Bill Cosby, 84, is accused of sexually assaulting a woman at the Playboy Mansion in the 1970s, according to a woman who met him when she and a friend saw him filming a movie in a park.
Judy Huth, 16, and her friend Donna Samuelson, 17, were walking closer to the set of ‘Let’s Do It Again’ when Cosby approached them and ‘bantered’ with them before inviting them to meet him the next Saturday at a tennis club.
‘We were kids,’ says the narrator. It was a well-known figure. ‘It was definitely out of the ordinary,’ she added.
Huth, now 62, has sued Cosby for undisclosed damages, alleging that he tried to put his hand down her pants, exposed himself, and pushed her to touch him sexually while in a Playboy Mansion bedroom.
Cosby’s defense team used the ‘Donkey Kong defense’ in response to Samuelson’s claim that she played the game at the house in 1975, six years before it was released.
The girls went to the tennis club to see Cosby, where they briefly watched him play tennis before heading to his nearby home.
Cosby suggested they play pool and set the stakes while they were there.
‘He said I had to drink a beer for every game I lose, and he said he has to drink a beer for every game I lose,’ Huth testified.
Huth, who was 16 at the time, admitted to drinking one to three beers.
When Cosby pointed out a portrait of Hugh Hefner on the wall after they drove to another site, Huth recognized it was the Playboy Mansion.
Huth said in her lawsuit that while she was at the home, Cosby compelled her to perform a sex act.
She had stated that the incident occurred when she was 15, in 1974, but she now believes it happened in 1975.
Jennifer Bonjean, Cosby’s lawyer, said in opening statements that Huth’s alleged assault was a “fabrication,” though Cosby did not deny inviting Huth and her friend to the mansion.
‘The evidence is going to show that Ms. Huth is lying,’ she predicted.
Donna Samuelson testified about the game room with the adjoining bedroom where Cosby allegedly forced Huth to perform a sex act.
Bonjean told Samuelson, “You testified multiple times that you were playing Donkey Kong,” referring to a 2014 police interview and a 2016 deposition in Huth’s case.
Samuelson stated, ‘If I did, I did.’ ‘From what I’ve heard, it wasn’t around yet.’
Bonjean showed a clip from Samuelson’s deposition, in which he mentioned the game several times.
When asked to explain the discrepancy, Samuelson answered, ‘I got the name wrong. I just kept saying that because it was a game. It could have been Atari.’
She also said she was playing the game when Cosby came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders before she shook them off.
Bonjean showed Samuelson and the jury a photo of the game room taken in 2016, where a Donkey Kong game could be seen, and asked whether similar photos taken years after 1975 could have affected her memory and testimony.
Samuelson replied that she hadn’t seen such an image until the 2016 photo was shown to her in court during her testimony last week.
During his opening statement on Wednesday, Huth’s attorney Nathan Goldberg sought to head off the issue, telling jurors they were going to be hearing ‘the Donkey Kong defense’ from Cosby’s lawyers.
‘So she got the name wrong,’ Goldberg said, ‘so what?’
When Nintendo introduced Donkey Kong as a platform video game in 1981, it was an instant hit.
The game could only be played on huge arcade cabinet machines at the time.
In her opening statement, Bonjean embraced the word, claiming that Huth’s past claims about Samuelson playing the game, as well as images subsequently showing it in the room, proved that the two women were coordinating a false story.
The civil trial in California, one of the last legal lawsuits against Cosby, begins 11 months after he was released from prison after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned his sexual assault conviction in a separate case.
The comedian and actor is best remembered for his role as the adoring husband and father in the 1980s television comedy series “The Cosby Show,” which earned him the moniker “America’s Dad.”
His reputation as a family man, however, was shattered after more than 50 women accused him of sexual assaults over the course of over five decades.
Cosby was found guilty in 2018 of drugging and assaulting Andrea Constand, a Temple University employee, at his home in 2004.
Cosby’s conviction was reversed by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in June 2021, after he had spent more than two years of a three- to 10-year sentence.
According to the court, Cosby should not have been charged because a prior district attorney publicly promised not to prosecute him in 2005.
The Supreme Court of the United States declined to revisit that ruling in March.