Bill Cosby faces another trial starting this week in Los Angeles on charges of sexually assaulting a teenage girl in the 1970s.
Jury selection in the civil case is expected to begin Tuesday in Los Angeles Superior Court and could last up to a week, a representative for Cosby told the Post on Sunday.
The fallen comedian, 85 and legally blind, will not be in court for the proceedings, the spokesperson said.
Opening arguments are expected to begin on June 1, and the trial itself is expected to last around seven days.
The legal battle comes less than a year after Cosby was freed from prison when Pennsylvania’s highest court overturned his 2004 drug and assault conviction of Andrea Constand.
In the LA case, Cosby is accused of sexually assaulting Judy Huth at the Playboy mansion in 1975 when she was 16 or 17 years old.
Huth previously said the alleged incident happened in 1974 and Cosby’s team unsuccessfully tried to have the lawsuit dismissed after revising the timeline of his allegations.
Although Judge David Karlan did not dismiss the lawsuit, he ruled last week that Cosby’s attorney, Jennifer Bonjean, could re-submit Huth and her friend, Donna Samuelson.
Samuelson was deposed Friday and Huth will be deposed Monday evening, Cosby spokesman and crisis communicator Andrew Wyatt told The Post.
‘This is a trial by murder of Mr. Cosby’s legacy and livelihood,’ the spokesperson said, adding that Cosby denies the allegations and believes he will be ‘vindicated’ at trial. .
Huth’s lawsuit, which was filed in 2014 but repeatedly delayed, claims she and Samuelson met Cosby while he was shooting a movie at Lacy Park in Los Angeles.
The women, who were underage at the time, said Cosby asked them how old they were when they first met, and a few days later invited them to the mansion, warning them to pretend to be 19 if they were asked their age.
Huth claims Cosby sexually assaulted her at the mansion by “putting his hand down her pants, then taking her hand and engaging in a sexual act without consent,” according to the initial complaint.
“We deny, of course, that Mr. Cosby did anything at the Playboy mansion that would constitute a sex battery,” Bonjean said last week.
John West, one of Huth’s attorneys, argued his client’s claims still fall within the statute of limitations under California’s 2019 law that allows victims to ‘look back’ and sue sexual assaults decades-old children.
The judge hearing the case previously ordered Playboy Enterprises to provide a list of employees from the mid-1970s to determine if any of them could testify about how visitor logs were kept during of those years.
Cosby claims there is no evidence that Huth was ever at the Playboy mansion.
Brass for Playboy told the judge on Tuesday that they had already given all the information they were required to provide under Huth’s subpoena for the records. The company also said it has no employees who can speak to how visitor logs were kept in the 1970s and that these logs, if they still exist, may be held by the estate of Hugh Hefner. .
Cosby, whose monumental fall from grace stunned America, had been in jail for more than two years when the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court overturned his indecent assault condition in June 2021.
The court said a decades-old agreement with Montgomery County District Attorney Bruce Castor Jr. should have prevented Cosby from being charged with allegedly assaulting Constand.
Constand first reported the alleged encounter in 2005 to Castor, who did not press charges in the case.
Constand then sued Cosby in civil court, and the case was settled for an undisclosed sum.
During the civil case, Castor and Cosby’s teams admitted to having made a backstage verbal agreement for the actor to give a deposition on Constand’s allegations – and Cosby would never be charged in return.
Cosby had admitted in the deposition that he drugged Constand before performing a sex act on him, although he said it was consensual. This testimony was later used, in part, to help convict him.
“I think Judy’s trial could be our last stand for justice and seeing accountability come to fruition in our position against Bill Cosby,” Cosby’s accuser, Victoria Valentino, told The New York Times.
The Santa Monica courtroom jury will have the final say.