers. There, Ms. Huth played a game where she had to drink alcohol every time he won at billiards, and then she and her friend drove with him to the Playboy Mansion. Ms. Huth says that once they got there, Mr. Cosby made her do a sexual act on him in a bedroom.
Mr. Cosby has said that he did not sexually assault Ms. Huth or any of the other women who have accused him of sexual misconduct in the past few years.
More than 50 women have said that Bill Cosby abused them sexually. This was Ms. Burr’s first time speaking in public.
As Ms. Huth’s lawyers tried to show that Mr. Cosby had a pattern of bad behavior and abuse, they called Margie Shapiro, 65, who had already accused him in 2015.
Ms. Shapiro said in court that she was 19 years old in 1975 when she met Bill Cosby at the doughnut shop where she worked. He asked her to come to the set of another movie he was making in Los Angeles. Later that day, they went to the Playboy Mansion, where, according to her, he gave her drugs and beat her. She said that they had played pinball in the mansion’s game room and that when she lost, he had given her a pill. She said she remembered waking up: “My next memory was fuzzy, but I was in a bed naked and Bill Cosby was naked inside me.”
She said she told a friend what had happened, but she never went to the police. She said, “I felt like I went there voluntarily, I took a pill, and now he’s him and I’m me.” “I thought I was stupid because I put myself in that situation,” she said.
Mr. Wyatt, who works as a spokesman for Mr. Cosby, said in a statement released Friday afternoon that the accusers were “discrediting themselves” by telling false stories. In the statement, he said, “Since we stand on truth and facts, we believe that Mr. Cosby will be cleared of ALL allegations so that he can move on with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
In court, Mr. Cosby’s lawyers questioned Ms. Shapiro’s story by asking if she was working at the doughnut shop the morning she said she met Mr. Cosby and if she went to the Playboy Mansion. They admitted that Ms. Shapiro went to Mr. Cosby’s house, but they said the relationship was mutually agreed upon. Ms. Shapiro said that she was sticking to her story.
In court, Mr. Cosby’s lawyers have pointed out that Ms. Huth’s memory of when she met Mr. Cosby has changed: She first said it happened in 1974, when she was 15, but she now thinks it happened when she was 16 in 1975. A California law said that a 16-year-old was still a minor. In order to dispute Ms. Huth’s story, Mr. Cosby’s lawyers have said that they might have met years after she said they did, when she was no longer a child.
In their opening statements, his lawyers tried to discredit Ms. Huth’s story by pointing out that she and the friend who went with her to the Playboy Mansion stayed for hours after the alleged encounter with Mr. Cosby, swimming in the outdoor pool and watching a movie.
Donna Samuelson, Ms. Huth’s friend, said that Ms. Huth was upset and wanted to leave, but Ms. Samuelson talked her out of it and made her stay.
Ms. Huth’s lawsuit, which she filed in 2014, was mostly put on hold while Pennsylvania prosecutors went after Mr. Cosby for allegedly sexually assaulting Andrea Constand.
An appeals court overturned Mr. Cosby’s conviction in that case in 2018. The court said that Mr. Cosby should not have been charged in the case because he had a deal with a previous prosecutor not to be charged. After almost three years of his three-to-ten-year sentence, Mr. Cosby was free to go.
Mr. Cosby, who is 84, is not scheduled to testify and hasn’t been to the first days of testimony, but his deposition testimony is expected to be played in court.
Ms. Huth, who has been there and is 64 years old, plans to tell the jury what she knows.
